Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(90)

Then Nisha burst into tears.

“What’s wrong now?” Trisha didn’t even know why she was asking. She sat down on the bed next to her sister and felt a few leftover crumbs move around under her blouse. She thought she had cleaned up, dusted herself and the car off thoroughly before going inside the airport terminal, but apparently the remnants of heartbreak-fueled muffin binges were tenacious.

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.” Nisha blew into a tissue.

Headline: The Raje sisters deplete California’s tissue supply just before their brother announces his candidacy to run the state that takes its tree hugging very seriously.

“It’s not nothing. Come on.”

“I was worried for nothing. He came home because he thought I’d need him for the fund-raiser. He came home because he missed me. You should have heard him. He just got off a transatlantic flight and he was ready to jump into the car to come see me. I was such a bitch to be suspicious of him.”

Trisha lay down next to her sister. They stared up at the ceiling for a while. Her sister did not need to see her face, and she most certainly couldn’t handle seeing Nisha’s. “What is it you were suspicious of, exactly?” she said before she could stop herself.

“Nothing.”

“Okay.”

Nisha rolled over on her side and propped herself up on her elbow. “Are you saying I’m missing something? Did he say something to you?” She shook Trisha’s shoulder. “What are you not telling me?”

“Nothing. I was just asking because you’re never suspicious of Neel.”

Nisha fell onto her back again. “Actually,” she whispered so softly Trisha barely heard her, “I’m suspicious of him all the time. All the damn time. We’ve been married ten years and I keep thinking he’s going to figure out that he settled for me.” Another tissue bit the dust.

“Nisha, come on!” It was Trisha’s turn to roll over on her side. She couldn’t believe Nisha had felt this way for her entire marriage.

Nisha’s response was a look that told Trisha exactly how hard it was for her to say what she said next. “Do you remember all those years ago when Neel came back from England? Do you remember how he looked?”

Trisha did remember how devastated Neel had looked despite all his forced good cheer. It wasn’t like anyone had expected anything different. “How would you know how he looked? You didn’t see him for a year after he came home.”

“Actually, that’s not true. I did see him once. Just after he came back. He was still staying with his parents. You were all in the backyard. The housekeeper told me he was in his room, so I decided to go straight up and say hi. His room door was slightly ajar. He was sitting on his bed crying. He didn’t even notice me.” Nisha looked like she was going to be sick again. “I left without telling anyone. That’s why I didn’t see him again. I couldn’t. That day . . . the way he looked was exactly the way I had felt when he started seeing her.”

Trisha twirled a lock of Nisha’s hair and tucked it off her face. “Why did you never say anything?”

“Say what? That I’m married to a man who feels about someone else the way I feel about him?” She pressed her cheek into Trisha’s hand.

“Felt, Nisha. Past tense. You’ve been married for ten years. He’s stood by you through everything. He’s lived and breathed for you and Mishka.”

Trisha would not read anything into the hell she’d seen in her brother-in-law’s eyes today. She had no way of knowing what that was. Someone had judged her today on the basis of incomplete facts. She wouldn’t do that to Neel.

Nisha’s shoulders were shaking again and Trisha did what she’d done so many times these past two weeks; she pulled Nisha into her arms and settled back against her headboard.

“He threatened to leave me if I tried to get pregnant again.” Nisha sniffed. “And he just went to England to spend more than a week with the love of his life. And I’m pregnant.”

Trisha shot the blob of tissue across her room straight into the garbage can. “Those facts are all out of context. All of them. You did not try to get pregnant. Neel did not go there to spend time with her. And you are the love of Neel’s life.”

Nisha exhaled. As though she’d been waiting for Trisha to say it.

It was true.

It had to be true.





Chapter Twenty-Six


If the fact that Emma didn’t want to go to Green Acres today was a sign, DJ didn’t want to see it. The wretched worry inside him had been steadily growing.

Emma and he were sitting at his excuse for a dining table waiting for Julia to show up and pretending to focus on their work. Julia wanted to get some final footage of Emma painting before she finished up the film and posted it on social media. After trying to film interviews where Emma refused to do more than grunt and give monosyllabic answers, Julia had settled on having the camera capture Emma while she worked.

“I’m happy to be accommodating,” she’d told DJ. “Emma’s silence will be more emotionally devastating to the audience than her words anyway.”

DJ wasn’t particularly keen on anyone being emotionally devastated because of what his sister was going through.

With every passing day, Emma seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into herself. Tomorrow would mark two weeks since Trisha Raje had discharged her. They were out of time. They were going to see Trisha right after Julia’s visit and DJ had no doubt how that meeting was going to go. He’d made sure she would be more than happy to wash her hands of him and his sister and send her off to an oncologist. Not that she wouldn’t perform the surgery if he managed by some miracle to change his hardheaded sister’s mind.