I Have Lost My Way(60)

And suddenly, Freya does know what she’s going to do. She’s going to hug her sister and then walk out of here and track down Nathaniel and Harun, these two strangers who entered her life today and showed her what love really looks like. She has no idea where they are, but if Hayden Booth has taught her one lesson it’s that if you want something bad enough, you find a fucking way to make it happen.

She’s going to find them. The rest will sort itself out.

She clicks on Harun’s number to open a text. Tell me where to find you.





THE ORDER OF LOSS


PART XI





HARUN



The last time I saw James was a beautiful spring day, as warm and soft as the day he found the fifty-dollar bill weeks earlier had been brittle and cold. The trees were in bloom. The women in the city had on dresses, and the boys wore tank tops that showed varying degrees of sculpted perfection.

We met that day in the park. James seemed happy. He was prattling on about getting his in-state residency after being in New York for a year and how he’d be able to start at LaGuardia Community College in the fall and how they had a food-service management program, which wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but maybe he could transfer to the Institute of Culinary Education.

I only half listened to him. The day before, Ammi had assembled a list of gifts to buy. I had been fitted by a tailor for a formal kurta. My passport had returned from the consulate with a visa glued into its pages.

I emailed or texted with Amir every day. When I’d first realized what he’d done, I had been so angry at him: What had given him the right? Who had given him the right? But I realized that I had. By being a coward, by relinquishing control. And anyway, my cousin seemed so optimistic about the way things were going.

“Am I boring you?” James asked.

I startled back to reality. “What?”

“I been talking to you, and I bet you can’t tell me one word I just said.”

“Culinary Institute,” I said. “Two words.”

He shook his head. “You’re distracted.” He gestured toward the shirtless confections sunning themselves in the meadow. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were stepping out.”

He was so completely off base—I’d never had any interest in the confections beyond the aesthetic—and yet completely on the nose. Because wasn’t marrying someone else the definition of stepping out?

He’d been teasing, until he saw my expression. His face fell.

But he wasn’t devastated. Not yet. He would not tell me that I’d devastated him—ruined him—for another few hours. At that moment, he thought I’d maybe hooked up with some other guy.

“Ja—” I began.

He held up his hand. “You still wanna be with me?”

There was nothing else in the world I wanted. I nodded.

“Then I don’t wanna know. Do what you gotta do. I’m your first, and I plan to be your last, but if you need to figure out what it is you ain’t missing, I’m not gonna stop you.”

This was James. Giving me permission to be with someone else so I could be sure it was him I really loved. Because he was unselfish and brave and because he loved me.

“Just be safe, ’cause I don’t want to catch any nasty-ass shit from some confection,” he said.

“You won’t,” I said.

“And don’t go falling in love, because that I can’t take.”

“I won’t,” I promised.

For the rest of the afternoon I let him think that I was having it off with some guy, and I let myself think that if he was okay with me hooking up with some guy, maybe he’d understand me being with some girl whom I wouldn’t even hook up with—not that often, anyway—and whom I’d certainly never love.

After that we had an okay afternoon. We fell asleep in Sheep Meadow and got food from the halal cart James liked best and walked all the way to the top of the park, where hidden by foliage and ferns and caressed by the welcoming spring breeze, we loved each other in the ways we knew how.

James was normally chatty during sex, but that day, weighed down by what he thought was my infidelity, he was quiet. I, on the other hand, who was normally quiet, was so overcome with love and fear and anguish that I cried out.

“Just you try to find someone better than me,” he said after. He smiled the saddest smile, and I knew that marrying a girl so I could keep hiding James from my family was not the same as hooking up with some confection.

“Next Thursday,” he said as we exchanged one final kiss under the cherry tree before he went uptown and I went home. “Park again, if the weather holds.”

How easy it would have been to say yes. To milk one more day out of it. To come up with some excuse about why I’d be away for six weeks. To continue doing this with James for as long as I could. To continue deceiving him into thinking there was a future for us when I’d known, all along, there was not.

I put my hand atop James’s chest. His heart beat strong and true under my fingertips—his open, loving heart, willing to shelter me and my secrets and my insecurities and even my infidelity. Willing to pay a price for things he cared about.

My heart was defective, not because it loved the wrong person but because it beat in the chest of a coward.