Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

by Sonali Dev

  “It’s Emma,” he said, his voice shaking. “She collapsed in the bathroom when we were . . . when we were talking.”

  “Where are you right now?” Please be in an ambulance, please.

  “In an ambulance. She was fine, she was laughing. She . . .”

  “DJ,” she said as gently as she could, “is she conscious?”

  “Yes, but she . . . the pain. It seems awful . . . Her head . . . They have her hooked up to an IV . . . They’re giving her something.”

  Trisha left her office and headed for Anne’s desk. “Is there a paramedic near you? Can you put them on?”

  “Emma’s doctor wants to speak to you,” he said to someone.

  Trisha got an update from the paramedic and made sure they were bringing Emma straight to Stanford. They tried to tell her that they had to take her to the closest hospital. It took her another five minutes to make sure they did no such thing. “I will get authorization from your dispatch. But this patient has an astrocytoma that I am very closely familiar with. We may not have time for another doctor to get the images and get familiarized with the case. If the patient does not come straight here, you will be responsible for the outcome and it will not be a good one.” She was barking orders, but this was not open to discussion.

  Anne stood when she saw Trisha approach. Trisha scribbled the name of the ambulance company on a notepad for Anne. “Call them and make sure they’re routed here.”

  Anne nodded and was on it.

  “You have to make sure they come straight to Stanford,” she told DJ when he got back on the phone. “Now tell me exactly what happened.”

  DJ walked her through it. They had met Jane, and Emma had been in a really good mood. Then she’d gone to use the restroom while he’d been speaking to Trisha. When Trisha hung up, he went to see why it was taking so long. Someone came running out of the bathroom and said Emma had passed out in there. She had regained consciousness, but she’d woken up with an unbearable headache. Yes, she was still coherent. No, she hadn’t thrown up. Yes, she knew her name. Yes, she knew what day of the week it was. She had asked to be taken to Trisha. Over and over again.

  This was good news. This meant Emma was going to have the surgery. Please, please let it mean that. And please, please let it still be possible to perform the surgery.

  “Hang in there,” she said. “I’ll be waiting for her when you get in. They’ll bring you straight into the ER.”

  EMMA WAS CONSCIOUS when they brought her in. But there was almost certainly a bleed in her brain. The OR was already prepped and the anesthesiologist and the team were waiting.

  “There’s something I need to say before you put me under.” Emma grabbed her hand and Trisha turned her focus to her. “I want you to save my life, to remove the tumor. And if you can’t now, if it’s too late, I want you to know that I’m grateful for how hard you tried.”

  Trisha leaned over and hugged her. “Thank you. I’m going to do everything I can. You’re going to be painting vaginas destroying things for a long time. Or maybe sculpting them. Vaginas destroying things in 3-D? I cannot wait to see what you do.”

  Emma grinned. “You bet. I have all sorts of ideas popping in my head for pieces. I’m thinking: mixed media, wrought-iron work mixed in with my canvases. The breaking of chains around physical abilities, that sort of thing.”

  “Navigating limitations but not as boundaries. I like it.”

  “See, she gets it,” Emma said to her brother. He smiled through his tears and Trisha, despite all good sense, gave his arm a squeeze.

  “Seriously, Dr. Raje,” Emma said. “You have no idea how grateful I am. I will literally carry your bags around for you for the rest of your life if you ask.”

  “That’s a tempting offer. I do hate carrying bags.”

  Emma actually got wistful. “Really? I love my bags.”

  “You should meet my sister.”

  Emma grinned. Then she turned to her brother and took his hand. “It was not your fault. Mum would have had that stroke, anyway, at work or somewhere else. It wasn’t your fault.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s not always about you, knobhead. But I do love you.”

  “You’re the best thing in my life,” he said simply before dropping a kiss on her forehead, holding on for a few seconds, and letting the nurse lead him away.

  Dr. Entoff met her outside the OR. “You don’t have to do the surgery. I can handle it. You can observe if you like.”

