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Besides, I didn’t have the slightest chance of stopping the wedding from all the way over here.

Who knows, maybe she’ll even ask you to be a bridesmaid? Lol. You’ll be a vision in pink.





Lol. No way. Besides she’s not having bridesmaids. But her little sister is going to be a flower girl.



Sounds adorable. Now, will you woman up and go?





I took a deep breath. I counted to five. I checked the clock on my TV. The time was 5:05 p.m. Not the best of all the signs, but certainly a very, very good one.

I read Kaavi’s email one last time, just to be sure.

Beth was right. I had to go.

This is not jealousy. This is protecting what once was and always will be mine.





3


AMAYA


Five Days before the Wedding


THE HEAT CLAMPED down on my nose and mouth like it was trying to choke me the moment I stepped out of the airport. It takes on a life of its own in Sri Lanka. It’s easy to forget when you’re looking at the postcards and travel vlogs. How the humidity swirls around you like a fog, making it hard to breathe, coating you in a constant, unyielding film of sweat.

But I can’t focus on the heat because I have to spend every ounce of concentration on not getting run over by the stampede of trolley-bearing travelers. Cars honked, porters hollered, tearful families embraced. I took a breath to steady myself, even though it felt like I was inhaling through a wet towel that stank of a boys’ locker room.

Urgh, I really shouldn’t be like this. I’m not one of those stuck-up Sri Lankans who leave for a few years and come back wrinkling their noses at the heat and the smell and the definite inability to line up patiently for anything. Being Sri Lankan was such a cliché at times—we love our country for the sum of its parts, just not the individual components that make up its whole.

Well, that wasn’t going to be me. Steeling myself, I forced another deep breath. I looked around for a clock, or a sign, or, well, anything really.

“Stoothi,” I called out in thanks to a porter who let me pass by, and instantly regretted how terrible my accent was. I’ve been gone awhile. I needed to ease myself in. Five years is a long time for anyone. Five whole years. Half a decade. And yet, here I was, ebbing and flowing with the crowd, listening to the louder-than-average voices with their lilting melodies, and it didn’t feel like it’d been that long. Like I was just waking up from a nap.

“Ammi!” a little girl screamed, darting past me and nearly jumping on the lady pushing a trolley behind me. The mother picked up the child and held her close, tears running down both their cheeks. I forced myself to look away. To give them their moment. I missed my own mother. I missed the life I could have had.

Rolling my trolley farther away to an empty spot on the walkway, I wondered whether I’d be able to spot Mahesh. There was usually a lot of fanfare at the arrivals terminal at Bandaranaike International Airport—families turning up in full vans to greet loved ones returning to Sri Lanka. There were flower garlands for tourists, pushy taxi drivers for those who hadn’t booked their transport into Colombo. But apart from just a “see you outside,” Mahesh hadn’t given me any other instructions.

My flight landed at 4:00 p.m., so I’d messaged him to pick me up at 5:00. If I knew anything about the Sri Lankan airport, it was that things took time. And in any case, I didn’t want to keep him waiting.

I checked my phone and it was only 4:22 p.m., so I guess I had overestimated the time, but at least the number pattern made me feel a whole lot calmer than I had been most of the way here.

I sent a message to Mahesh—

I just got out of the airport. A little earlier than I thought, but please take your time.



A message beeped back a second later—

C u soon, Akki!





I figured I’d send Beth a message as well—

Just landed. Can’t believe I’m actually doing this!



She replied right away too. I guess I was in luck today.

You got this, babe!





But what have I got, exactly?

A plan A, plan B, and plan C, all increasingly far-fetched and desperate. I’d spent the last few months thinking and rethinking and drawing up various scenarios. If this were a movie, I’d be sitting at my desk with intricately mapped out blueprints and doing my evil villain laugh, but the reality was actually far from it. A lot of antacids, extra CBD oil in my tea to help me calm down, not that it worked, pacing around my apartment so much that I was sure my downstairs neighbors started to hate me. A few notes scribbled in a little notebook I have. Not too many details, of course, but enough to help me keep track of things.

So maybe I didn’t have the best plan. But I did have something better, and that was a purpose. I knew I had to stop this. Any doubts I had slowly dwindled away over the last three months and were steadily replaced by the true gravity of what I had to do. I couldn’t fail. This wedding must not happen.

Kaavi made sure she was keeping all her followers up to date. There had been a flurry of wedding-related posts on her social media. The first was choosing the location—Mount Lavinia Hotel, not as modern as some of the more recently built hotels in Colombo, but a classic, she said. And there’s something so romantic about getting married where my parents did. There had been some pressure, she explained, to just book out an entire island in the Maldives, but they’d eventually decided to stick to good old Colombo so that none of their thousand attendees would be inconvenienced.