with surgery, the odds aren’t good, Janya. To make love to you, to have you hoping for a baby, and to know that I could not give you one and might never be able to! I just…couldn’t.”
She was still angry, but she knew what she said now would matter for a lifetime. She tried to choose her words carefully.
“What must you think of me? You believe that having a baby is all our marriage is about?”
“You married me expecting a traditional life together. We married to have a family. You didn’t know me. You certainly didn’t love me.”
“I—”
He held up his hand. “Yes, I know you married me to leave an unpleasant situation, but you also expected to make a new home here. With me. With children. And what if I can never give you that?”
She took a deep breath. “Marriage is not an equation. Love plus children does not always equal a happy marriage. But respect plus love? That is an equation that always ends in happiness, no matter the circumstances. And we have both.”
She grabbed his hand and held it against her cheek. “I love you, Rishi. It’s a love that took time to grow, and it’s growing still. But it is not a love based on whether you can give me a child. The world is filled with children. If we cannot create our own, perhaps we will raise someone else’s. And will we be less happy because of it? Will we love them less? Will we love each other less?”
He began to weep, this man who almost never showed his feelings. It was a measure of how deep his emotions ran, the fear he had experienced every day since finding that he might never father a child. The horror he felt at the prospect that he would lose his wife.
Janya put her arms around him and drew his head to her chest. “Rishi, Rishi, I love you,” she crooned in her native language. “And I will love you more each day. How could you not know?”
He put his arms around her waist, and they held each other until holding was no longer enough. She lay back on the sofa, and he undressed her before he undressed himself.
“Nandi the bull is watching,” she whispered as he took her in his arms. “We should close the door to the puja room.”
He made a sound low in his throat. “Don’t move. Unlike the bull, I’m not made of stone.”
He wasn’t. He was made of warm, willing, human flesh and need. Even better, so was she. She opened to him and moved with pleasure in his embrace.
chapter twenty-seven
When Wanda noticed Rishi’s car in the Kapur driveway, she figured she could skip the fireworks. Rishi would probably keep Janya company, and she sure didn’t want to interrupt that.
With nothing better to do, she decided to use the evening to catch up on work she’d been putting off at the shop. She needed to do an honest-to-goodness inventory of supplies, followed by placing orders for whatever she was missing. She needed to look at her own hastily scribbled notes and figure out which pies were selling best, so she could move them to the top of the weekly lineup. She’d been itching to give the refrigerator a good scrubbing, and what better time than now, when nobody else needed to get into it?
With that last in mind, after a quick sandwich she pulled on an old pair of capris and a faded Miami Vice T-shirt that was practically an heirloom and drove into town, fuming at the ramped-up holiday traffic on the bridge. Since the park where the fireworks would be launched was miles away, she found a parking spot right in front of her shop. The only sign of business as usual came from a bar one block down, where loyal patrons were probably watching some distant city’s festivities on television and didn’t know the difference.
She was heading toward the door, key in hand, when she heard a muffled crash. She took another step before she completely processed the sound. Her first assumption was that the noise came from a neighboring shop, but one quick glance in either direction showed no lights shining in either.
She considered her options. Nobody in town could summon a cop faster than she could. On the other hand, nobody had more to lose if she simply imagined an intruder. She could just hear the razzing she would get every time one of Kenny’s buddies stopped by