Chapter Five

It’s okay to admit you’re in pain. We can get you meds.” Rico looked more nervous than Yash had ever seen him look before a public appearance. Or maybe Yash was assigning emotions to Rico, since he couldn’t seem to manage any on his own.

“I don’t need meds.” Maybe it was part of the relentless numbness, but Yash had expected a bullet wound to hurt more.

He stared out at the crowd from behind the stage. The Orpheum was packed to capacity. Everyone was carrying a candle, flameless naturally. Wave upon wave of flickering electronic wicks lit up the darkened auditorium.

“Maybe it’s too soon. You’re looking a little green.” Rico followed Yash’s gaze to the too somber crowd. Yash didn’t think he had ever seen such a large audience be this quiet.

“I feel perfectly normal.” Physically. “That bullet barely made it inside me. It hardly even broke skin. The other one just about grazed my arm.” Someone started singing Imagine and the crowd started swaying with their candles raised up and hummed along. “What is the vigil for? What is all this sympathy for? I’m standing. And Abdul’s not dead either.”

“It’s a vigil against hate crimes, against the gun culture. It’s one of your biggest platform issues. It’s time to get people to see sense.”

“People haven’t seen sense through fifteen hundred school shootings. Now a politician gets shot at and you think it’s going to make a difference?” The NRA had poured another giant cash infusion into Cruz’s campaign the day of the shooting.

Rico threw him the look that everyone in his family had taken to tossing his way all the damn time. A look that told him they weren’t quite certain how much to push him, or even who he was anymore, really.

“It’s an opportunity. It’s not how you wanted to get here, but that shooter practically handed you this election.” Rico had grown up in Rio de Janeiro and lived in London for the past decade, and his accent tended to go all over the place with the enunciating and lilting when he was upset.

“That shooter, who you think has handed me the election, might have taken a little girl’s father from her before she was old enough to know him. She’ll have no memory of him if he dies. All she’ll know is that her father died because some damn politician made some damn fanatic angry enough to shoot at him.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.” Rico gave Yash one of his coach-before-a-game looks. “You did not cause this. But you can make something good come out of it.”

The man may be a recently retired soccer star, but Yash wasn’t a nervous rookie in need of a pep talk. “Of course I caused it. I don’t look like these people. I don’t pray like them. From the first time I announced that I might have hopes of doing this, of running this great state, I was warned this was going to happen.”

When the news of his candidacy first came out, someone had put a dead squirrel in his car with a note that said people who tried to step out of their lane ended up as roadkill. It was one of those letters that had been pasted together from magazine cuttings.

“Do you know how many threats I’ve received? How many creatively phrased messages telling me to go back to where I came from? More than I’ve bothered to count.”

“And you decided to fight them. To make sure that people stop seeing the color of our skin when they see us. To prove that elections should be won for what we believe and how hard we’re willing to work, not because of how we look or how relatable we are.”

Yash backed away from the wings, then spun around and returned to the green room, Rico close behind him. “What if that’s not possible? What if it was just hubris, me thinking I could do any of that? What if more people get hurt?” As a young boy Yash had exhausted everyone’s patience with his questions. There had been so much he wanted to know that it used to fill him up and make him feel like he would burst if he didn’t find out.

That wasn’t how he felt now. These weren’t questions. Even if he was phrasing them as such, they felt like answers. In fact, he knew for sure that none of what Rico had just said was possible. That knowledge felt so absolute inside him that he couldn’t imagine how he’d believed it until now.

Once, while hiking in Yosemite, he’d wandered off a trail and gotten lost. The disorientation had felt like this, like he hadn’t just lost his way, but like the path he’d been on had disappeared, like it had never existed in the first place.

Was it hot in here? He loosened his tie. A black one—Nisha had put it on him when she had picked him up this morning.

The black tie was a protest against the shooting. A statement of support for Abdul. Both he and Rico were wearing black bands around their arms. The sea of people filling the stadium were wearing black bands. Yash pulled off his tie. The breath in his lungs had grown thick and hot, fire trapped inside him building into a backdraft. He wiped his face against his sleeve. It came away damp. He was covered in sweat.

Someone called his name. It had to be Rico. But his vision wasn’t doing what vision was supposed to do.

“I can’t breathe.” That’s what he tried to say, but it wouldn’t come out. Or it probably did, because suddenly there were several people in the room. Nisha, Ashna, his mother. Naturally, everyone had insisted on being here for his first event after the shooting.

