Incense and Sensibility (The Rajes #3) - Sonali Dev Page 0,106

kitchen.

All the people she loved were in pain and she wasn’t able to absorb it from them, no matter how hard she tried.

When Tara found out India was considering selling the studio to pay the bills, it was going to kill her in a whole different way, but preventing real death came first. India had checked the estimated price on Zillow and then felt queasy all day for having done it.

She hadn’t been able to do anything to protect her sister either. The last time they spoke, China had just landed in Seoul and checked into a hotel, but instead of sounding excited she’d sobbed incoherently.

Song hadn’t picked her up at the airport or even invited China to her home. China had been holed up in a hotel room, waiting for her. The idea of her sister by herself, hurting, made India livid.

Then there was Yash’s pain, which she couldn’t separate from her own. All the way down to her toes she knew there was more. He was not just a man who had tired of a relationship. She knew that was how anyone who had an affair with someone who was cheating justified it. But the way her entire self reacted to him was not a lie. She had spent her life staying in tune with her mind and body, being true to her whole self. It would never betray her that way.

Yash was not a liar.

He just couldn’t give her the truth. And without the truth, they had nothing. Much as she wanted to push him to tell her so she could understand, that trust had to come from him. Everything was his to lose, that part she understood. But why they had ended up here, where she could cause him to lose everything, that part she needed to understand.

Why don’t you ever fight for what you want?

She’d been sitting right here in this room, all of sixteen years old, when she’d asked Tara why Tara hadn’t saved any information about her birth parents. She thought she was fighting for what she wanted.

Tara had pulled her into her lap and insisted on holding her tight when she answered.

“I spent ten years searching for my father because he put a fake address on an envelope. At least your birth parents were kind enough to leave you with no breadcrumbs to follow.”

Fighting for something meant demanding a definitive answer, with no guarantee that you’d like the one you got.

“Did you choose us because we’d never be able to search for them?” India had asked.

“You chose me. Your eyes chose me,” Tara had said in her Tara way. “All I knew was that I’d never give you reason to want to search for them.”

Tucking the blanket around Tara, India made her way down the stairs, already dreading how empty her own home would feel with him gone.

When Chutney didn’t immediately waddle up to her, a flash of discomfort gripped her. Just as she was about to call out to her dog, her eyes fell on Yash sitting on the floor where she had left him, Chutney cuddled up in his lap, fast asleep.

When she walked to him, he pressed a finger to his lips, as though her pug were their baby, and he’d finally gotten her to fall asleep after half a night of sleeplessness. A spasm of yearning squeezed in her heart and sent heat spreading across her body.

There was new purpose in him. He studied her reactions like someone studying sacred texts. Was the man trying to kill her?

She pointed at Chutney, and when he looked down at her, she quickly dabbed her eyes on her flowy yoga shrug. “When she’s passed out on your lap like that, even screaming in her ear won’t wake her up.”

He smiled and scratched Chutney gently between the eyes. India sat down in front of him.

You’re still here, she wanted to say, but couldn’t without letting him see the tenderness flooding through her at seeing him, still here, on her living room floor.

“What if I told you it isn’t what everyone thinks?” he said finally.

The determination darkening his eyes, the resolve squaring his jaw . . . it was obvious that he’d decided to give her honesty, even when he knew exactly what it would cost him.

She stroked Chutney’s ear. “I know you, Yash. I know it isn’t what it appears to be. If it were, if she was someone you were in love with, ever had been in love with, you wouldn’t