Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
The paramedics had cut open her dress, wiped away the smeared blood.
Jesus.
I’d seen those kinds of marks on countless television shows. She hadn’t just been stabbed. She’d been attacked with a mindless fury that meant one mark blended into the next. Narrow, like thin lips in her skin…except where they were clustered together, her beautiful body mangled and torn.
She’d made me an omelet this morning while wearing yellow pajama shorts and a white tank top, her hair piled on top of her head in a haphazard updo. Without shoes, she only reached the top of my breastbone, a petite woman with the kind of presence that could hold an entire stadium spellbound.
Her laugh as I muttered curses at her fancy coffee machine had become entwined with the smell of the omelets, and with the soft morning scent of her. “Tavish, my gorgeous man, my beloved, it’s a machine.” Her eyes dancing under a curl that had escaped her attempt to contain it. “Threatening to disassemble it won’t miraculously make it work!”
“Oh?” I’d said as the machine began to cheerfully create her favorite latte. “I rest my case. Robot; it’s a robot. Probably going to eat our brains in our sleep.”
Shaking her head, her smile creasing her cheeks, she’d said, “I had the oddest dream last night. About our old house in Fiji. I could see the mango tree from a window—and then I was trying to dig it up using a shovel.” A sudden pause. “Oh drat, I forgot to put spinach into your omelet like you wanted. I’ll sauté it as a side dish.”
Now the omelet as well as the spinach threatened to leave my stomach. Because my wife’s torso was a maze of stab wounds wet and red, the bruising around them barely begun.
I knelt down beside her, took her hand.
Pale, clammy, limp.
“—another survivor!”
The words made no sense, not when the house had blown up.
By the time I turned to look over my shoulder, one of the paramedics had picked up his gear and was racing over to join the fireman who was walking over with someone in his arms. Not from the house. From around the house.
Long dark hair, a sleeveless navy blue jumpsuit, both dripping wet.
Shumi.
Diya’s sister-in-law and best friend had done what I’d hoped Diya might have—jumped into the lake as the only safe option. But from the limpness of her in the fireman’s arms, I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not.
I should’ve gone to her, checked, but I couldn’t—wouldn’t—leave Diya. “How bad is it?” I asked the paramedic as he worked on my wife. “She’ll be all right, won’t she?”
The middle-aged man gave it to me straight. “Look, son, it’s serious. More than ten stab wounds from what I’ve seen so far. I can’t tell how deep they are, but they’re all in dangerous places. We have to get her to the hospital.”
A shadow fell over me.
“Hey, I got you your phone and wallet from the car.” It was the teenager…Joseph, that was it. Tall and lanky with hair that fell into his eyes and the beginnings of a peach fuzz beard. “I figured you might need it to, like, call people and grab stuff? Your passport was with your wallet, so I grabbed that, too.”
“Thanks, Joseph.” I stuffed the phone into my back jeans pocket, the slim leather wallet into a front one. The passport I shoved into my other back pocket.
Another ambulance screamed into the street just then, and there was no real choice—I went into the ambulance with Diya, while Shumi was placed in the other one. A second fire truck turned into the drive of the Prasad home even as the ambulance’s siren pierced the air, the peaceful lakeside now a chaos of people and vehicles.
Shutting it all out, I held my wife’s hand and brushed back her hair. “Don’t you dare let your light go out. Don’t you dare. Not now, not when we’ve come through the worst of it.”
To say that the Prasads hadn’t been pleased with our rapid-fire courtship and Vegas elopement was an understatement of magnitudes. Their treasured daughter, who’d only just turned twenty-four, had left for seven days in Los Angeles for a friend’s bachelorette celebrations—and returned six weeks later with a husband who was a total unknown to them.
Her family’s initial disapproval had dimmed Diya’s light, made it flicker in that dangerous way that kept me awake at night, but she’d refused to burn out under the pressure, refused to agree with their belief that she’d made a horrible mistake.
“It’ll be okay, Tavish,” she’d told me when I’d sat at the edge of our bed with my head in my hands, terrified their words would get to her, thrusting a wedge between us. “My family just needs time.” A kiss on my bare shoulder, her body pressed up to my back as she knelt behind me. “But they love me, and once they see how happy you make me, they’ll be your biggest fans.”