Finally Trisha hurried in. They were all dissolving around the place like an oil painting left out in a heat wave. Someone pushed him into a chair and shoved a paper bag in his face.

Great, he was hyperventilating into a paper bag. Like a nervous boy. Something sharply cold hit the back of his neck, jolting him. Someone was pressing ice against his neck.

“Yash, beta? It’s okay. We’re here.” Words his mother had always said to him anytime he needed support. Even if it was just her, she always said, “We’re here,” her attempt at reinforcing the support she was providing by multiplying it.

“What happened?” he asked, when he could finally speak. What the hell had that been? “Did I have a heart attack? Did the bullet move something that damaged my heart?”

“Your heart is fine,” Trisha said, “but we should get an EKG to make sure.” She was squatting in front of him and asked him to walk her through what he’d experienced.

He told her how it had felt like leaving his body or maybe like having his body leave him.

“I suspect you had a panic attack,” she said, pulling his eyelids apart and staring into his eyes.

Ashna was squatting next to Trisha, worry pinching her forehead. “That’s what it looked like. I had them for years.” She took his hand and stroked it. “You’re going to be okay. It just doesn’t feel that way right now.”

Damn straight. “I feel fine now,” he said, lying. Nothing felt fine. He couldn’t seem to remember what the hell fine felt like.

“Are you sure?” Nisha asked, far too gently. “Do you think you can go onstage? Those people have been waiting for hours to hear you speak.”

And there it was again. His heart started to thud in his chest cavity like a stampede of rogue elephants. His mouth felt like he had gulped down his tongue and left behind a vacuum he couldn’t swallow around. It wasn’t exactly emotions, but at least it was something.

“He can’t. We’re going to have to cancel,” Trisha said, staring into his eyes again.

“I’ll go speak to them,” Rico said, giving Yash’s good arm another squeeze. “You’re going to be okay, mate.”

“What will you tell them?” Yash asked.

Nisha’s phone beeped and she looked at it. “I think we have something we can give them. Abdul’s blood pressure is falling. It’s not looking good. We should head to the hospital.”

HAVING YOUR FAMILY talk about you like you weren’t in the room was never fun.

“My son have a panic attack? How is that even possible?” their father asked Trisha.

Why don’t you tell me how it’s possible, Dr. Raje?Yash wanted to say, but evidently His Royal Highness Shree Hari Raje, the patriarch, had completely taken over Dr. Shree Raje, the physician.

“He’s obviously in shock from the shooting, which isn’t surprising. He needs help.” Trisha tried to sound patient. Yash knew what she really wanted to do was tell Dad to stop being pushy. But no one spoke to their father that way.

“He’s leading in the polls. This is the miracle we’ve been waiting for,” HRH said as though it weren’t the single most abhorrent thing to say in this circumstance.

They were all gathered in Trisha’s office because there were too many of them to wait outside intensive care, where Abdul was struggling for his life.

If one more person said anything about the polls right now Yash was going to—ah, forget it, he did scream. For the first time in his life he raised his voice while speaking to his parents. “He might die!”

Yelling in a hospital, even though it was just barely yelling, was bad form. Yash knew that. Which was why he swallowed and lowered his voice. The family, who had turned to him as one, gaped at him.

“A man might die. A father, a husband. That is not a miracle. That’s a travesty,” Yash said in a voice that took all his strength to keep down.

“We know, beta,” his mother said, stroking his arm and giving HRH a placating look, as though it were Yash and not HRH who had just said something completely despicable.

They had all rushed to the hospital. All hands on deck. That was the Rajes. The room closed in around Yash. All he wanted was to be alone. Just for a moment. Yash had never felt suffocated by them before. He needed to breathe. Could everyone let him breathe for just one moment?

“That’s not what your father meant.” It wasn’t surprising that Mom was supporting Dad. Usually Yash appreciated the devotion between his parents despite their vastly different personalities.

“Mina kaki.” Ashna wrapped an arm around Ma and moved her away from Yash. “Trisha is right. Yash needs help.” Ma saw something in Ashna’s face, because she waited for her to finish. Even HRH watched her, his face softening for the first time.

“You know I started having panic attacks after Baba died.” Ashna’s father, Yash’s uncle, had shot himself when Ashna was eighteen, and she was the one who had found him, minutes after he’d done it.

