Despite the flood of emotions she felt, there were no tears to cry. She couldn’t let them fall, being so lucky compared to all of them. To cry would be to kick them twice. She was not deaf to the spring that had offered a second chance for her without offering one for the rest of them.

She wanted them so much to be happy. She wanted the wolf inside Wolf to stop its howling. She wanted Anthony and Luke to each find a woman to love again. She wanted Robert’s kindness repaid. She wanted Mike to hear the childish trumpet of Aston’s voice playing in his own backyard. She wanted to see Taylor’s face on the billboards littering the city. She wanted to see EJ clean and sober. She wanted a man to walk into Ciarra’s life and quiet the bonfire within her that continued to burn up everything and everyone in her life.

Aria wanted to celebrate the luck of her life, but the festival of it could not compete with the sorrow that she felt for all of them. Despite the hope she tried to hold for them, she knew that the odds were stacked against people like her and people like them. She knew that so many of the wishes she had for them were like waves that would never break against the shore.

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 32

Though she didn’t want to completely ignore it, Aria hated her birthday. She didn’t want to plan something special to do for herself any more than she wanted someone else to. There was always this pressure to do something fun and to be happy on her birthday when no amount of pressure could change the conditions that made her unhappy year after year.

Omkar would have been upset if he’d known that Aria intentionally hadn’t told him that her birthday was today. He would have been less upset with her than he would have been with himself for not already knowing. Aria had been staying with the Agarwals for a little over a week and helping Omkar with customers in the store during his shifts there. Despite Jarminder’s constant urge to feed her, Aria had not wanted to feel in debt to her generosity, and so she had made an excuse to leave the house every day to preoccupy herself and to take advantage of meal programs around the city.

Aria had been to the church near the store nearly every day for the past week. On this day, she found herself there again, standing in line and waiting for Imani to hand her a sandwich. “Hey girl, how you be today?” Imani asked her before she was done serving the two men standing in front of her.