  To quote DJ: Was he bloody joking? “This is my patient, Dr. Entoff. You’ll have to fire me to keep me from doing this surgery.”

  He squeezed her shoulder. “It’s one case.”

  Entoff loved to tell the story of how she’d organized that mission of doctors when she was thirteen. “Do you know why I chose neurosurgery, sir? Because the mission we organized to perform those surgeries couldn’t help the patients with neurogenic blindness. So this isn’t one case—it’s the reason I became a doctor.”

  And no one was going to keep her from going into that OR.

  Entoff pushed the button that opened the OR doors. “After you, Dr. Raje,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty

  Every hospital waiting room in the world had to have been designed by the same architect because hell if they didn’t feel exactly the same. They even breathed the same way. Had the same pulse. DJ’s mother had been in the ICU for four days before she had passed and Emma and he hadn’t left the waiting room that entire time except when they were by her side. And now here he was again, and it felt as though he’d never left.

  That probably wasn’t the best train of thought right now, but he hated being here alone, sitting on the floral couches, staring at the single potted plant and the generic painting with the stone house surrounded by a profusion of flowers.

  He’d been in the waiting room for four hours. Someone from the surgical team had come out every so often and filled him in. There wasn’t any new information, but every time they told him that Emma was stable he felt every bit of life rush back into his limbs.

  A little after the four-hour mark, Ashna came in.

  “How did you know I was here?” he asked her.

  “Trisha had the nurse call me,” she said, pouring him a steaming cup of her legendary chai out of a flask. The woman could do things with ginger and cardamom and tea leaves that left him in awe. He had never been able to replicate it.

  Thinking about work calmed him. A taste of her chai practically tranquilized him.

  “You put crack in this, don’t you?” he said, taking a long satisfying sip.

  Someone else had said similar words to him about his curried stew. Someone who had eyes much like the woman who put her head on his shoulder and let him drink.

  “I’m going to take that as a compliment, Chef Caine,” she said, making something an awful lot like hypocrisy prick at his conscience.

  When he was done with his chai, he filled Ashna in on how they’d ended up here after their trip to Monterey.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? My family owns a beach house there. I feel like I spent all my weekends there growing up.” She studied him with her usual calm expression. Her eyes were the same shape as Trisha’s, large, heavy lidded, and turned up at the ends. But Trisha’s were that unique brown and amber, like the fiery licks of flames. And Ashna’s were guarded. She could blank them out so you only saw what she wanted you to see. Trisha could blank nothing out. Everything she was feeling leapt out of her eyes.

  “Isn’t Naomi’s café something else? A world in itself. The way every restaurant should be.” There was the distinct burn of envy in her voice. It was the chef’s burn—that particular grudging note chefs got when they praised each other’s work or restaurants.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, the disaster with Trisha that had taken place in their friend’s beautiful café doing a slow-motion replay in his head.

  Ashna smiled, albeit a little despondently.

  DJ couldn’t understand
why Ashna’s own restaurant was having such a hard time. She was incredibly talented.

  “How’s the response to the new specials been?” he asked. Ashna was supposed to have test-driven some of his new recipes this week.

  She brightened. “Fabulous! We’ve seen a few people come in a few times this week for the okra and the tilapia. And the Yelp ratings have jumped.” Then she got somber again. “I just hope it lasts.”

  “It will, love. This is just the beginning.” He was going to do all he could to help her turn Curried Dreams around.

  They spent the next half hour discussing menus. Having Ashna here was exactly what he needed right now and he couldn’t stop telling her that.

  “Emma will be fine, DJ. I’m really glad you were able to convince her to have the surgery.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t the one who convinced her. Your cousin Trisha . . . she . . . she figured out exactly what Emma was afraid of and . . .” God, what an idiot he’d been.

  Ashna studied him, her usually distant gaze probing. “That sounds like Trisha. She’s the solver in the family. It’s that brain of hers. Sees everything in all its parts and pieces and knows how to break problems down and put them back together as solutions. Emma is in great hands with her. Truly.”

