Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

by Sonali Dev

  “Hi, Dr. Raje.” Julia extended a hand, her smile turning mildly amused.

  “It was nice seeing you again, Mr. Caine,” Trisha said in a slicing tone that reminded him of the first time they’d met and she’d asked him if he knew the worth of her hands. That was it. That’s all she threw at DJ before spinning around, her proud head held high. Then without even looking in Julia’s direction she strode away.

  Julia looked as though someone had slapped her. He barely knew her, but he could swear she was holding back tears.

  “Sorry about that.” He touched her shoulder even as his eyes followed Trisha Raje walking away. “You all right?”

  Her eyes filled, but she sniffed and smiled at him, batting her lids to clear the tears. “I’m sorry you had to witness that. How well do you know Trisha?”

  “Barely. Just as Emma’s doctor. Do you know her?”

  Her laugh at that was horridly sad. “We were best friends in college.” She flicked away the tear that glided down one cheek. “Or she was mine. Apparently, I wasn’t worthy of the honor. Trailer trash on scholarship at Berkeley is still trailer trash.”

  He knew exactly how Julia felt. Before he could respond, she scrubbed at her eyes with so much resolve it made her look years younger. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. It was a long time ago. I just came back to make sure you were okay. You looked very worried when I left. I wanted to let you know that if you have any concerns at all, all you have to do is ask and I’ll address them.”

  She looked so earnest he had to smile at her. “You came back just to tell me that?”

  Her grin went impish, every evidence of the tears she had fought gone, and he marveled at the strength that must take. “Maybe.” She held up her denim jacket. “But I also left my jacket in Emma’s studio.”

  That smile of hers made him feel lighter, as though he, too, could put things away himself. “And here I was, all flattered.”

  She threw him a look from beneath her lashes. “Well, I never said I didn’t leave the jacket behind for a reason.” With that she sashayed away, leaving him to ponder the two women who had traced that same path within the span of a few minutes, and how very different each one of them made him feel.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Trisha ran out into the shaded nursing home parking lot. Her heart was thudding in her chest. She willed herself to calm down, but she couldn’t seem to bring her panic under control.

  It felt like she’d seen a ghost. She had. A ghost who looked nothing like the girl who had been her roommate for a whole year. Julia had gone from looking like Disney’s Cinderella to looking like someone who despised the idea of looking like Cinderella.

  Had those been dreadlocks? Something about that made Trisha want to bring up her lunch, even more than the shameless amusement in Julia’s eyes as she had taken Trisha in. And, oh God, had she seen Trisha drooling all over DJ Caine?

  Letting herself into her car, she leaned her head back into the headrest and closed her eyes. She needed to find out how, and why, why! DJ Caine knew Julia.

  And she needed to call Yash.

  She sat up and tried to calm herself. Jacaranda trees cast a deep shade on the stamped concrete sidewalk. Red country tiles lined the arched porch. Cheery yellow annuals overflowed from massive ceramic planters. All the elements that attempted to mimic a homelike atmosphere jumped out at her. Everywhere there were efforts to soothe those who visited family members they couldn’t keep close in their real homes.

  She thought about Dorna’s Rita, frail yet resilient. Trisha had come by to drop off Dorna’s things and check up on her. Rita had been lucid today but not a single tear had fallen from Rita’s eyes as they sat together and shared Dorna stories. “She lived,” Rita had said. “Really lived. And that’s nothing to shed tears over.”

  She had made Trisha tell her all about the ependymoma she had performed that morning the way Dorna had always done, and also all about the surgery that Dorna had insisted upon for herself. In the end they had agreed that Dorna had probably orchestrated her own death on the operating table.

  When Trisha left, her heart had been so full of pain, but also joy at a life well lived. Then she’d run into DJ.

  And then into the woman who should never ever be allowed anywhere near vulnerable people. Or anywhere near where Yash was. Her chest tightened painfully as she thought of what Julia had done to her brother.

  Picking up her phone Trisha scrolled through her favorites. There were her brothers: TP—short for The Prince, not Toilet Paper—and Little TP.

