You're Invited(87)
“I didn’t—”
“Oh, come on, Amma. You welcomed him with open arms. I’d have been married off the same day he proposed if it were up to you. You didn’t even care that we weren’t dating!”
“You weren’t dating? But you spent so much time together. And he told me he had been in love with you since university.”
“That’s bullshit, Amma. Just because we worked together on the charity it doesn’t mean we were involved. I mean, come on. I know you grew up in the Dark Ages, but even you can’t be that dumb.”
She faced me then, anger dancing in her eyes.
“Now here, you listen to me. When you chose your university, did you ask me? When you applied for jobs, did you think to ask, even for a moment, what I thought? You work, you run your charity, you travel around the world, and not once did you ask—Amma, what do you think? I’m just here to throw parties, and entertain the wives of the men your father does business with, and clean up everyone’s mistakes. To clean up all your mistakes. So, no, Kaavi. I didn’t know you weren’t in a relationship with him, because it’s not like you ever tell me anything anyway. And now you come and ask me for my help? No, you got yourself into this mess, now you get yourself out of it. And don’t think, for one second, that I’ll let you run out on this wedding and destroy all the years I’ve spent holding this family’s place in this society. You think it’s been easy, with the rumors and the whispers and the jealousy? But I’ve held it together. For the sake of this family. And now it’s your turn to do the same.”
With that, she stalked into the attached bathroom, banging the door shut after her.
* * *
—
I OFTEN GET asked how I manage everything I do. How I’m a director of a company that turns over millions, while running a successful charity, while managing multiple social media accounts and maintaining a presence as an “influencer,” while also working out, eating healthy, and being so fucking perfect it makes you want to scream. And if you come up with some smart-ass comment about how it was easy for me because I have my father’s money, I’ll slap that smug grin right off your face. Sure, he helped me out at first, but how many parents help out their kids when they have money to spare? And how many of those kids built award-winning, successful charities? So what if I got dealt a good hand? People with so much more, men with so much more, have fucked it all up. But not me. I’ve managed to do it all.
And the reason for that, if you must know, is that I am able, I believe more so than the average person, to compartmentalize. I can remove myself emotionally from most situations while I search for solutions. You might say that makes me cold, but I say it makes me smart. Besides, no one would ever accuse a man of being a cold compartmentalizer. We get fed too much of that genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist bullshit. Men are allowed to fuck around, more so when they are rich. No one ever asks a man how he maintains his waistline while running a company. Men marry trophy wives all the fucking time. Why was it so wrong that I tried to seek out a trophy husband?
The only difference was that my golden trophy turned out to be cheap old brass underneath his glossy exterior, and actually had the audacity to blackmail me.
I couldn’t do anything that would mess things up for my dad. It would shatter him, and frankly, it would be shit for business. I can’t believe I didn’t have a clue though. I mean, I knew he and my mother had literally no love life. I just didn’t think . . . But, then, what did they know about me? I guess we were all in the same boat.
Maybe it would be better to just marry Spencer? I’m marrying him in Sri Lanka, after all. I could always put safety measures in place. Make sure I’m smart about where I move my money, if that’s what he was after. I’d have to keep all this bullshit about his company going belly-up and his disastrous family life under wraps, but knowing everything was out in the open now made it easier to control the narrative. If it came down to it, we could always say that Spencer liquidated his company in San Francisco to work more with the charity. That he was searching for a more meaningful life.
And then, after riding out all the publicity my Insta will get after the wedding, I could keep a low profile for a few months. I won’t even have to publicly announce the divorce for a while. This is what high-profile couples in Sri Lanka do all the time—they allow themselves to drift apart. As long as I can keep Spencer from making a stink, I should be okay. Actually, now that he’s showed his hand and I know what his real motivations are, all this should be much, much easier. If it’s money he wants to walk away, well, I happened to have a fair bit of it, even though it pains me that I’m in this position because of him. But still, I had to keep my emotions aside. Like my mother said, I got myself into this mess, I had to get myself out of it.
I pulled out my phone and sent Spencer a text—
Deal on. You better hold up your end of the bargain.
He might have won this battle, but there was no fucking way I was letting him have access to my kingdom. I will win this war. It just might take a little longer than I thought.
29
KAAVI
Two Days before the Wedding
NOW THAT I’D made up my mind to go through with the wedding, I had another fucking headache to deal with—Mr. Ananda. It turned out that Tehani was right and his wife was really sick. Who would have thought? She was so sick, in fact, that she’d passed away a week after her husband was let go. Talk about a rough patch, huh? I’d checked in with Danushka, who was usually up to date on all office gossip, and it turned out that Mr. Ananda had to transfer his wife from the private hospital she was in to a government one, since their medical insurance got canceled. It wasn’t technically my fault. I mean, she still did get medical care, right?