  For everything he had accused Trisha of, that much he’d always known. That much he’d never doubted. For all the sadness and worry pressing against his chest, he smiled. Ashna gave him another quick sideways hug.

  “You really should let me pay you for the menu consultation. Especially if it’s going to get these results.”

  “Actually, that would mean I’d have to pay you for the kitchen.” They’d decided that he would use her kitchen overnight and early in the morning, before the renter came in. At least until he could afford to pay her rent or find another place. That way she could still make money on it and he’d still have a prep place.

  “Barter then,” she said, and they shook on it.

  Ashna sat with him for the next six hours, comfortable silences interspersed with comforting conversation. Finally, ten hours after Emma had gone into surgery, she turned to him. “I have to run out and take care of closing up. Will you be okay? I’ll come back after.”

  “Of course. I’ll be fine.” As long as his little sister was all right, he would be all right.

  She stopped in the doorway on her way out and turned to him. “I meant what I said about Trisha earlier, DJ. This isn’t just a job to her. I know she’s hard to understand sometimes. But she’s not what she seems to be. Do you know what I’m saying? She won’t let a patient down. She won’t let anyone down. It would kill her. She is the most dependable person I know. I just thought you should know that.”

  He nodded. Had Trisha told her sisters what had happened at Naomi’s? The idea that Ashna and Nisha might know how he had behaved was more than a little embarrassing.

  Something told him she hadn’t told her sisters. For all the uncertainty he was filled with right now, the only things he felt certain about seemed to have to do with her.

  “Thank you,” he said and he must have looked really pathetic because she came back inside and pulled him into a hug.

  TRISHA LOVED HER cousin like a sister. Truly, she did. But the kick of envy in her gut at seeing DJ holding Ashna made her want to fold over.

  After ten hours of destroying a tumor lodged deeply into brain tissue, one cell at a time, she was bursting with adrenaline. Surgery never exhausted her. It wiped her mind clean of everything else but her patient, and that put her in a place she couldn’t describe with words. She felt hollowed out yet full. Like she carried everything, yet nothing weighed her down.

  Now here she was, out of the OR, and everything she’d left outside it came crashing down on her—the way DJ felt about her, the fact that HRH had disowned her. Had that been real? A wave of panic washed over her.

  Looking at DJ, she knew she had made the right decision. The way everything inside her melted into a pool of wanting when she was near him had nothing to do with her decision to go ahead with the surgery. A man getting to keep the only family he had—that had everything to do with it. It didn’t matter who the man was. This was why she did what she did. This is what she had wanted with a singular obsession all her life. HRH had taught her too well. If he’d lost sight of what was important because his ambitions were under threat, that wasn’t Trisha’s problem.

  The excitement of telling DJ that the surgery had been a success and that his sister was stable had felt uncontainable moments ago. No, it still felt uncontainable. It wasn’t going to be ruined by how badly she wanted to hold him the way Ashna was doing right now. He deserved his peace wherever he got it. Sitting by yourself in a hospital with no idea if someone you loved would survive was not something she wished upon anyone.

  She remembered sitting in the waiting room while Yash underwent surgery. Nisha’s tight grip on one hand and Ashna’s on the other was what had gotten her through it.

  DJ looked up from Ashna’s shoulder. His eyes darkened with awareness, mixed in with a whole slew of other emotions she couldn’t name. He pulled away from Ashna and blasted Trisha with the desperate question in his eyes.

  “We got the tumor—all of it,” she said, fighting hard to keep her voice professional. “Emma is stable.” It was hard forcing herself to not imagine scenarios where he’d suddenly realize he was in love with her and fly into her arms. “The next twenty-four hours are critical. But everything looks good.”

  “That’s great!” her cousin said, beaming.

  She smiled back, but she couldn’t look away from DJ’s eyes. There was such relief there that in that moment it was just the two of them in the room.

  “Can I see her?” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion.

