asked as Lily walked around from the coffee machine. “I can carry it for you.”
Maybe it was a genuine offer and maybe she wanted longer to dig at my soul, but I smiled my best sociopath smile, charming and warm with nothing behind it, and said, “Lily’s put it in an insulated go-cup for me. It’ll be a bit awkward, but I should be fine not spilling it.” I shifted my attention to Lily. “Thanks for that.”
“It’s not a problem.” She handed over the coffee, a look in her brown eyes that was difficult to read—but that was no surprise. Lily, I’d learned, had a way of opening herself up while keeping herself shuttered at the same time.
The day she’d taken my virginity, she’d been a sensual siren, but afterward, her expression had hardened, holding an edge as harsh on the tongue as the bitter melon my father’s second wife so loved.
8
I thought of Lily’s postcoital expression at times, had often wondered if I’d been a pawn in a much bigger game. Maybe my mother had been right—but the one thing I’d never been able to square away was why Lily would’ve slept with the school-aged son if she was involved with the powerful CEO father.
Leaving that question for another time, I walked out the door—trim and tanned Lexi helpfully held it open for me. Her surgically plump lips were downturned, her thick brown hair pulled off her face in a ponytail. “I’m sorry, Aarav. Your mum was always nice to us when we saw her on our walks.”
“She enjoyed talking to you.” I remembered how the three of them had laughed together more than once.
“They remind me of the gossips from back home in India,” she’d said to me with a smile. “I never thought I’d miss those biddies.”
As I went through the door on the ghostly echo of my mother’s laughter, I had the sudden thought that I’d be better off picking up a cane. It’d give me the full use of one arm while also offering my leg some support.
I paused just beyond the Cul-de-Sac gates to take a sip of the coffee. Only as it went down, burning all the while, did I realize I was frozen. Numb.
“Aarav!”
Diana, dark hair shiny and tumbled with a few curls where it hit the middle of her back, her body clad in cuffed jeans and a fine pink cashmere sweater. Whether walking the dog or watering the lushly blooming plants in her garden, Diana was never less than perfectly put together in a neat and elegant way that befit the wife of one of the country’s best surgeons.
She also baked cookies with her children and went to every school event. Any time I’d turned up at her house as a kid, she’d smiled and asked me to grab a seat, then given me milk and cookies. I’d watched her since the day she and Calvin moved in to the Cul-de-Sac. She’d been a luminous young bride, had turned into a lovely young mother.
My first crush.
Today, she hugged her arms around herself as she stood on the other side of the drive, her creamy skin flushed from the cold. A small French bulldog sat panting at her feet. Glossy black, Charlie was old, had been around when my mother disappeared.
At Diana’s side stood Calvin, tall and lean. Must’ve been one of his rare days off. Born of immigrant Chinese parents he’d lost in a traumatic incident in his youth, Dr. Calvin Liu was the clean-cut high-achieving son of Asian parents’ dreams. I, meanwhile, was the opposite. Unlike Diana, Calvin wore running gear. Probably heading out to one of the few open trails.
It had been Calvin who’d partnered with me while I was training for that half-marathon ten years ago. I’d never completed it, though Calvin had urged me to keep going, telling me that it might help take my mind off my mother’s sudden absence from my life.
Though I was in no mood to talk, I shifted direction to cross the drive. I respected Calvin, and Diana was one of the few people in the Cul-de-Sac whom I genuinely liked. Not because she’d been my mother’s best friend, but because she hadn’t gossiped about her in the aftermath of her disappearance. She’d also made the time to find a confused sixteen-year-old and tell him that the one thing on which Nina had never wavered was her love for her son.
“She’ll come back for you,” Diana had promised. “I know she