by Sara Desai
“Come back,” she called out. “I’ll think of something. I’ll tell them I’m ill . . .”
Too late. He swung off the roof and the branch cracked, dropping him the last five feet to the grass with a sickening thud.
“Liam!” She leaned half out of the window, her throat constricting when he didn’t move. “Are you okay?”
“Daisy?” He pushed himself up, and her knees buckled as relief washed over her.
“Yes?”
“Next time I’m going out the door.”
* * *
• • •
AFTER throwing on some decent clothes, Daisy made her way downstairs and opened the door to Salena, Mehar, Lakshmi, and Taara aunties and poor Hari Uncle, his hands filled with coolers, boxes, and bags.
“Look who is finally here!” Salena Auntie brushed past Daisy and into the house, her bright orange salwar kameez brightening up the curtained living room. “We were worried something was wrong with you. Hari Uncle was going to kick down the door for us.”
Hari Uncle shook his head. “No, I wasn’t. I have a bad hip. I suggested using the spare key that they keep under the rock. You were going to kick the door down.”
Salena waved a dismissive hand. “No matter. Mehar told us about poor Max, and you’re all alone without your dad so we thought we’d bring you breakfast before you pick him up.”
Daisy’s skin prickled in warning. Her aunties had always come with dinner when she and Sanjay were young and their dad had been held up at work, but now that she was grown, the unexpected visits usually involved a suitor instead of food.
She peered out the door, trying to find the man they had no doubt brought for her to meet. “Where is he?”
“Who?” Lakshmi Auntie added her shoes to the pile in the hallway.
“Somebody’s friend’s sister’s cousin who just happened to be in town and just happens to be looking for a wife and you just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought you’d drop in.”
“It’s just us.” Taara Auntie held up a Tupperware container. “And my famous Cinnamon Toast Crunch Marguerita Poha.” A wannabe chef with two boys at home, Taara Auntie was infamous for her terrible fusion foods.
“Don’t eat it,” Lakshmi Auntie muttered. “Those are not flavors that go together. I had some this morning and . . .” She held her stomach. “Do you have any antacids?”
“Medicine cabinet in the bathroom.”
Daisy followed Salena Auntie into the kitchen and settled on the stool while Taara Auntie took out container after container from her plastic shopping bag.
“We were having dinner at the Spice Mill last night,” Salena Auntie said in a tone that was clearly meant to be casual, but was anything but. “Jana said that Nira said that Deepa said that she had helped you find a sherwani for your fiancé who still hasn’t met the family. Deepa overheard that you were taking him to the Dosa Palace and she happened to go over there to talk to Amina who said that you had a fight . . .”
Despite being a Patel and growing up in the Patel family, it still amazed Daisy how quickly information got around. You couldn’t keep secrets for long when there were family members everywhere and gossip was everybody’s favorite hobby. “That was three days ago. Everything is fine now.”
“Fighting when engaged is not a good sign,” superstitious Lakshmi Auntie said. “Unless you see a brown goat with a white head, fighting early in a relationship portends difficult trials ahead.”
Desperate for a way to divert the conversation, Daisy gestured to the cooler bag. “I’m starving. Maybe we should eat.”
“Is it just us? Or maybe you have a friend over?” Lakshmi Auntie peered up the stairs.
“Now that you mention it, I do smell something.” Mehar Auntie sniffed.
“Nobody is here, Auntie-ji.”
They were the right words, but Lakshmi Auntie seemed unconvinced. “A black cat with one green eye and one blue crossed my path three days ago outside a yellow house. It means bad luck on the second floor. Mehar, you should probably go and check it out.”
“Be my guest.” Daisy waved Mehar Auntie upstairs. “You may also want to check the roof while you’re there. Sanjay used to sneak out at night. You wouldn’t want to miss anyone who might be hiding there.” She couldn’t resist throwing out a little dig at her perfect big brother.