Ashna had spent the past ten years buried in guilt and trying to revive her father’s restaurant. There was something in the way she looked up at Yash that hooked into him and told him what she had to say was important. “I was only able to work through my panic attacks because I knew what they were and how to get through them. You have to get help.”

“Ashna’s right. He needs therapy,” Trisha said with all her directness.

“That would be all well and dandy if it didn’t involve the therapist knowing that he’s having panic attacks. No one is going to vote for someone who’s actively losing control of himself.” No one but HRH could say that without a bit of hesitation a week after his child had been shot.

Yash reminded himself that he loved his father and that his father had done everything in his power to give Yash the best possible life any human being could have.

“Yes, but his health is more important than the election.” Trisha again. She’d been Dad’s pet when they were young and she seemed to have the easiest time going up against him.

“His health is fine. He has a lifetime to take care of his health. The election is in a matter of months. He can’t lose this momentum.” Dad doubled down.

“Yes, but if he has a nervous breakdown, he’s going to lose more than momentum, he’s going to lose the election.” Nisha joined in. “The public sympathy is high enough right now that we have some time. If we don’t use that and take care of this now, and he has an episode in public, we’re throwing the election away.”

HRH stood surrounded by two daughters and a niece who was as much his daughter as the rest, the wall of sisters shooting daggers at him like superheroes facing off a supervillain.

“Okay, warriors, stand down,” Yash said. “This is my election and my life. You can all stop acting like I’m some sort of robot you all get to control.”

The wall of sisters turned their eye daggers on him and he rolled his eyes. “I had one panic attack. One. I’m not going to have a nervous breakdown.”

“And where did you get your medical degree from?” Trisha, naturally.

Nisha held her hand out to him. “Well, then, let’s go. You have another event scheduled for today, at San Jose State. If we leave now we can make it there. Rico’s told them we’re canceling your appearance, but Rico is still speaking, as are other supporters. I’m sure everyone will be happy to see you.”

His heart started to race and, damn it, sweat broke out across his forehead.

“That’s what I thought,” Nisha said, smug as ever. “You need to see someone.” She turned to HRH. “Dad, surely you have psychiatrist friends you can trust. Plus there’s doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“There’s no one I trust enough so close to the election. This cannot slip out. The media is far too hungry and the other side is spending an obscene amount of money digging through every single thing they can get their hands on,” HRH said.

In this Yash agreed with him.

“If I go to a psychiatrist, I’m going to be honest with the public and announce it. I’m not keeping something like that secret.”

HRH looked at him like he had lost his mind. Again, he wasn’t wrong. It definitely felt like he had lost something.

“Actually,” Ashna said, “going to a psychiatrist didn’t help me that much. The person who really helped me was . . . well . . . you all know India Dashwood, right?”

Yash fell back in his chair and pretended it was exactly what he’d intended. In the midst of all his numbness, a jolt of discomfort punched deep inside him. A feeling. His first since the shooting.

“Isn’t she your yoga instructor?” Ma said to Ashna. “China’s sister?”

“Actually, she’s a trained yoga therapist and one of Northern California’s foremost stress management coaches,” Trisha said.

“When I first got back from Paris and was struggling, India was the one who helped me out. She taught me everything I know about meditation and grounding myself and working through episodes. This is very much in her wheelhouse,” Ashna said.

“I’m not having episodes,” Yash said, just as Dad said, “He’s not having episodes.” Saying it together like that seconds after he’d had an episode did not help their case at all, and the wall of sisters made sure he knew it with their glares.

“There is no point skirting the truth.” Ma fixed her son and husband with the master glare that his sisters had trained from, then turned to Ashna. “She did help you, didn’t she?”

Ashna nodded. “I wouldn’t have made it without her.”

Ma threw a look from Ashna to Nisha to Trisha. “And you girls have been friends for many years now. You think we can trust her?”

“I’d trust her with my life,” Trisha and Ashna said together, because suddenly his life was a theater production.

“She was with me at Berkeley and she punched Rick Nugen in the nose when he called me . . . well, he used a word I’m not repeating, but it was offensive to people with developmental challenges,” Nisha said.

Despite himself, Yash wanted to smile. Of course India had done that.

“Haven’t I met her?” Ma said. “Wasn’t she at Nisha and Neel’s wedding?”

