misleading the electorate.
“So, our deal . . .” She walked around the desk and leaned her hip on it, staring down at him. “What if it’s time to adjust it? Our goals have changed, shouldn’t our deal change too? We can achieve things we couldn’t even imagine back then.” She hadn’t changed one bit.
“Like winning the Nobel?”
Excitement flashed in her eyes. The kind of excitement for one’s work that Yash had always taken for granted. Now it was gone, and he couldn’t seem to retrieve it from the hole that had opened up inside him.
“Like winning the Nobel. Like running California. All we have to do is figure out how to make living in the same city work.”
Or maybe it was time to figure out how to get out of the arrangement. Living on different continents and getting together for the occasional photo op, that was easy enough to fake, and harmless. It was a different thing entirely to perpetually be around each other and pretend to be something they were not.
It was a different thing entirely to profit from people’s sympathy for a sobbing lover over a fallen body.
The excitement on Naina’s face told him that they were not on the same page. “How long would you stay in San Francisco?”
“Indefinitely, at this point. I’d manage the project from here. You’d mostly be in Sacramento. And I’ll be there when you need a first lady.”
“First lady?” He jumped out of his chair. Maybe he should not have sounded so horrified, but what in the hellish hell?
“Keep your boxers on, I’m not saying we have to get married. At this point I don’t think the public cares if we get married or not. I think being partners actually makes us more relatable to young voters.”
“And our parents? The reason we’ve been able to avoid marriage without them losing it is because we’ve never lived in the same place.” He squeezed his temples.
“It’s not about our parents anymore. We’re too old to not be able to just tell our parents to butt out of our lives.”
“Actually, we were too old for that at twenty-eight, by normal people standards,” he said.
“Well, we aren’t normal. My parents certainly aren’t. How is it normal to hold your daughter’s career ransom to marriage? The only reason Dad let me take off around the world for my career is because I was with you. The prized catch of the community wanted his daughter. He thinks it’s his greatest achievement.”
This was doubly preposterous, given that Dr. Kohli was credited with pioneering the imaging of certain parts of the human body using an MRI.
Naina’s laugh was too sad by half. The laugh of a child who’d never felt like she was enough for her parents. It was this determined laugh that had made Yash go along with all her shenanigans when they were kids.
“MRI machines don’t have vaginas that you get to hand off to the most deserving member of the next generation,” she added with fiery bitterness.
“And yet you never figured out how to say any of this to your father.”
She looked at him as though he were being willfully naive. “Truthfully, I can tell him to go to hell now. I can support Mummy, so she doesn’t have to put up with him. I really don’t care about him anymore. But I do care about you. The election is on the line now. So is my foundation. Don’t you see?”
He did see.
“I thought you’d be excited for me. Why are you acting like you don’t want me here?”
“I’m saying having you here means we’d have to fake a relationship in full public view on a daily basis. Do you really think we can do that?”
“Why not? We like each other, which is more than most real couples.”
“We aren’t a real couple, Nai. We tried, remember? It didn’t work out.”
“We can try again!”
Without thinking about it, he stepped back and away from her. Annoyance, even hurt, tightened her mouth, and he kicked himself for not controlling his reactions.
“Friends with benefits” was a phrase Naina had thrown around a lot in the early years of their arrangement. They had even tried it, but sex had been such an awkward, mechanical experience, they’d given up.
He knew she was right that it would make everything easier. Sleeping with anyone else would be perceived as infidelity. An affair would have ended his hopes at running for any public office.
This hadn’t been much of a problem for Yash. The idea of physical