“Sanjay!” Mehar Auntie sighed as she headed for the stairs. “Such a good boy. How is he doing?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t heard from him in months. And did you miss the part where I told you he used to climb out on the roof to sneak out at night against the rules?”
“Such a rascal.” Mehar shook her head, smiling.
“You wouldn’t say that if it had been me climbing on the roof,” Daisy called out.
“You would never have climbed on the roof.” Salena Auntie pinched Daisy’s cheek. “You’re our good Daisy.”
Good Daisy. She’d always been good because there had never been an opportunity to be bad. When it had just been the three of them at home, she’d taken over the household chores—all of which made it easier for her to justify avoiding school dances, dating, and parties. If not for Layla dragging her out, she would have been content to stay at home with her schoolbooks and her video games and her online computer world.
“All clear.” Mehar Auntie joined them in the kitchen, smiling as if she hadn’t just been upstairs checking under beds and in closets for a hidden man. “I haven’t been upstairs for a long time. Daisy’s room looks just like it did when she was a little girl . . .”
Ugh. Why had she never bothered to redecorate? She was twenty-seven and still living at home in the same room and following the same rules her father had laid down when she was a teenager. If her aunties had their way, she would marry a nice desi boy selected by the family and go straight from her house to her married home.
Daisy grabbed a bedmi puri and dipped the crispy Indian bread made of urad dal into the raseele aloo. Jana Auntie always made it with the perfect combination of spice and tang.
“If things don’t work out, Roshan is a lovely boy,” Lakshmi Auntie said. “I had your horoscopes done and you’re a perfect match. He comes from a good family, and he is an engineer . . .”
Daisy shoved another bedmi puri in her mouth as her aunt extolled Roshan’s virtues. Usually she just switched off when her aunties played matchmaker, but today everything they said grated on her nerves. She was a professional with two degrees and a good job. Why did no one even consider that she might be capable of picking a man for herself?
Maybe her perfect match was the kind of man who would propose a marriage of convenience to get her aunties off her back? Or give her a passionate kiss in the middle of the office? Or show up at an animal hospital in the middle of the night after he’d been emotionally flayed by his family?
Maybe she’d stuffed her emotions so deep inside, hidden beneath her lists and rules and lines of code, that she hadn’t realized there was a “bad Daisy” waiting to get free.
• 20 •
Thursday, 8:07 A.M.
DAISY: Confirming Date #4, Thursday 6 p.m. Hockey Game. SAP Center. San Jose Sharks vs. Toronto Maple Leafs. Objective: Meet Taara Auntie, Ashok Uncle, and their boys, Nihan and Imran.
LIAM: Go Sharks!!!!
* * *
• • •
AFTER messaging Liam, it took Daisy a full thirty minutes to get into her flow state. Even then, a part of her brain was still mulling over their encounter from the past weekend and all the things that could have happened if they hadn’t been interrupted. What if they’d actually had sex? How could they continue to have a fake engagement after crossing that line? And what if once wasn’t enough? Was she betraying her family by sleeping with the enemy? Or was she putting the past behind her and moving forward?
Only a few short minutes into her flo
w, Rochelle interrupted with a pop-up message on her screen.
TYLER WANTS TO SEE YOU IN HIS OFFICE.
With a sigh, she pulled off her headphones. Despite the cutbacks, Tyler still wanted to go ahead with their new monthly subscription boxes and a revamped website to reflect the new branding, which meant a whole new level of code.
“What’s up?” Mia looked over from her desk. “I thought this was flow time. I’ve been trying to keep quiet.”
“Tyler wants to see me.”
“Shh.” Josh ripped off his headphones. “It’s like you’re just sitting there waiting for any excuse to talk, or rip open a foil packet, or sigh, or rustle papers, or . . .”
“Have a donut.” Mia offered him a box of fresh crullers from the bakery down the street.
“I know what you’re doing,” Josh grumbled as he took a donut. “But it’s not going to work. I can’t be bought with donuts and smiles.”
