“By the way,” Zayan said, chewing the apple with his mouth open. Zayan wasn’t nearly as…polished as his brother. He was the hoodie-and-jeans sort of executive, instead of the suit-and-tie type. “I can’t believe what you did yesterday.”

Kamila’s eyes widened. Crap crap crap. It hadn’t occurred to her that Rohan might be the kiss-and-tell type. He certainly wasn’t seven years ago.

She tried to look nonchalant. “Oh, I—”

“Zayan, don’t tease Kamila. So what if she brought him throw pillows?”

“Hell, I’m not complaining,” Zayan said, laughing. “Someone has to try to breathe some life into my brother. He was even wearing a color this morning.”

Phew. But also, Rohan told them about the cushions she bought him?

“Kamila!” Dad called out. “I’m hungry. You should have seen the lunch they gave me in the hospital. They called it soup…but broth with two carrots isn’t soup. Is there any more of the bean stew you made? With some crackers. The ones the hospital gave me were salted…Can you imagine! I have high blood pressure!”

“Okay, Dad, relax. I got this…”

And Kamila didn’t have time to worry about Rohan, or anything else. She only needed to take care of Dad.

*  *  *

Kamila spent the weekend mostly on the couch with Dad, watching cooking shows and working with him to come up with a meal plan for the week. His mood was the same—almost too happy and enthusiastic about everything. While she was glad to see him in a good mood, the fact that it was chemically induced didn’t do much to put her at ease. Tomorrow, he could be back to how he was before. Or worse.

She heard from most of her friends at some point, checking in to see how Dad was doing. Asha, Nicole, Tim, Anil, and surprisingly, even a (very brief) phone call from Jana. Shelina had called about eight times after heading home Saturday night. But nothing at all from Rohan.

She did get an email from his assistant though—to her Emerald email address asking her to send them a list of the Emerald clients that HNS would be taking over temporarily. And Rohan called Dad to briefly check in and discuss the cases. But still. Rohan used to check in on Kamila when he knew Dad was in a bad way. Not this time.

Maybe she should contact him? She almost sent a text—even drafted a light and breezy message telling him about the new Malaysian noodle recipe she was planning to cook this week.

But she couldn’t pretend what had happened hadn’t happened, and she didn’t know how to talk about it. So, she did nothing. Which was so completely outside of her comfort zone she didn’t know how to feel about it. Thankfully, she was almost too busy with Dad to worry about it too much. Almost.

*  *  *