The Bride Test(69)

“It sounds good, but it’s a small company. Nothing like Kh?i,” C? Nga said in a dismissive manner.

Again, Esme got the impression they weren’t talking about the same Kh?i. Why did people make it sound like he was mega-successful when he wasn’t? She shook her head and got to work. It didn’t matter.

She had to mind her own business. There were three weeks left before she had to leave, and the clock was ticking.

In this country of empowered people, justice, and fairness, opportunities were there for everyone. Marriage and birth couldn’t be the only ways to belong here. She didn’t believe that.

There had to be something she could do to earn her place here, some way to prove herself. She had to keep looking.

? ? ?

Khai sat down in front of his desk in his office, and he honestly didn’t remember driving here, walking into the building, or going up the elevator. He’d done it all on autopilot.

He’d been too busy adjusting to the knowledge that Esme was safe and unharmed. The previous day had passed in a white blur. Even though logic had told him she was most likely fine, horrible scenarios had possessed his mind nonstop, and he’d been a wreck, not sleeping, not eating, watching the news in case she showed up on a gurney in an ambulance.

Now that he knew she was okay, he finally relaxed and let himself contemplate the fact that she was not only refusing to marry him, but moving out early, too. Back there in the restaurant, he’d made the best case for staying with him that he could. And she’d turned him down—as she should have.

Just look at him now. He’d thought he’d go through a terrible withdrawal when Esme left him for good, but he was shocking himself with how fine he was. Everything was perfectly, perversely, anticlimactically fine. He wasn’t sad or mad or depressed. He felt … nothing.

As he started his computer and watched the screen come to life, mundane work tasks lined up neatly in his head—emails, projects, important shit. He was like a fucking machine. Back online, ready for production.

When he opened his first email, however, it took him three tries before his cold fingers could type “Hi, Sidd” correctly (that would be Sidd Mathur, the M from DMSoft), and even then, he wasn’t sure he’d spelled “Hi” right. Was it just an H and an i? That didn’t seem like enough letters for such an important concept.

Whatever, he would plow through. People said he was smart. All he had to do was focus. He was good at focusing, too good sometimes. When he finally finished the email, he checked the clock and was floored to see he’d spent two entire hours on one short paragraph of text.

He sighed and lifted a hand toward his forehead to massage it—and accidentally poked himself in the eye. Shit. Now that he was paying attention, his head throbbed, his face hurt, and his limbs felt off, like they’d been taken from someone else and glued onto him. He was probably getting sick. It had been a while since the last time, so he was due something awful. Come to think of it, he hadn’t had a flu shot in years.

He opened his desk drawer, got out the small bottle of ibuprofen he kept there, popped the lid off, and shook a couple of pills into his palm. At least, that was how he envisioned it in his mind. What really happened was he scattered pills all over himself, his desk, and the floor.

When he went to clean up the mess, pills crunched under his feet and knees and slipped out from between his fingers. By the time he’d gathered the majority of the pills back into their jar and accidentally pulverized the rest, he’d banged his elbow on his chair and hit his head on the desk.

He stepped into the hall, meaning to go to the kitchen for water, and he noticed the office was eerily empty. It was like working on Christmas.

That was when he remembered today they had an offsite company-wide team-building thing. Fuuuuck. His partner was going to give him shit for being antisocial again. When his phone started buzzing, he dug it out of his pocket and answered it without checking who it was.

“Yo, it’s me. How are you doing?” asked a familiar voice that did not belong to his partner.

“Hi, Quan. Everything’s …” He glanced at the pill bits all over the floor of his office, and look at that, one of his shoelaces had come undone. “Everything’s fine. Why are you calling?”

“Mom says I need to fly back from New York to see you because it’s an emergency. What’s up?”

“There is no emergency.”

“How’s Esme?” Quan asked in a neutral tone.

“Fine.”

Quan kept quiet and waited.

When Khai couldn’t take it anymore, he said, “She’s not coming back. She found an apartment by the restaurant that she likes better than my place.”

“How are you with that?”

“Fine. I’m just … fine.” And he wished he wasn’t. If he could manage some manner of dramatic emotional upheaval and prove he was heartbroken at her loss—and therefore in love—he could keep her.

But nope. He was A-OK.

“Want me to come home early?” Quan asked. “We can do shit. I dunno, go pick up chicks at a tax convention or something.”

“No, thanks.” He didn’t want to do anything that involved women for a long time, and the thought of “picking up chicks” made his headache worse, even though it meant he got to go to a tax convention.

“You sure?”