“What about gossip?” Zoe asked, looking up from her computer. “I know something you don’t know.”
“Is this middle school?” Sarcasm dripped off Josh’s tongue. “Are we taunting each other now? Am I going to come to work tomorrow and find a frog on my chair?”
“Fine.” Zoe turned back to her computer. “I won’t share that Andrew’s leaving. Brad is going to hear our branding pitch. Oh, and Hunter asked Rochelle about Daisy. I guess he missed the meeting where Tyler announced she was engaged.”
“Hunter asked about me?” Daisy’s mouth went dry. If she’d known all she had to do was turn a laptop off and on to get noticed by a guy like Hunter, she would have spent more time volunteering with the Help Desk team.
Josh sniffed. “He probably forgot which end of his laptop was up.”
“Or maybe he realized a brilliant, sexy software engineer, who is so awesome she got us an audience with Brooding Brad, has been hiding on the third floor, and he wanted to make his move before anyone else snatched her away,” Mia said, snatching the box away. “I can’t believe you’re jealous.”
Josh huffed his derision. “I’m not jealous. I just don’t understand why he would ask about her and not me.” He flexed both skinny arms, puffing out his chest beneath his Coding Is Life T-shirt. “Who could resist this?”
“You’re right.” Sarcasm dripped from Mia’s tone. “Even I can barely hold myself back. How did Hunter manage to resist the siren call of your fabulous bod?”
“Exactly.” Josh gave a smug smile. “And she’s engaged. I’m not.”
“Fake engaged.” Zoe grinned. “Who wants to let Hunter know?”
* * *
• • •
TYLER was in a mood.
“What took you so long?” he demanded when Daisy walked into his office.
“I was in the flow.” She sat on the chair across from his desk and peered at him over a giant stack of papers. Unlike her tidy workstation, Tyler’s office was a sea of paper, coffee cups, pizza boxes, charts, boxes, books, and, curiously, pink paper umbrellas. No surface was clean. Every movement was a study in not knocking something over.
“Brad isn’t happy,” Tyler said abruptly. “Apparently you convinced Liam to give Mia and Zoe a chance to present the branding pitch that I rejected last year.”
Daisy shrugged. “Can he be unhappy and still hear them out? Not one of the women in that room felt that a rebrand of unicorns, rainbows, and scantily clad nondiverse women resonated with them in any way.”
Tyler ran his hands through his hair, taking his look from slightly crazy to mad scientist in a heartbeat. “I thought you were a behind-the-scenes kind of person.”
“It was all an act.” Although she’d made the comment flippantly, the words rang true. Although she’d been a high school nerd, she’d never been shy or quiet. At least not until her mom had thrown out a comment that made her wonder if her personality was one of the reasons she’d left. But something had changed in the last few weeks, and it wasn’t just the fact that she’d almost slept with her high school heartbreak. She’d made friends at Organicare and discovered a confidence she’d thought she’d lost. She had a passion for the product, and a voice that could help the company succeed.
“Good to know,” Tyler said. “Anything else you think we’re doing wrong?”
Daisy hesitated. “Is that a trick question?”
“It’s an honest one.”
She leaned back in her chair, considering. “I’d put people back in their own divisions. Developers in one corner. Marketing in another.” She slipped a side eye at Hunter in the glass-walled conference room next door. “Finance could go beside the developers because they’re generally quiet.”
“Andrew gave his notice.”
She startled at the abrupt change in topic, and the skin prickled on the back of her neck. “Yes, I heard.”
“Now I don’t have a project manager.”
“Josh could take over quite easily,” she offered. “He worked closely with Andrew.”
“So you’d pick Josh over anyone else?”
“He’s good at what he does. People like him. He’s a bit of a cowboy, but you can easily rein him in.”
Tyler studied her for a long moment. “Not you? After all, you came in here and advocated for Mia and Zoe’s rebrand, proposed an office reorganization, questioned Brad’s vision, and tried to get Josh a promotion. You have the skills and the experience. I think you’d do a good job.”
