Until she couldn’t take it anymore and quit med school.
“Jianna.”
Again with the full name, yikes.
“Why did I leave surgery to find no less than two WhatsApp messages featuring a photo of you wrapped around some man like a vine?”
“The messages were from us,” her oldest sister, Noor, interjected.
Jia was so preoccupied by how her mother said man, the same way she might say serial killer, that it took her a second to process the rest of that sentence. “Uh. What.” How.
Noor crossed her arms over her chest. She was a miniversion of their mom, though her recent illness had taken some of her healthy plumpness away. “We are very worried about you,” Noor said severely. Noor was always severe. The eldest of the five sisters, she felt the weight of being the future matriarch very heavily.
“You didn’t answer our calls.” Zara, her second-eldest sister, tipped her head and gave Jia a concerned look, the same one she probably gave to her psychiatric patients.
“What kind of shenanigans are you getting up to in that city?” Her mother closed her eyes. “I knew you’d fall prey to the evils of Hollywood. Didn’t I tell you girls that?”
Jia held up her palms. “I haven’t fallen prey to anything. I don’t know what you guys are talking about.” Don’t you? A pit opened up in her stomach, and it widened when Zara held her phone up to the camera. It took a second to focus, and then Jia had to swallow.
There she was, she and Dev, against the brick wall of that bar. His face was slightly turned toward the camera while hers was away. It looked like they were hugging, perhaps seconds away from kissing.
While they’d been avoiding one photographer, another had caught them with a nice wide angle lens. And, apparently, he or she or they had known who they were photographing.
“Legend’s Grandson Romancing His Way Through America,” the headline read. Jia squinted, trying to make out the text of the article, but it was too blurry. “Ahhh . . .”
“It doesn’t name you, thank God.” Zara put the phone down. “Of course, I recognized your scarf right away, I gave it to you last Eid, and then I looked closer at the profile. This is definitely you, isn’t it, Jia?”
Her shoulders sagged in relief. She hadn’t been named in the press. That was something. At least her extended family wasn’t blowing up her mom’s phone about why her youngest unmarried daughter was going around doing something as scandalous as smelling a man. “It’s me, but this isn’t what it looks like.” She paused. “By the way, what do you think it looks like?” Just so they were all on the same page.
“It looks like you are kissing a man at a bar!”
Her mother said it with all the scandal of someone else saying, “It looks like you are murdering a man at a murder house.” “That’s not what kissing looks like, Mama.”
“Don’t get fresh with me.”
“I’m not being fresh!”
“You are nuzzling, at the very least.” Zara tossed her hair.
“Nuzzling is worse than kissing,” her mother announced.
“How . . . ?” Jia rolled her shoulders. It was no surprise how tight they were. “We were both avoiding photographers. Clearly not well enough.”
“Avoiding photographers? Is that what they’re calling it nowadays. Convenient,” Noor said dryly. She readjusted the nasal cannula under her nose. Jia felt a stab of worry, as she always did when she saw the device. While she’d been sick in California, Noor had been battling the same illness in their hometown in Western New York. Jia had recovered without long-term side effects, but Noor hadn’t been so lucky. She didn’t need supplemental oxygen all the time—she could do her rounds at the hospital as an ER doc without it—but she still depended on it when she was home.
Nothing had made Jia feel more homesick or helpless than being sick all the way across the country, except for knowing her sister was sick and she couldn’t help out. Her sisters might be annoying as hell, but that didn’t mean she didn’t love them fiercely. “Look . . .”
Zara sighed. She was always stylish and glowed with health, and today was no different, though she wore a sweater instead of a suit. “Jia, I’m sorry, but the jig is up. I told Mom and Noor.”
“Told them what?”
“I overheard you speaking with Ayesha weeks ago. I know you’ve been talking to this man.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
The rare swear could be forgiven right now.