The Vibrant Years(27)

“No,” Aly said. “Your conversation with the cops is confidential. There is nothing incriminating about what happened. The coven is just making assumptions and trying to turn this into something it’s not.” Juvenile complaints about bras might be funny. But Bindu had watched a man die, and going after her now was downright cruel.

“They want us to get angry,” Bindu said, calm again. “The only way to get back at them is to not react to their pettiness.” Something about the coven turned Bindu into a block of ice, immovable but bloodless. Well, this wasn’t the time for that.

“Pettiness?” Aly put down her cup, because anger was making her hands shake. “This is not pettiness. This is bullying, and this is not the time to ignore bullies. This is a time to hit back.”

Bindu put her chai down next to Aly’s. “Really, Alisha? You won’t tell them to take a hike about some bras hanging in my lanai, but now, when it’s something I’d rather not talk about, you want to fight?”

“You’re the one who’s always telling me to fight. Bras aren’t worth fighting for. Not letting someone threaten your right to live somewhere is worth fighting for.”

“The fact that Richard and I were having relations is not anyone’s business.”

Cullie looked up from her phone. “Who’s Leslie?”

“Why? She’s the HOA secretary. I’ve never met her, but she keeps trying to be the good witch. She usually calms the rest of them down when they get their chaddis in a knot.” She turned accusatory eyes on Aly. “She was the one who got them to back off about the bras when Aly thought I was the one who should back off.”

“Stop bickering with Mom for a minute. It looks like this Leslie might be our best bet. But she wants you to meet with the HOA.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Like hell you’re not.” Aly stood, heart beating fast, and pressed a hand to her hip. “If you don’t shut these women up, they will drive you out of a home you love. Enough is enough.” She held her hand out to Bindu.

Bindu didn’t take it. “And yet you let that manipulative boss of yours bully you every single day.”

That wasn’t the point right now, was it?

“Mom is not wrong. Let’s at least see what this Leslie has to say,” Cullie, who always, always sided with her grandmother, said.

Bindu took Aly’s hand and stood.

Cullie continued to study the emails on Bindu’s phone. “Don’t worry, Binji, let’s go see what these jerks want, and if they mess with you, I’ll hack into their bank accounts and bankrupt them.”

Aly was about to respond when both grandmother and granddaughter held up hands in an identical gesture. “It’s a joke,” they said together, as though they’d invented the concept of humor.

Cullie stopped short in her study of Bindu’s phone and looked up at her grandmother, eyebrows drawn together quizzically. “Binji, who’s Bhanu D.? And why do you have twenty unopened emails about where to find her?”





CHAPTER TEN


BINDU


“Why does lying get a bad reputation?” she asked me once when I worried about all the lies she was telling her family to shoot Poornima. “Isn’t filmmaking lying? It’s spinning tales. Digging into a lie so hard that it helps you get to the truth.” It was easy to forget that she was seventeen.

From the journal of Oscar Seth

Her acting days, short as they were, had served Bindu well her whole life. When the camera turned on, it was as simple as letting the words you were saying, the person you were being, become the truth. Slipping into an alternate moment, letting it take this one over. Sometimes it taught you something new about yourself, and sometimes it saved the person you needed to be.

When Bindu had taken her phone back from Cullie and calmly told her that Bhanu was a friend who used to be an actress, Alisha and Cullie had believed her without even the shadow of a doubt. Obviously, Bindu still had it.

That pesky person had been sending her five emails every day. It made her so angry, she almost yearned for the coven’s emails.

How idiotic of her to let Cullie go through her phone. But what had happened with Richard had erased everything else. And it had been so long since she’d had to hide something.

It didn’t hurt that Alisha and Cullie were currently throwing Bindu a pity party. All that mattered was that they hadn’t deepened the interrogation. She’d take it. This was one thing Bindu was never discussing with anyone. Not ever. It was her business. Hers alone. The shame of those memories flushed across her body like a fever.

It had been decades since she’d thought about Bhanu. Every memory of all that nonsense was long gone. None of it took up any space inside her. Not even a little bit. Not the scandal, not the death threats from her own mother, not the blazing joy of facing the camera, of being pierced by it all the way to her soul, of being seen. Nothing.

The lady doth protest too much, Oscar’s long-ago voice said in her ear. The velvet note of knowing so vivid, it was as though he was standing behind her. Too close. His body straining toward her even as he held it back.

A man of rare integrity. That’s what Oscar’s obituary had said. She let the involuntary pang of grief wash through her. She knew she had no right to grieve him, but the grief found its way inside her regardless. If she forced it away, it would only fight harder to take up residence. So she let it lie and covered it up until it was ready to leave.