The Vibrant Years(74)
Bindu wasn’t ready to label their relationship or discuss it with anyone, not yet. “You are Weaselly Leslie after all.” She laughed. He could handle Cullie. She had no doubt.
“I’ve been called worse.”
“As a lawyer?”
“As the secretary of the HOA.”
They laughed together and took their cups into the kitchen.
“You need to sign the papers soon, Bindu,” he said quietly, and she thought about him interrogating clients. Soft, lulling you into trust.
“I don’t understand why it’s a problem that I don’t want Richard’s money,” Bindu said, putting the shredded coconut into the food processor. “Weren’t you the one who accused me of having an ulterior motive in dating him?”
He wrapped his arms around her and laid his chin on her head. “I never said that. I said his children suspect that. I’m only interested in doing what Rich wanted me to do with his money. He trusted me with it for a reason.”
The racket the food processor made as it ground the coconut gave them pause.
“What about what I want? Does that not count for anything?” she asked when silence returned.
“Once you have the money, you can do what you want with it. The money was his to give.”
“But I don’t want to be stuck in a legal battle with someone who has more right to the money than me.”
Taking the spatula from her, he started to spoon the ground coconut into the bowl she handed him. “Do you know how Rich and I became friends?”
She waited for him to tell her, amazed that the conversation—not the first time they’d had it—was so equanimous. She didn’t feel attacked. It didn’t feel like she had to prove anything. He was listening to her, but not as though she made him feel silenced or angry.
They moved around the kitchen, he looking to her for directions and she giving them, even though she’d had to force herself to do it at first.
“I met him when Mary—the receptionist at the HOA office—invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner, because Sally and Jake were traveling that year and I didn’t go to Michigan. Richard spent the last five Thanksgivings with Mary. Do you know when the last time he saw his children was?”
She waited; the bitterness in Richard’s eyes had been so sad. Now she saw clearly that it was loneliness.
“It had been more than twenty years.”
“So you want to use me to get retribution on his behalf?”
He thought about that. Taken aback. He barely saw his daughter and son-in-law twice a year. He seemed okay with it. They talked on the phone every week.
She started grinding the next batch of masalas, and the whirring of the food processor forced them into silence again.
What Bindu had was rare and precious. It was her wealth, what she’d worked her whole life for. To love her family wholeheartedly, that had been her choice. Hers. She’d been lucky to have her love returned. But she had also created that luck with her choices.
Other people’s choices had guided most of her life, but this she had done herself.
Her parents had chosen honor over her.
Oscar had chosen his family. Oscar had chosen his name.
Rajendra had chosen to save her so he could have her. He’d almost bankrupted himself to pay Oscar off. To keep him from releasing Poornima. To hide her obsceneness away from the public eye.
The heat of the lights on her naked body as she threw herself open for the camera burned her skin in another flash of memory.
She had let their choices tear her in half. But her choice to do what she’d done as Poornima had never felt like a choice at all.
All that mattered now was that she was here. In a place neither Rajendra nor Oscar could ever have imagined. In a home that belonged to no one but her, wrapped in ocean and sunshine, in the most free country in the world. With her heels and her dresses. Bindu in all her glory. Not trouble, just because she loved herself.
It had taken her long enough to get here. Where the “society” whose opinion her mother and Rajendra, and even Oscar, had lived for—had forced Bindu to live for—meant nothing. Society’s opinions were not rules or sentencing, because there was no jury but herself. The realization wasn’t a lightning bolt. No, it had been a leak. A slow trickle that had taken years to drain her belief system and reverse it.
Lee was waiting to answer the question she’d asked. Lee, who deliberated everything and took nothing for granted.
“Maybe some retribution is called for? But I’ll support whatever you choose to do.”
The words fell on her like rain. How she’d hungered for them.
I’m here, she repeated to herself. Where if a man who deserved her showed up with love, she could take it. Without shame. And not Oscar and not Rajendra and not her aie could take that away from her.
“I know you’re here, Bindu,” he said. Apparently she had spoken her heart. “Let me know when you have a decision.”
“I have a decision,” she said, wrapping her arms around him. She knew exactly what she wanted to do with Richard’s money. But first, she was ready to take her friends with benefits situation with this lovely man to the next level.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CULLIE
On the day that I ended it, we both told the worst lies of our lives. She never told me that her mother had thrown her out, because she wanted my love, not my pity. I never told her that Hema had swallowed half a bottle of sleeping pills. I didn’t want her pity either and I thought giving her something to loathe would make it easier for her to forget me.