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“Amma,” I hissed, when I reached her. I looked around, expecting to see a trembling maid, or some other messenger she was in the process of shooting, but it was just my dad, sitting on the sofa, looking like he was as sick of her as I was.

This was strange. They never yelled at each other. At least, not out in the open like this. Their fights were usually a combination of silent treatment, simmering glares, and passive-aggressive comments spoken aloud to other people.

“You!” she yelled, when she saw me. “You’re the cause of all of this. Lajja naddha?” Aren’t you ashamed? “This is all your mess.”

“What?” I asked. I looked to my dad.

“What’s going on? Fiona, are you okay?” It was Aunty Geetha, who had flown in from the Gold Coast in Australia. She’d been staying in one of the guest rooms. Great, just what we needed right now.

“Of course I’m not okay, you know—”

“Fiona.” My father stood up, his voice booming over hers. “I think we should go upstairs, hmm? To my office?”

“I can’t bel—”

“Now!” And he stood up. “Geetha, please excuse us. It seems we have some family matters to attend to.” Aunty Geetha was left with her eyes bulging and mouth open. She’ll be on the phone the very second we leave.

The door to Laura’s room banged shut as we made our way upstairs, so she probably overheard the whole thing also. What the hell was my mother thinking? We’ve spent years making sure we kept up appearances, and then she just decides to fly off the handle like this?

“Thaththa, what on earth’s going on?” I tried to keep my voice level. There’s nothing that my father hated more than emotional outbursts, which is probably why he has more regard for his chauffeur than his wife.

“Sit down, both of you.”

We did as he asked, my mother quiet now but still looking like she was about to explode.

“I got a call today from your mother’s friend, Josephina. You remember her, don’t you?” He was speaking directly to me, so I nodded.

“She seemed quite aghast with some information she had received. Information about Spencer.”

“Spencer?” My pulse quickened. What the hell could it be? Had news about his company’s bankruptcy spread so quickly?

“Yes, about his family.”

“His family? Thaththa, I’ve told you, his parents are both dead.”

“It doesn’t appear that way, Duwa.”

“What?”

“Josephina had apparently been delivered some information anonymously”—he eyed my mother—“which I don’t quite believe, but still, she said she called me directly and had her driver drop these off.” He patted to a plain white envelope sitting on his desk. “She said I must have already known about it,” he snorted, “but that she was doing the honorable thing by coming to me first.”

“The honorable thing.” I rolled my eyes. “What does it say, so?”

“Why don’t you take a look for yourself?”

I gave him a look, but curiosity got the better of me and I pulled out the contents of the envelope. They were printouts of newspaper pages, mostly, all reporting about a Jeremy Spencer. I looked at the dates.

“His father?” I asked.

“Yes.” They were all articles about various arrests, made over many decades, the most recent being five years ago. Spencer’s father, it seemed, was very much alive, and still serving out his sentence in prison.

There was a line in one of the articles, which was highlighted—Jeremy Spencer’s wife, Sharon Spencer, who has been missing since her release from California Pacific Rehabilitation Center after being charged with the illegal possession of a controlled substance, was not available for comment.

“And his mother is—?”

My mum squeaked at this. “She’s a drug addict, Kaavi! Can you believe this? An addict in the family? Haiyyo, I won’t know where to hide my head. How could you do this to us?”

But I ignored her.

“How do we know if this is true?”

“So you weren’t aware of this?”

“No, of course I wasn’t aware.”

“Haiyyo, this is the problem with marrying a foreigner, I tell you,” my mother started up again. “If he was a Sri Lankan, then at least we could have found out about him. Asked around. Checked his background.”

“Amma, you’re the one who insisted that I marry him right away.”

“Enough now, both of you.” My father beat my mother to her reply. “There’s only one thing left to do.”

Call the wedding off? Would it be so terrible? We could tell people that my father had a change of heart. It would be the talk of the town, of course it would be, but it would all die down eventually, right?

“And what is that?” my mother huffed.

He looked at me again. “Give Spencer a call. Ask him to come here at once.”





26


KAAVI


Three Days before the Wedding


IT TOOK SPENCER about a half hour to get home, during which time I got a few more details of what happened this morning. Turned out that Aunty Josephina, that nosy bitch—I didn’t buy her bullshit story about an anonymous delivery at all. She’d probably hired a PI or something—had sent over the package to my father, and then called up my mother directly afterward to “ask what she thought.”