  The nicknames made her smile. Trisha hated that she barely ever spoke to her brothers anymore. Vansh hadn’t lived in the same time zone as her in years. Plus, the boy was always in the middle of some serious shitstorm. If there wasn’t shelling, or chanting, or rioting going on in the background when they spoke on the phone, Trisha might suspect someone was impersonating her little brother.

  She badly wanted to call Vansh, but she knew that was just avoidance, so she took a breath and hit “TP,” a part of her hoping that Yash might be too busy to answer.

  He picked up immediately. “Trisha? What’s wrong?” It made sense that he’d think a call from his screwup sister had to mean something was wrong.

  “How are you, Yash?” she said, trying to sound breezy. “All well in DC?”

  “Everything’s great. Except what’s not so great of course.” His voice did a groaning/smiling thing. “I was actually just going to call you.”

  “Really?” she said without thinking, surprise far too clear in her tone.

  “Yes, I wanted to know if you had seen Nisha. She’s not answering her phone.”

  “Oh. Yes, I have. She’s been a bit busy with Neel gone and your fund-raiser coming up.”

  “Hm. I just wanted to make sure you’d seen her and that she was okay.”

  “Did I tell you about my grant?” Changing topics inelegantly, yes, that was the way to go here!

  “Ma did,” he said, sounding alert. He’d caught the topic change but didn’t point it out. He hadn’t bothered to congratulate her. Not that she’d been waiting or anything. “Sorry, I should have called to congratulate you. Congratulations, Shasha. We’re all so proud.”

  “Are you really?” she wanted to ask. But the real reason for her call meant that they couldn’t possibly be.

  “Thanks,” she said quietly.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  Maybe he knew about Julia. What if this was a test? “I’m fine.”

  “Good. Can I call you later?” He seemed to be in a busy place with lots of voices in the background. “I need to finish this meeting and have dinner with Naina. She’s only in the country for a day.”

  Oh. Yash’s long-term girlfriend had been living all over Asia working on her postdoc on feminism and feudal Eastern cultures for almost five years. Trisha had no idea she was visiting. “Is she coming back for the fund-raiser?”

  “Not sure,” he said absently. Too absently. Trisha had been seeing pictures of Steele with his lovely wife and two children splashed across every California paper. At church, on vacation. Would Yash’s unmarried status be a problem for his campaign? Maybe not, unless the fact that he hadn’t married a woman he’d been with for close to two decades was coupled with an old video of him with an underage intern who had worked for him.

  “Yash?” Sometimes her mouth did things without her permission.

  “Yes?”

  Other times it totally gave up on her. Seriously, why couldn’t she just live in the OR? All her parts worked just fine in there.

  “Shasha, what’s the matter?”

  “Well . . . um . . . I don’t want you to worry, but I . . . I just ran into Julia.” Shit! HRH was going to kill her for telling him. Why hadn’t she thought this through?

  There was a beat of silence. A very long beat. “Okay. Is that why you’re sounding like this? What did she want?”

  How the hell would she know what Julia Wickham wanted?
Other than to destroy everything and everyone in her path. Why did her family think being her roommate for one year made Trisha an expert on a sociopath? “I don’t know. I ran into her by accident. We didn’t talk. She didn’t seek me out. I swear.”

  “Sweetheart, I’m not saying she did. Listen, stop worrying so much.” Easy for the gray-eyed prince to say. He had never ruined anyone’s life because of his inability to judge people. “So you ran into her. It’s a free country. Did HRH say something to you?”

  She couldn’t answer that. She wasn’t a snitch. But HRH was right, Julia’s timing wasn’t an accident. Something was off. Actually everything about the Julia she had just seen was off. It wasn’t just that she was all tattooed and pierced and dreadlocked. There was nothing wrong with being any of those things, but it reminded Trisha too much of how Julia had taken to regularly wearing Indian kurtas and bangles when they had been friends. She had even bought a book of henna and ordered henna cones off a mail-order catalog and started to wear it all the time. Trisha had only ever worn kurtas in college at the Indian Students’ Association’s Diwali celebrations, and she’d only ever worn bangles and henna at Nisha’s wedding. The Indian ceremony, not the church one.

