“I’m so glad you’ve decided to do it.” Nisha rubbed her belly. She’d had to slow down her work. With her history of miscarriages, she was being cautious. It had to be hard given that she ran Yash’s campaign and the election was less than a year away, with the California primary nipping at their heels.
“Have you found someone to help you with the campaign yet?” Ashna asked, only partially deflecting. She wished she could help, but strategy and politics were alien to her. Asking people why they wouldn’t vote for the best man they would ever meet in their pathetic lives was not a workable approach.
Nisha let out a long-suffering sigh and popped one of their grandmother’s ladoos into her mouth. “The last guy who seemed promising tried to ‘handle’ Yash. He also tried to tell him that his policies were too complex for the simpleminded voter. You can imagine how that went.”
Yash’s theory was that people rose to the levels you expected of them. Ashna wasn’t sure that was true; she was certain it wasn’t how recent political campaigns had worked. But Yash knew what he was doing, and he would only do things the way he believed they should be done, not in ways that would get him elected.
That was why she had the urge to shake anyone who didn’t get him. Definitely a terrible strategy.
“We’ll know when the right person comes along. Yash knows what he’s looking for,” Mina Kaki said with the kind of certainty that dissipated every iota of doubt in Ashna’s mind about the existence of such a paragon who combined strategic wizardry, ideological integrity, and the family’s nonnegotiable requirement: trustworthiness.
“Until then, I can totally handle it,” Nisha said, part bravado, part desperation. “So long as I don’t have to travel.”
“Only, you can’t run a gubernatorial campaign without running from district to district at the drop of a hat.” This from Esha. Such an uncharacteristic thing for their ethereal cousin to say that they all burst into laughter.
“What?” Esha said, her always peaceful face quirking with humor. “It’s time for Nisha to loosen the reins.” She patted Nisha’s hand when Nisha pouted. “Don’t worry. The person you’re waiting for is almost here.”
There, that was much more like Esha. All would have been well with the universe had Esha not reached over and patted Ashna’s hand too, as though the words were also meant for Ashna.
Chapter Five
As a child, Rico had always had a hard time with waiting. Patience had not been his best virtue. As an adult, he prided himself on his composure. He’d worked hard to harness his restlessness, focus it, and set an example of decency and grace on and off the pitch—a tribute to his father, whose sportsmanship was just as legendary as his football moves. Right now, however, waiting to get his cast off was making Rico so restless that he had visualized himself ripping it off with his bare hands more than a few times.
It had been just a couple of days since he’d been back in London, but waiting another day for it to come off felt like pure torture. If he didn’t stop pacing (okay, hobbling) around his flat, he was going to cut a trail in the floor. Kneading the knot at the nape of his neck, he made his way onto the balcony. Usually, the perfectly synchronous white facades of Kensington calmed him. Today, the sun was too bright, a complaint another Londoner might smack him upside the head for. He went back inside and held down the button that pulled the shades. They descended far too slowly.
My impatient baby. He heard his mother’s voice in his head.
His mãe had loved to tell stories of how Rico gobbled down all the brigadeiro before she could get the condensed milk truffles molded into balls.
Then a time had come when his impatience had dissipated in the blink of an eye. Everything had dissipated when his mãe and pai left home one evening to go to the movies and never came back. Well, they had come back, but in closed coffins because the car crash hadn’t left much of them. Everything had stopped that day and never quite started up again.
Rico had entered a fog that felt like glue, viscous and sticky around him. One moment he’d been in a hurry to rush from thing to thing—football, friends, school—then the next moment it had all vanished. There had been nowhere to go, nothing he needed to get to. That’s how it had stayed as he moved, seemingly in slow motion, from Rio de Janeiro to his mãe’s sister’s house in California. She had been his only living relative. At least the only living relative who acknowledged him. His father’s family had never acknowledged his mãe and him.
His pai had met his mãe in England while playing for Man U. He had asked her to go to Rio with him after he retired, and she had. He had asked her to keep their relationship quiet, and she had. If the fact that he never left his wife bothered her, she never showed it. She had once told Rico that she would do anything his pai asked of her. Because that’s what love meant.
At fifteen Rico had still needed a legal guardian, and that meant leaving his home and moving to California. Not that he cared where he moved. His ability to care about anything at all had also vanished.
That’s how it had stayed until he’d stopped a ball from hitting a girl on the head. Then everything had changed again. Almost everything. His impatience, his burning need to get to the next thing, hadn’t come back. Not until he made his way to England and found football again.
Being dumped by someone you believed to be the love of your life because her family thought you were worthless had a way of shaking you out of the thickest stupor. Over the past decade, Rico had left that heartbroken boy so far behind that he barely recognized him in his own memories. At least, that’s what he had believed until Zee’s bachelor party. Apparently his young self was more tenacious than Rico gave him credit for.
Dropping onto the couch, he turned on his laptop. Out of habit he scanned the tabloids to make sure there were no fires to put out. Things had gotten batshit crazy with the guys at the bachelor party. Journalists had caught wind of it, and some employees from the venue had leaked information. Rico had spent all day yesterday negotiating with media outlets, releasing curated pictures of the party and throwing in videos and sound bites from Zee and Tanya about their wedding to keep the illegally taken pictures out. Information was power, and controlling how you disseminated it was the difference between disaster and adulation.
Being the public face of his team for years meant Rico could divert scandal in his sleep. He reminded himself that it wasn’t his job anymore. That meant the team was going to have to find another face. But hell if he was going to let the tabloids make a mockery out of his best mate’s wedding.
After making sure that the paps had kept their end of the bargain, Rico skimmed the news. In America, the California primary race was gathering steam. Yash Raje’s name caught his eye. The candidate’s speech at the last Democratic convention was possibly the most exciting thing Rico had heard in politics in decades. He inhaled the piece about how the candidate had used a wheelchair for a few years as a teen.
Rico had to laugh. Now that he had let the portal to his younger self open, everything seemed to lead right back there. Ashna had rarely talked about her family, but her cousin’s accident had still been fresh back then and Rico remembered her telling him about how the doctors had declared that Yash would never walk again and how he had refused to believe them.