“I didn’t realize you needed cheering up so badly. Am I not doing my job properly?”
“Oh, no, it’s just . . . uh, I’ve had a tough day.”
“Really, what’s wrong? And why am I only just hearing about all this now?”
Reeva hesitated. She had avoided mentioning her dad drama throughout the whole dinner, instead choosing to share funny anecdotes about her clients, making Nick laugh so much he’d almost choked on his tuna taco. He’d called her hilarious and said she was the most interesting woman he’d ever dated. Reeva hadn’t wanted him to switch those adjectives for unhinged and dramatic, so she hadn’t said anything. “Um . . . I just have some family stuff going on. But it’s a lot, and there’s no need to go into it with you, honestly. I mean, it’s intense.”
“Of course,” said Nick, leaning against her dove-gray cupboards (with gold handles; they matched the gold frames of the Vogue prints hanging on her walls), looking so perfectly at home in her flat that Reeva was starting to wonder how she’d ever enjoyed being there without him. “You don’t have to say anything at all. But I’m here if you want to.”
Reeva bit her lip. She was so aware of not wanting to fuck this up. Nick was the best guy she’d dated in a long time, even though he hardly ticked any of the boxes she’d been so obsessed with in her twenties. Like the fact that he was divorced. At forty-three, he was also nine years older than her. And his lifestyle—jetting around the world to manage famous singers—was not conducive to the calm family setup that Reeva had desperately craved ever since she’d been shuttled off to boarding school. But after four years of dating in her thirties, she was now aware that this stuff didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Nick came closest to hitting the Holy Quartet—the relationship checklist she’d invented with Lakshmi—out of any guy she’d been with since Rakesh. When she was with him, she felt (1) true desire, (2) genuine interest in him, (3) a fun lightness, and (4) the safety to be herself. Well, almost.
Reeva knew that the safety normally came with time, but it had been three months, and she was still scared to show Nick even 10 percent of her crazy. She knew she had to try and show him her authentic self by being more vulnerable with him—only then would she be able to see if he was right for her. Or at least, that was what a podcast on “Feeling Safe in Relationships After Childhoods Filled with Abandonment” had told her.
“Okay, well, um, my mum called me this morning from Mumbai to say my dad is dead,” said Reeva. “No, it’s fine, you don’t need to look so sad for me! I thought he’d already died. When I was five. But it turns out, nope, he only just died today. They’d kept him a secret from me and my sisters. And, yeah, so now I have to obey his last dying wish and go spend thirteen days at his house, grieving with my sisters. It’s one of the stipulations in his will, for his inheritance.” She paused. “Does that make sense?”
“Uh, wow.” Nick looked taken aback. “Yeah. That is a lot. God, I can’t believe your mum pretended he was dead, and . . . now he is. It’s so dramatic.”
“Welcome to my family,” said Reeva, suddenly aware that she didn’t feel as safe as she’d hoped she would. Was it her fault? His?
“So are you going to go to his house? And your mum, is she coming? To explain it all?”
Reeva snorted, then tried to cover it up with a cough. “Uh, no. She’s conveniently stuck in Mumbai on a film set, so she can’t come over. Her lawyers were the ones who properly explained the whole thing to me. I guess I have to go. My sisters won’t get the money unless I turn up.”
“Your mum’s on a Bollywood film set?”
Reeva flushed. She’d purposely evaded telling Nick about her mum. But now it was too late. “She mainly just sings playback. She only acts occasionally.”
“Wait.” Nick’s face lit up. “Your mum’s not . . . Saraswati Acharya?”
“You know of her?”
“Of her!” cried Nick. “She’s major! One of my artists wanted her on his backing track, but she was too busy.”
Reeva shrugged awkwardly. “That’s Mum.”
“That’s amazing! I can’t believe I didn’t realize until now—you look so similar! But you have different surnames?”
“She went back to her maiden name once my dad, well, didn’t die.”
“Isn’t she married to MJ Shah? How come you never mentioned it before?!”
“I . . . don’t really like to make a thing of it. But yes, they’re married.”
“Wow. She’s a total legend. You must be so proud of her.”
Reeva forced herself to smile. “Right.” This was why she hated talking about her mum—people always made so many assumptions about how she must feel about it all, when the truth was she wished she had a mum with a normal job. It was at times like this she felt the loss of not speaking to her sisters—they were the only ones who knew how she felt.
“Are you okay?” asked Nick. He took her hand and led her over to the oval glass table with its teal suede chairs. “Let’s sit a moment. This is all pretty big stuff. You must be so overwhelmed. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I found out that the dad I thought had died when I was a kid had been alive all this time.”
Reeva felt tears springing to her eyes. She blinked them away in alarm. She hadn’t cried once since her mum had called—she hadn’t even felt the need to—but hearing Nick repeat the facts to her made everything feel more real. And his obvious shock made Reeva realize the enormity of what had happened. She just hadn’t let herself recognize it until now.
She laughed in embarrassment as she ran her finger under her eyes. “Sorry. I guess it is a lot.”
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“Sorry,” said Reeva automatically. “God.” She put her head into her hands. It was all just too much. Growing up, all she’d ever wished was for her dad to still be alive. She couldn’t really remember him, and even though her mum didn’t speak particularly highly of him (“Oh, we had nothing in common; no idea why we ever thought marriage was a good idea”), Reeva had idealized this man she’d never really known. Every time her mum let her down, promising she’d read her a bedtime story and then blowing kisses and apologies at her as she went out to a last-minute party, or sending her PA to parents’ day because she was still on set, Reeva had fantasized about what life would be like if her dad were still alive. He would have read her stories, he would have turned up to parents’ day, and he definitely would have remembered she hated raisins.
And now, all these years later, she was finding out that he had been alive. He’d been living just two hours away, and no one had told her. She could have had a dad. But she’d been denied her biggest dream, and she had no idea why. Had he not wanted her? Did he have another family? No, the lawyers had told her he’d never remarried or had more kids. But then why hadn’t he come back to the kids he’d already had? Reeva’s lips trembled. She’d thought she’d already been dealt a lifetime’s worth of rejection from her mum and then Rakesh, but now she was being given a whole new dose: a dad who’d rejected her for twenty-nine years.