  “They’re setting her up in post-op. A nurse will come and get you when she’s ready. It will be a while before she wakes up, maybe even a day. I . . .” Ashna’s gaze on her suddenly made her feel naked. “I can come by later and fill you in on the details and answer questions.” Her voice sounded professional enough, but Ashi’s eyes were getting more and more knowing.

  Then again, having a nurse call Ashna in the middle of surgery to tell her that DJ was by himself in the waiting room had been akin to confessing all her feelings for him anyway.

  The idea of her family seeing how she felt about him was horrifying. There was no way she could bear their sympathy. So she had no idea what came over her when she reached out as though to take his hand, and then halfway through withdrew it because suddenly she didn’t want to touch him. Not with Ashna’s concerned eyes watching her as though she were a puppy hit by a car with no hope of recovery.

  His hand hung midair as she turned around and hurried out of the room.

  God, when would she stop being such a dimwit around him?

  When she’d left the OR, she had felt powerful. Then she’d seen him and the sight had hit her like a full-body blow and now all she wanted was to attach herself to him like a leech.

  She pictured him plucking off the leech and flicking it into the air. Turning down the empty corridor, she thumped her head against the wall, giving in to an urge that was becoming as habitual as not being able to keep her shit together when it came to DJ bloody Caine! A nurse scurried past, working hard to avoid eye contact. Maybe Trisha just needed to move away. To the moon, or maybe Mars. What was the holdup with colonizing planets anyway?

  She pulled herself together, got some coffee, and without waiting to think about it stepped into Entoff’s office. Maybe she couldn’t move to Mars, but she could talk her boss into helping her get away for a while. There was a team of surgeons traveling to Africa this week to train the surgeons there on a new technology. Even if she had to beg, she was getting on that team.

  BY THE TIME she got to her patient rounds, she was feeling human again. As she spoke to patients and their families, the storm inside her stilled. Was it really obnoxious to know you were good at your job? To love it so much it actually help
ed soothe your broken heart?

  As she strode down the hallway, she thought about DJ in Nisha’s kitchen, arranging delicate, thinly sliced pieces of chicken as though they were butterfly wings. Her steps faltered.

  He was right, the obnoxious part wasn’t loving her own work; it was seeing other people’s love for their work as somehow less important.

  That first day she’d seen him he’d used his bare hands to straighten a boiling pot. It had seemed crazy to her then, but she understood it now. Had she known the magic he made with food, she might have risked her own hands for that caramel, too. Oh, what she wouldn’t do to turn the clock back to that day.

  Her response had been to ask him if he knew how valuable her hands were. God, what the hell was wrong with her?

  I’ve never dated anyone who hasn’t been to college.

  He had gone to college with Ashi! How the hell had that slipped her mind? She knew how hard Ashi had worked to get into Le Cordon Bleu.

  No wonder the man thought her self-absorbed and arrogant.

  She wrapped her arms around herself. Squeezing herself tight did nothing to stem the leaky pain inside her. The truth was, he was right about many things—things she could change, like how she treated people. He was also wrong about a few—things she could not change, like who she was.

  Emma’s room was not on her way to her office, but her feet, stupid as they were, took the scenic route. And scenic it was, because as she approached Emma’s room, she saw DJ’s tall form looming over the nurses’ station. Seriously, if you cooked food the way he did, you had absolutely no business looking like an athlete. That was what was obnoxious.

  He started to turn and without thinking about it, she dived into a random room. Yes, she was hiding again, because once you lost your self-respect, you realized it was a burden in the first place.

  Actually, it wasn’t. She would very much like it back. But that battle was lost, because she peeped out of the thankfully empty room and watched as DJ made his way to Emma’s. Maybe it was the fact that she hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, but the sight of him made her want to weep. All her exhaustion gathered inside her in one fell swoop. He looked so incredibly sad, and beautiful. All she wanted was to go sit by him, hold his hand, tell him everything was going to be okay. And maybe smell his neck.