  “Does your friend think she’s desi?” Nisha had said on a laugh, back when they had still been able to laugh at a conversation that involved Julia.

  Something about Julia dressing desi all the time had made Trisha uncomfortable, but she’d said nothing. “It makes me happy! Your people’s stuff is so much more beautiful,” she’d said with so much longing that Trisha had told herself that her friend deserved to be happy.

  And now it seemed Julia had decided that dreads made her happy. Trisha felt physically sick. More than how Julia looked, it was her eyes that terrified her. They hadn’t changed at all.

  “Something is off. I have a bad feeling about this,” she wanted to say to Yash. But where would she even begin with explaining her bad feeling? Someone else spoke to Yash, and he asked for a minute. The brother she could pour her heart out to was long gone, she’d lost him. Julia Wickham had used her to almost destroy him and taken that from her forever. Plus, how could she dump more stress on him right now?

  “Listen,” he said coming back to her, “if Ma and HRH get on your case about it, you call me, okay?”

  Really? Suddenly Yash was on her side? “They’ve been on my case about it for years. What have you ever done to help?” That’s what she wanted to say. Naturally, what she did say was, “Sure. Thanks.”

  “Also, Trisha,” he said a little more tentatively, “if she contacts you or if you think of anything else, call me, please.” Then just in case she was too dense to get his meaning he added, “However small it seems. Even if it seems harmless, don’t worry, just let me know. Okay?”

  A pulse pounded in her temples. She had confided in him later, when she had apologized after Julia had drugged him and violated him. I didn’t say anything because I thought she was harmless . . . I really believed she was harmless. She had wanted him to understand. I don’t care, he had said. It doesn’t matter.

  But of course it had mattered.

  “Sure,” she said once more and wished him luck with his meetings.

  She just sat there in her car for a while longer, thinking of how simple it had been for her to say something back then. It had been right in front of her, the fact that Julia would do anything to get what she wanted. But Trisha had chosen not to see it. She had lied to her own brother. She had put an outsider before family, despite everything she’d ever been taught.

  Her phone beeped, snapping her out of her trance.

  “You here?” It was a text from Harry. Shit! She had forgotten about meeting him.

  “Sorry, emergency errand.”

  “That’s kind of shitty,” he texted back. “I was looking forward to dinner.” Translation: You were supposed to be here with the food.

  What a jerk. Although she didn’t think being obsessed with food was so strange anymore. Not since DJ Caine had made his annoying presence felt inside her taste buds.

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too. I don’t think this relationship is working out.”

  Was he breaking up with her by text? What were they, high schoolers? At least this proved that they’d been in a relationship. Then again, did it?

  “I didn’t realize we were in a relationship.” Of course she didn’t send that. She deleted those words and typed: “I agree. Things have been crazy. I’ll drop the food off with your assistant tomorrow. It’s frozen.”

  A long silence followed. “I’m sorry. I was upset. I don’t really want to break up. Can we reschedule?”

  She laughed, loud and so maniacal that a passing lady scowled at her.

  “No thank you. I’ll see you around.” She hit send.

  Her relief at not having that food in her fridge any longer was immense.

  Chapter Twenty

  Maybe you should get a real job, mate, because the medical bills here will kill you,” Rajesh said as he lounged on a beanbag in DJ’s flat, where he was camped out on the floor of DJ’s room in exchange for assisting DJ.

  DJ did love irony so very much.

  Good thing Rajesh only showed up a few times a week and that Emma was in the shower. The last thing she needed was another conversation about her bills. Actually, the last thing she needed was to hear Rajesh’s idiotic opinions on the matter.