“Yes, I remember she wore that lovely lilac ghaghra.” Nisha remembered every single thing anyone had ever worn in their entire life. How she had any space left in her brain after storing the entire world’s fashion choices, Yash had no idea. Who remembered what someone had worn ten years ago?

Hypocrite.

He pushed away a vision of India in what he’d always thought of as not quite blue and not quite pink. So the color had a name. Lilac.

India Dashwood in that ghaghra was probably the only thing Yash remembered about Nisha and Neel’s wedding. A memory too long past, water under the bridge. Or not. Because no way would she give him the time of day. Not after the way he’d behaved.

Another faint brush of feeling rolled through him. Was he feeling things again? A wave of relief crashed on hope so intense, he stood and started pacing, trying to hold on to it. Just as quickly as he had felt it, it was gone and he was cold again. Filled with nothing again.

It was getting a bit annoying, all of this nothing filling him.

“How do you remember the color of her ghaghra?” Trisha asked, blinking at Nisha.

“Hello! It’s Nisha. She remembers what everyone wore to her wedding, including all the aunties,” Ashna said.

Their father cleared his throat.

“You can all relax. I do not need to see a therapist. I most certainly do not need to see some woo-woo yoga self-help life-coach guru person who manufactures incense in the middle of Palo Alto and travels around the world lecturing people about how to breathe.”

The attention of the room shifted to him like a spotlight. Every brow rose. The silence was so intense he could hear himself breathing. Not in the correct way, no doubt, but who needed training on how to breathe? What kind of scam was that?

“I only know those things about her because I’ve heard Ashna mention them so many times.” Actually, he knew because he’d read about India in the Daily Post last month. It was his job to read the local papers.

Ashna frowned at him. She had never mentioned India around him until now and her narrowed eyes told him exactly how well she knew this. But she kept her mouth shut. Which meant Yash was in more trouble than if she’d said something.

“Then you’ll agree that I know what I’m talking about. It won’t hurt to meet her once,” Ashna said. Was that a threat in her eyes?

He had nothing to be afraid of. Knowing what a family friend did with her life was not a crime. Especially for an information junkie like him. Sure, he usually focused on things like the unemployment rate or global health care statistics, but India Dashwood’s work was unique enough to stick in anyone’s head. Plus, she’d ended up doing exactly what she’d dreamed of doing, what she’d talked so excitedly about that night.

“There are behavioral therapies that can help you deal with what you’re going through. A set of steps that can walk you out of your moment of panic,” Ashna said.

“Clearly you know what works. Can’t you just walk me through it?” Yes, that was the answer. Ashna could help him.

She squeezed his arm. “What works for me may not work for you. Our cases are completely different, and I’m not qualified to know what will work for you. India is.”

Avoiding going out into crowds and speaking to voters was not an option. Unless he wanted to walk away from the race and let not just the people in this room but all his supporters down.

His family watched him, worry etched into their faces.

They’d had the scare of their lives when he got shot. If it happened to any one of them, if he thought even for a moment that he might lose any one of them, he didn’t know how he would handle it.

His family had dreamed of him winning this election for as long as he could remember. Now they could almost touch the dream. Unless he messed it up.

Ashna sat down next to him and laid her head on his shoulder, a very Ashna gesture. She was the gentlest of them, the most empathetic. Just having her hold you made the world a better place. But today, nothing. Until she’d mentioned India.

“Chances are it’s just shock and it won’t last long,” Trisha said.

“But you can’t take the risk of having a public panic attack months before the election,” Nisha added. “Not when your chances of winning are the best they’ve ever been. Think about what this means. All that we’ve put into this campaign. It’s going to pay off.”

Nisha had spent more days and nights than he could count working on his campaigns, prepping for interviews and debates, strategizing responses to mudslinging in the press. She’d been tireless. This time she was doing it pregnant. With swollen feet and needing to take breaks to throw up.

“Go see her once. If it doesn’t help, you don’t have to go back,” Ma said.

“Don’t forget why you’re running. You can’t do any of those things if you don’t win,” Dad said, but Yash could no longer remember what his reasons for running were or why he had even decided to go into politics. “Your sisters might be right. Going to see this girl makes sense. So long as we can trust her.”

“We can trust her,” Yash said before he knew he was saying it. Then, because he wasn’t interested in more probing looks, he added, “I mean, if Trisha, Nisha, and Ashna trust her, we should too.” Then, without waiting for a response, he excused himself and left Trisha’s office.

