The Candid Life of Meena Dave(51)

His voice dropped lower, to a whisper. “Neha wasn’t your birth mother.”

Meena stilled. The synapses in her brain zapped around. Made it difficult to think. She took a breath. Then another. And calmed. She put her hand over his. “I understand. You were friends and you can’t see this side of her. Maybe you’re upset that she kept this a secret from you.”

“That’s not it,” Sam said. “She probably had secrets. This isn’t one of them.”

“How do you know?” She believed Neha. Needed to believe her. Wanted this connection to the house, to a legacy. She wanted to belong somewhere. No, not just somewhere, but in the Engineer’s House. “I have the notes.”

“Does she say it explicitly?”

“She . . .” Meena mentally ran through the clues. “I’ll show them to you. Let’s go back. I’ve been through them over and over again. She defined my name. Then there’s the apartment. She left it to me, the next generation.” Meena called over their waitress and asked her to wrap up their food. “I know her. I can feel it. I wouldn’t just believe something like this. She wanted me to find out.”

The server brought empty containers. Silently they packed up. Sam had to be wrong. Or he wasn’t convinced. Had she misread the notes? No. She’d been so hesitant to admit the possibility when she’d arrived. And she wasn’t impulsive, not by a long shot.

He paid their bill as Meena wrapped her scarf around her neck and buttoned up her coat. She walked out of the restaurant and took long strides back to the apartment. Once Sam read the notes, he would see that Neha wasn’t a stranger. Neha was the answer to a question she’d stopped asking. Neha was an anchor.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


Meena chewed on the loose cuticle of her thumb as she watched Sam go through each note, from index cards to fronts of fortunes from cookies. They were scattered on Neha’s scuffed coffee table. She sat on the floor opposite him with Wally, who’d been freed from his crate after their silent walk back to the Engineer’s House.

Meena knew she was a good journalist. She didn’t jump to conclusions. She’d kept her mind open, allowed the story to unfold instead of forcing it together. The threads were all there, the inheritance, the messages Neha had written specifically for her. Meena stroked Wally’s fur as he chewed on a toy that might have once been a raccoon.

“Well?” She ran out of patience.

He dropped the note in his hand on top of the others and removed his black-framed glasses. “I can see why you may think—”

She cut him off. “It’s not an assumption. It’s a conclusion.”

“She doesn’t explicitly make that claim.”

“Why is this so hard for you to believe? Is it me? You don’t want me to be here, like Sabina?” Meena heard the hitch in her voice and cleared her throat.

He reached for her. She shifted away from his touch.

“There are more notes,” Meena argued. “They pop up all the time. So far the pieces fit.”

“Because you want them to,” Sam said.

Need them to. But Meena couldn’t voice that. She wanted him to see the rational truth, not an emotional wish. “You don’t get it. You think because you knew her, she would have told you all of it. But she wasn’t the type to care about people. She had no use for a husband and likely didn’t think she would be a good mother. What if she couldn’t tell anyone and kept it a secret? Maybe she thought this was the only way to acknowledge me.”

Sam rested his elbows on his thighs and clasped his hands. “When we don’t understand the whole, we tend to fill in the missing pieces, like a sentence you can read even when it’s missing all of the vowels.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

He stood and ran his hands over his face. “She told me.”

Meena stilled. “About me?”

“In a way,” Sam said. “Not by name. Parts of it. She was thirty-four when you were born. Married for two years.”

“She didn’t want to be a mother.” Meena’s voice was flat. “There are many women who don’t. You all said, over and over, that she didn’t like people. She wasn’t a nurturer.”

“And what? She hid the pregnancy from her husband?”

“Stop.” Meena didn’t want logic. She couldn’t have been wrong.

“Neha and I used to play chess.” Sam softened his voice. “Whenever she felt like talking, she would set up the board. Not often. I learned quickly that she wanted someone to listen for a few hours.”

Meena closed her eyes. She didn’t want to hear what he had to say.

“About three years ago,” Sam said, “she told me that she’d had a rough day. That she’d noticed the date. August sixth. She was restless. She’d been holding a secret that had become stuck in her throat. She wanted to say it out loud. She wanted to tell it to me.”

“August sixth is my birthday.” She knew she had to hear him out.

Sam nodded. “Now that I’ve put the pieces together, I know.”

Meena sat on the couch and hugged her knees into her body, wrapped her arms around them. Wally wedged his face between her thigh and stomach. She loosened her grip and relaxed her legs. Wally climbed into her lap and nuzzled her. “That’s when she told you about me?”