  It had been six days since she’d been discharged. The exhaustion on her face when she had gone to bed last night had been brutal. She had spent far too much time yesterday at Green Acres. When DJ had come home last night, she’d been furiously working at her easel while Julia sat by with her camera, letting it soak up the turmoil in her frenzied strokes. Julia and he had sat together for a while, watching Emma stab at the canvas. Then Julia had left but Emma had refused to go to bed. Emma had told DJ that she had let Julia interview her about their childhood in London, which explained some of her mood. The memories of their homeless days made him want to stab at something too.

  Naturally, he’d stayed up with her, too, tinkering about with some of the recipes for a dinner he was catering tomorrow and trying to make sense of his financial crisis.

  Ashna had called, mortified, to tell him that she had an offer from a chef who wanted to rent her kitchen when the restaurant was closed. He had urged her to take the deal of course. “You have to save your restaurant, that has to be your priority,” he’d told her.

  The words she’d said after that had made anger churn inside him again.

  “That’s what Trisha said too.”

  Why was he not surprised that Dr. Raje was the one who had come up with the idea of finding a renter for Ashna when she knew DJ needed to use her kitchen? He knew she was only trying to help her cousin, but to use his own idea to screw him over when he so desperately needed money was callous if not cruel.

  He’d insisted on still working with Ashna on the menu revamp. She’d tried to convince him to let her pay for it, but that was out of the question. Even if he were desperate enough to take money from a friend, he wouldn’t have anywhere near enough to rent another kitchen. Not until Emma’s medical bills were taken care of.

  Rajesh had come in past midnight and gone straight to bed on wobbly drunken legs as usual. Now here he was sharing his unsolicited opinion on how to tackle the bills DJ had been admittedly glowering at.

  When Charan Singh had called asking if DJ had a job for Rajesh, DJ had naturally said yes. Apparently the idiot had picked the wrong married woman to start an affair with back in the old neighborhood.

  Rajesh poured half a carton of cream and half a jar of sugar into his coffee and took a slurping sip. Really, it was a shame to let this guy near food. “The car seems to be your only asset, mate,” he said.

  DJ heard Emma open and shut the bathroom door. Rajesh dug his fingers into the slice of frittata DJ had cut for Emma. “Even if you are okay with Emma’s hospital bills, what about the kitchen? We need pr
ep work space. There’s no place to do it here.” He swept his eggy fingers in an arc, indicating the two-foot countertop.

  DJ handed him a fork and a napkin.

  “Why can’t you just keep on using Ashna Raje’s kitchen and keep giving her whatever she’s getting in return.” How a creep like Rajesh had descended from someone like Ammaji, DJ would never know.

  Instead of punching Rajesh’s nose, he took a deep breath. “Ashna is getting new recipes and my eternal gratitude in return. Is there any woman in this universe whom you respect?” But of course he should not have asked the question. Because now that he had asked the question, he’d have to hear the answer, and nothing good could come of that.

  “Respect them? What for? They don’t care about being respected anymore. Not like our mothers. They want you to be a man again. Haven’t you been on Twitter lately? Hashtag-WomenAgainstFeminism. Buy them things, pay for their dinner, and they don’t give a fig about respect.”

  “I’m so glad Twitter’s not where I go to find women.”

  “That’s because you don’t go anywhere to find women, mate. Not that you would ever find the paragon you’re looking for.”

  “I’m not looking for anything.” How had he let himself get involved in this conversation?

  “Of course you are. But what you’re looking for doesn’t exist.” He stuffed his face full of frittata and leaned his hip on the table. “You’re one of those blokes who wants someone he can put on a pedestal. But you also want someone who puts you on a pedestal too. That’s why, my friend, you’re going to be looking for a very long time. A woman is either a diva or a devi. Either you take care of her or she takes care of you. You can’t have both.” He wiggled his brows. “And that’s true when it comes to shagging them as well.”

  “All right.” DJ pushed himself off his plastic chair and pulled himself up to his full height. Which put him at a good six inches above Ammaji’s fool grandson who straightened up but didn’t look in the least bit intimidated. “I did not need to hear that.”

  DJ went into the kitchen and cut Emma another slice of frittata, just as Emma’s door opened. Thank the good Lord she hadn’t been here to hear Rajesh’s depraved soliloquy.