Nisha followed him out. Of course she did. “You got a minute?” she called after him, and he turned to her.

He did not like what he saw in her face. “I already said I’ll see India. You don’t expect me to rush off there right this minute.”

“You’re right. This minute I need you for something else.”

“Fine, hit me.”

“I need you to meet your new bodyguard.”

Over his dead body. “What the hell, Nisha! We talked about this.”

He started walking and slammed his hand into the elevator button. When had his family completely stopped paying any heed to his wishes?

Nisha waddled after him into the elevator, face as patient as a saint’s.

“I told you I don’t want to talk about a new bodyguard, and I meant it,” he said as the elevator slid shut. “At least wait until I’m campaigning again.” Until Abdul wakes up.

“And I told you that not doing this right now is not an option, and I meant it.”

They stood there staring each other down. “Are you questioning my professional opinion as your campaign manager?”

“As my campaign manager you’re supposed to work for me, which, you know, involves taking my wishes into consideration. At least every once in a while. You’re basically freaking out as my sister, and I’m telling you that I will be fine. I don’t need security to walk from my car to buildings.”

She took a step closer to him, but her pregnant belly kept her from actually getting close enough to breathe down his neck. “You will be fine?” Her voice did a high-pitched wobbly thing that was all sister and zero campaign manager. “You’re not a superhero. This is not you going to prom by yourself so you could dance with all the girls who have no one else to dance with. Get over yourself. You have no way of knowing that you will be fine.”

“So you think someone is going to shoot at me twice in one campaign cycle?”

Sticking out her hand, she started counting off on her fingers. “Reagan, Johnson, Nixon, Carter. They’ve all had over fifty assassination attempts. Some over a hundred!”

His sisters were the earth’s most annoying creatures. “Those are all presidents. And they all survived the attempts.”

“William Goebel, gubernatorial candidate. George Wallace, gubernatorial candidate.”

“You’re in the wrong century.”

“And you’re underestimating the power of racial hatred,” she snapped.

“Bill Richardson, Deval Patrick, Bobby Jindal, David Paterson, Susana Martinez, Michelle Grisham—”

“And listing all the minority governors from this century proves what?” she snapped again.

“It proves that we can run for elections without ending up dead.”

The elevator stopped and he waited for her to get out. “California’s economy is larger than almost every nation’s in the world,” she said, heading off across the lobby.

“No way, really? Is that on Wikipedia?”

It was a miracle she did not wring his neck. “Really? Being a patronizing prick, that’s your response, because you have nothing intelligent to come back with? I haven’t lost you a single election in ten years. I’d like you to show me some respect.”

“And I’m the one who won those elections. I’d like you to show some respect for what I want.”

With a sigh, she grabbed his arm. “Yashu, think about this. It’s three months to the election. And we’re going to have to do this with a ground game, door-to-door, like we’ve won the rest. There’s no way you’re doing that without security. Not after what just happened.”

“If someone is going to shoot me again, I’d rather not have anyone take another bullet for me.”

Her eyes filled with sympathy. “Oh, Yash.” Her thumb stroked his arm.

“How can you not understand this?” Of all his siblings, Nisha and he were usually on the same page. She would, in fact, tell anyone who’d listen that she knew what Yash was thinking better than he himself did. It wasn’t untrue, and was terrifying as hell.

“I do understand it.” Her voice was entirely nonconfrontational now. “I just want you to meet this person. Just say hello. She’s here. Don’t waste her time, at least.”

That stopped him in his tracks, as Nisha had known it would. She was such a sneak.

“You found me a female bodyguard? And you thought that would somehow make the job of bullying me into it easier?”

She had the gall to grin. “Bingo. Wait here while I text her. We’ve made her wait long enough.”

He sank into a couch off in a private corner of the hospital waiting area. “I really pity poor Neel, you know that?” he said with all the spitefulness of a sibling who’d lost an argument.

Her grin widened, a damn whoop of victory if he’d ever seen one. “You’re so easy.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, deploying one of her own favorite strategies for getting her way. “You know Ma loves me more than you, right?”

“Sorry, buddy, I’m the favorite by miles. Substantiate your claim by getting her to admit it, or shut up.” With that she grinned widely at the woman approaching them with long, powerful strides.

