to yourself. You have so much to offer to the world.”
He sighed. “I deserved to be punished.”
“You did not deserve to be punished. You need to stop thinking that way. I want you to tell yourself you’re a good man and you deserve some happiness.”
He smiled. “Alright. I’m a good man and I deserve some happiness. There, are you satisfied?”
“For now.”
“If it makes you happy, I’ll try to change my attitude about it.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He moved over to my other arm and began massaging my palm.
“So what changed for you? Did getting six hours back as a man make enough difference for you to want to live again?”
“No. It wasn’t that at all.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No. What changed my perspective was meeting a beautiful girl by a waterfall who said she knew who I was and knew what I was.”
“Oh.”
“She’s the one who rescued me from my tiger skin and pulled me back to the surface. And, no matter what else happens . . . I want her to know that I will be eternally grateful for that.” He lifted my hand and pressed a warm kiss on my palm. He smiled charmingly and placed my arm back on the bed.
I looked up into his sincere golden eyes and opened my mouth to explain to him again that I loved Ren. His expression changed. He set his face and said, “Shh. Don’t say it. No words of protest tonight. I promise you, Kelsey, that I will do everything I can to reunite the two of you and try to be happy for you, but that doesn’t mean I can easily set aside my feelings, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Goodnight, Kells.”
He pressed a kiss to my forehead, turned off the light, stepped through the connecting door, and shut it softly.
I felt better the next day, extremely grateful to have recovered from my altitude sickness. We stopped in Gyantse, which was only two hours away but was on the route, and tourists were expected to spend the day there, so we had to as well. Mr. Kadam said that he’d been there before, that it used to be a major city on the spice trade route. We stopped to see the Kumbum Chörten, which was a school of Tibetan Buddhism, and had a Szechuan-style lunch at a local restaurant. The city was beautiful, and it was nice to get out of the car and walk for a while.
We stayed in a hotel again that night, but Kishan spent most of his time as a tiger while Mr. Kadam tried to teach me how to play chess. I couldn’t bend my brain around the game. After he quickly beat me a third time, I said, “Sorry, I guess I’m more of a reactionary player than a think-ahead kind of girl. One of these days, I’ll teach you how to play Settlers of Catan.”
Smiling, I thought about Li and his friends and Grandma Zhi. I wondered if Li ever tried to contact me. Mr. Kadam had disconnected all our phones and got us new cell phones and numbers right after we arrived in India. He said it was safer not to contact anyone back home.
Once every two weeks or so, I wrote to my foster parents and told them we were out of cell phone range. Mr. Kadam had it mailed from faraway locations so that there was no way to trace where the letters had come from. I never gave them a return address because I told them we were always moving.
They used a post office box to write me back, and Nilima picked up our mail and read the letters to me over the phone. Mr. Kadam dictated what things would be appropriate for me to include in the letters. He also had people discreetly keeping an eye on my foster family. They’d returned from their Hawaiian vacation with nice memories and nicer tans and found nothing amiss at home. Fortunately, it seemed that Lokesh hadn’t found them.
On day five of the Friendship Highway tour, we stopped to see Yamdrok Lake. Its nickname was the Turquoise Lake, for obvious reasons. It sparkled like a bright jewel set against the backdrop of the snow-capped mountains that fed it.
Mr. Kadam said it was considered sacred by the Tibetan people who often made pilgrimages to the lake. They believed it was the home of protective deities who watched over the lake and made sure it didn’t dry up. They believed that if it did, it would mean the end of Tibet.
Kishan