The Vibrant Years(87)

How had Binji lived all those years with such heavy secrets? Love for her father rose sharp and strong inside Cullie. She’d always had his lap to crawl into as a child; she’d always had his brain to pick when a problem challenged her. And he’d had neither of those things from his own father.

Just as Cullie was about to drag herself out of bed to go looking for her grandmother because questions were suddenly exploding inside her, Binji stormed into the room. “Okay,” she said. “You’ve been crying for two days.”

“I have not.”

“Cullie, when water leaks out of our eyes, that’s what we tend to call crying.”

Cullie pulled up the neckline of her black tank top and wiped her eyes.

Binji sat down on the bed next to her. “You also haven’t stopped moving your fingers on that keyboard.”

Cullie held up her fingers and wiggled them. She wasn’t writing code right now.

Binji took Cullie’s hand and started massaging her fingers one at a time, as though she were counting them. “You didn’t shed one drop when Hot Steve went back to his wife.” Her grip tightened on Cullie’s hand because she’d clearly anticipated that Cullie would try to pull away.

The look in her eyes kept Cullie from putting any force into it. “Tell me what’s so special about this Rishi that he’s turned my Cullie into this?”

Cullie turned her hand and wrapped it around Binji’s.

“I think you’re the one with more to tell.”

Binji tried to pull her hand away. This time Cullie held on. “Tell me why it took you two days to come to me with that question. This thing with Oscar Seth, it was more than just an affair, wasn’t it?”

All the color drained from Binji’s face. “I’m sorry you got caught up in all this.”

The thought that Cullie wasn’t sorry struck slowly. She was livid, but she wasn’t sorry she had met him. “What is all this, though?”

“Did he not tell you? What happened between you two?”

She’d never known Binji to be cagey. Binji was being cagey.

Maybe if one of them broke the cycle and was honest, they’d get somewhere. Cullie was gripped with the urge to get somewhere, to not feel quite like this. As though she’d lost all control.

“Ever since I met him, he’d been talking about his grandfather’s journal detailing a relationship he had with a woman. He was here in Florida to meet her. Turns out the woman was you. Turns out he only became friends with me because he thought I’d get him to you.”

Suddenly Binji looked old in a way Cullie could never have imagined, the gentle give of her skin drooping just a fraction more, the familiar pattern of lines on her face just a fraction starker. “Did he say why he was looking for me?” She looked like all her ghosts had come home to roost inside her.

“He wouldn’t tell me. He said he had to tell only you. He’s oddly . . . what’s the word for it . . . principled? Filled with right and wrong. Filled with . . .” She couldn’t say the word integrity. If Binji had looked concerned before, she looked stricken now. “All he told me was that he wanted to . . . had to meet you.”

“Then why didn’t he?”

“Because I wouldn’t let him!”

Binji rubbed Cullie’s arm, some of the spirit that had been sucked from her returning to her gaze. “But how did you find out what he was up to? How did you know he’d sought you out to get to me?”

Cullie felt that now-familiar electric zap in her chest, the one she felt every single time she thought about him. A heartzap. “He told me.” It came out a whisper.

Binji sat there motionless. She didn’t press her hand to her mouth, but she might as well have.

Cullie’s own heart was hammering in her chest.

I couldn’t risk this.

“Why? Why did he tell you before he could get what he wanted?”

It was the question Cullie had been avoiding ever since she’d walked away from him.

“And he didn’t tell you why he wants to meet me?”

“All I know is that he has something he needs to give you. Something his grandfather wanted to give you.” Something he’d worked on for years. But he hadn’t told Cullie any details that might hurt Binji. And he hadn’t stepped into that elevator.

Binji pushed herself off Cullie’s bed and yanked her up by her arm. “Come on. Time to stop moping.”



Cullie raised her hand to knock on Rishi Seth’s door. Rishi Seth. It helped to think of him that way. Like a stranger, a celebrity. A man whose grandfather had some sort of connection with her grandmother. A connection that was twisting her always-composed Binji into tense knots next to her.

There was no way to know if he was still around. It had been two days. But he’d promised her he wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.

She was about to pull her arm away from the door when it flew open, and there he stood.

He was wearing red basketball shorts and a white tank top. His hair stuck to his forehead in spikes, and his color was high. He’d obviously just worked out. Good to know that his life was going on as though nothing had happened.

Then his caramel-brown eyes met hers, and she knew that wasn’t true. There was a deep exhaustion in them. Sharp shadows radiated from the inside edges of his eyes and slashed downward, and his jaw was covered in stubble.