Kamila put her hands on her hips. “It wasn’t my fault. I’m pretty sure Mercury is in retrograde or something. It would explain a lot about my day. I was following the recipe and suddenly the sweet potatoes were on fire.”

“The sweet potatoes were in the toaster?”

She’d already put up with Rohan’s incredulous rant about why she’d put vegetables in the toaster—she didn’t need to hear it from her best friend. “Asha, it was sweet potato toast—how else was I supposed to toast them?”

Asha shook her head, clearly straining not to laugh, so Kamila went back to photographing the dogs.

“You should have at least kept an eye on them in the toaster,” Asha said.

“I know. I was distracted. I’d just heard Jana Suleiman is coming back to town.”

Kamila was fully aware that pettiness wasn’t an attractive character trait, so she’d kept her father’s best friend’s daughter’s status as her secret nemesis to herself. Asha had only met Jana a few times and barely knew her.

“Oh. It’ll be great to have your old friend back in the neighborhood.”

Kamila shrugged. Old friend? Hardly. Not when Jana had always been smug about clearly being a better daughter to her parents than Kamila was. But there was more to Kamila’s dislike of Jana. When Kamila and Jana were both in their last year of high school, the nosy aunties in their circle told Kamila’s parents that they saw Kamila in a parked car outside Jana’s house with the neighborhood bad boy, Bronx Bennet, when she was supposed to be at school. That was bad, because Kamila had been forbidden to see Bronx since the last time she’d been caught in a parked car with him.

But the thing was, even though Kamila had skipped school that day, and even though she and Bronx had still been secretly hooking up, she hadn’t actually been with him that day. Kamila had spent the whole day at the mall. But of course, Kamila’s mother hadn’t believed her.

Mom used to throw these massive parties back then…and she’d hosted a huge one for Shelina a few years earlier for her high school graduation. Kamila didn’t really want a graduation party, but Dad (bless him) insisted that Kamila deserved a party, too. But after the Bronx-in-the-backseat accusation, Mom deleted Kamila from her party. Deleted Kamila, not canceled the party, because she’d already hired the caterer and rented a hall. She proclaimed the celebration was now in honor of Jana’s fancy scholarships. When Kamila confronted Bronx about the incident, he told her it had been Jana in the car with him. Jana had known Kamila had lost her graduation party because of this accusation, and she hadn’t come forward to admit it was really her steaming up Bronx’s old Toyota’s windows.