care if the world sanctions our relationship? We would have so many happy nights together.”
She couldn’t walk fast enough. She unlocked the car with her remote; then she opened the passenger door and took out the bag she had so carefully packed. She opened it and began to draw out objects, dropping them on the ground at his feet.
“The sari you bought for me. The bracelets. The ring. The pashmina shawl. The book of love poetry.” She was dropping the items faster and faster, flinging them at his feet now, until the bag was almost empty. “I kept them. I brought them into my marriage, and now I’m so ashamed. If my husband notes their absence, I will tell him they were soiled beyond repair and not nearly as lovely as the things he has given me.”
For just a flash he looked at her with the eyes of a cobra. “You fool!”
“I said I made two mistakes. The second? I fell in love with a man who can only love himself. But Darshan, there was a third mistake, too. I didn’t see until right this moment that you must have helped Padmini plan my humiliation.”
His fury was suddenly tinged with surprise, a cobra caught in a net, and she knew for certain that although she had only been guessing, she was right. Now she knew him for the man he was. She also understood exactly what he had been capable of, although knowing gave her no pleasure. She set the facts before him, his very own feast of lies.
“When you finally realized you had been blinded by lust, you knew you had to act quickly. Padmini was willing to do anything to become your bride, even destroy her best friend and cousin, so the two of you found a way to make that happen. You were the one who made certain your colleagues and your father’s saw that Web site. For all I know, you helped Padmini put it together.”
He had recovered his poise. “This isn’t true.”
She reached into the bag and pulled out the only thing left, the portrait of Padmini. This she handed to him. “Give my cousin this gift, along with all the things I’ve outgrown, Darshan. And don’t contact me again. If you try, I’ll telephone Padmini and tell her what you’ve said. I will call your parents, and the men at this new firm of yours. I will beg them to make you leave me alone.”
She rounded the car and got in, glad he didn’t try to follow her. She turned the key and drove off without looking back.
Never would she have expected to see Lee Symington simmering deep in the eyes of the man she had loved. She supposed this would be the only time in her life that she would be grateful she had ever met Alice’s son-in-law.
She drove calmly, carefully. But she didn’t go home. She drove to Rishi’s office to insist that he come back with her for dinner on their little patio.
chapter twenty-nine
Wanda wasn’t familiar with Tampa, but Ken knew it well. It was a thriving international city, but like any city, it had high-crime neighborhoods. When he told her where she could find Gloria Madsen, Ken warned her that the neighborhood was primarily industrial, but the cops still dealt with illegal alcohol sales and prostitution. A flourishing adult entertainment business was a magnet for people Wanda didn’t want to meet on a dark street corner.
“You be careful,” he said. “If you want to wait for my next day off, we can go together.” But on Friday morning, rather than take a trip to and from Tampa with Ken sitting silently beside her, Wanda left alone. As payment for what was surely going to be nothing more than a wild-goose chase, she planned to treat herself to a real Cuban lunch in Ybor City.
She hadn’t been surprised to learn that Gloria Ann Madsen, born in Cargo Beach in 1928, had a long record of arrests, most recently for forgery. She had served part of that sentence, but as the oldest inmate at the correctional institution, she had been moved to a halfway house as soon as it was legally possible. That was where Wanda was heading now.
After the long drive and a staggering portion of paella, Wanda parked in front of a run-down house on a side street she’d spent a frustrating hour trying to find. The house was stucco, with a red tile roof, but anything that had added