Daisy’s mouth went dry. Project manager? It was the next step in a developer’s career. More money. More prestige. More responsibility. Better work. But on the flip side, it required more commitment. The project manager was the glue that held everything together, and you couldn’t be the glue if you weren’t prepared to stick around. She had started to find her voice, but it wasn’t loud enough to lead.
“No,” she said. “Not me.”
* * *
• • •
LIAM’S phone buzzed on his desk. He picked it up and barked a hello. Usually, he enjoyed the rare opportunity to work in the office, but tonight was hockey night. He hadn’t seen Daisy all week, and every minute until quitting time felt like a damn hour.
“Your tickets have arrived.” His new assistant wasn’t fazed by his odd behavior. She’d come from a start-up where the developers dressed and acted as characters from the game they’d created. Even the days when Liam arrived in full riding leathers didn’t merit the lift of an eyebrow. “You got the club seats with a center ice view.”
“Yes!” He pumped a fist. There was no point going to the game if you couldn’t see the sweat on the players’ brows. No point making money if he couldn’t share one of the few things that brought him joy with his fake fiancée.
He wanted Daisy to know him—the man he was today, not the man who had messed up his life so bad that it took three years on the road and a kindhearted stranger to set him on the right path again. He wanted her to look at him with all the passion and desire he had seen in her eyes when she was a teen, like he was perfect and not flawed, whole and not so utterly broken. And the best way to do that was to show her the things he loved.
Six hours until game time. He drummed his thumb on his desk for a full ten seconds before pressing Daisy’s number on his phone. He’d never been a patient man.
“To what do I owe this honor?” Her voice lit him up inside and he instantly forgot all about the accounting systems software pitch deck James had given him to review.
“I wanted to let you know the details of our sports date. I got club seats with a center ice view! It’s going to be a great game. I can feel it. One good run and the Sharks will get close to the top.”
Daisy sniffed. “A Sharks turnaround that results in a playoff spot is a long shot. There’s no point in denying reality.”
His breath left him in a rush. Her informed assessment suggested more than just a passing familiarity with the game
. Could this day get any better? “You follow hockey?”
“After Sanjay moved away to do his residency, I couldn’t let my dad watch the games alone.” She sighed. “I can’t imagine they’ll be able to turn it around. Maybe I shouldn’t come. Mia asked me to stay late tonight to help her prepare the pitch for Brad and she wants a second opinion. I also have a program to debug that could use a few extra hours. And Tyler offered me a project manager job but I turned it down and now Josh wants my help after work to transition into the role.”
His good mood popped like a birthday balloon. “You aren’t coming?”
She laughed and hope swelled in his chest again. “Of course I’m coming. I said I’d come and I love hockey, so I’ll be there. I didn’t realize it was so easy to wind you up.”
“You didn’t wind me up,” he grumbled. “I knew you were kidding.”
“Sure you did.”
His heart jumped at her teasing tone. “I’ll ask James if I can borrow his SUV. I wasn’t going to bring my fan gear but now that I know you’re into the game . . .”
“What do you mean by ‘fan gear’?” she asked carefully.
He felt a warning prickle on his neck and quickly changed the subject. “Why did you turn down the promotion?”
“I’m not ready for that type of commitment. I don’t like to get too involved in the companies I work for so I can keep my options open.”
Liam wondered what she considered being “too involved.” She had clearly made friends at Organicare—people who trusted and relied on her, and who had inconveniently asked for her help when she had a hockey game to attend. She’d also put her neck on the line to save the company—matchmaking hadn’t been enough to convince her to be his fake fiancée, but saving the company had. How much more committed could a person be?
“So you were saying you can’t come because you’re helping the friends you don’t have at the company you don’t want to stay at because you don’t care?” Was she doing that with him, too? Helping him and pretending she didn’t care? When really she did?