Brandy Hennessy (yes, that was her name) was not what Yash had expected. Although he couldn’t say what it was he had expected. She had cherry-red hair cut into short spikes and biceps that pushed into the sleeves of her muscle shirt. If you wanted your security detail to be visible, she was your person.

“Isn’t it your job to disappear in a crowd?” Yash said as soon as Nisha had introduced them, being deliberately and uncharacteristically ornery.

“I don’t believe that is part of the job description. In fact, I would say warning people off is the job description, sir.”

“Okay, let’s cut to the chase. There is only one condition on which I would hire you. If there is a shooting I need your assurance that you will not jump in front of any flying bullets.”

Nisha knew better than to interrupt, but she threw him a look that would have maimed a man who hadn’t dealt with her his entire life.

Ms. Hennessy met his stubborn gaze, stood, and shook his hand. “Well, it was nice meeting you, Mr. Raje. I hope you find someone who does the job the way you want them to.” With that, she turned and strode away.

Nisha ran after her. “Brandy, listen, could you hold up a minute?” Before Nisha disappeared out the giant glass doors, she threw Yash the nastiest glare.

With a deep, deep sigh, Yash followed the two women out. Both of whom were moving a little too fast. And Nisha was pregnant.

Fortunately, Brandy noticed that Nisha was chasing her down and turned. Good, because the woman gave off a Terminator vibe, one that said she could outrun them if they were driving cars.

“I’m sorry,” Yash said, catching up. “Can we come up with a compromise?”

“A compromise?” Brandy said, as though it were a word Yash had just made up out of thin air.

“Yes, in case of an assassination attempt, could you just shout me a warning or something? Oh, and could you wear a bulletproof body suit—head-to-toe?”

Not a single muscle on her face moved. She looked as though the question were too far beneath her dignity to address.

Yash raised his brows in a do-we-have-a-deal? gesture.

“No.” Just that. A single word.

“No to one or both?” he said, and tried to ignore the fact that Nisha looked like she was going to kick his shins, even as she texted away furiously on her phone. What was she up to now?

“Both.” Another single-word answer from Brandy. He could work with this woman. Especially if she trained everyone else in his life in the skill.

“Have you ever been shot?” he asked, determined to not sound like a scared little boy.

“I’ve never been hit by a bullet.”

“So you’ve been shot at?”

“The person under my protection has been shot at.” The woman seemed to be entirely unfamiliar with these things called emotions. In other words, she was Yash’s inner world right now.

“What did you do?”

“I pushed him to the ground and the bullet missed.” Still no emotion. None at all.

“How many times has this happened?”

It took her a few moments, during which her face blanked out even more. She was actually counting the number of times in her head. “Four.”

“Why do you do this job?”

“Someone has to do it and I can do it better than most.”

Nisha looked like a cat who had swallowed a giant tub of cream.

Yash threw his sister a look that said, Don’t you dare say one single word, before turning to Brandy again. “You can start tomorrow.”

He was about to leave, glad to be done with this, when Nisha spoke. “Actually she’s starting today.” She turned to Brandy. “Yash needs to go see someone in Palo Alto today. Now, as a matter of fact.”

Yash didn’t even bother to glare at Nisha. How had she and Ashna managed to even get through to India so fast? “I’d like to do that by myself. Thank you.”

“So you’re going to hire someone else for this job, then?” Brandy said.

God, he hated his life.

“No, he won’t,” Nisha said before he groaned out loud. “You’ll go with him. Your first assignment.” As if he didn’t know that Nisha had already hired Brandy before bringing her here.

Yash sighed. “I didn’t say I was going to go see India today.”

“You need to be back on the campaign trail. You don’t have the luxury of waiting until tomorrow.” Nisha no longer sounded smug, just worried. “Brandy and you can wait in the car. I just texted Ashna. She’s on her way down, she’ll take you over to India’s.”

Nisha and everyone he knew had spent a lifetime working to make his goals a reality. It was time for him to stop being a baby.

“Fine.” They walked in silence to his car.

He hadn’t seen India Dashwood in ten years, and now he was going to have an audience when he did see her.

At least there was zero chance that she would want to work with him. Which meant he had to show up, have her tell him she didn’t have time for him, and then . . . and then what, he didn’t know.

For the first time in his life, when he looked into the future, he hit a wall. A wall that loomed as dark and endless as the numbness inside him. For the first time in his life, he had a problem and no idea how to fix it.

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