‘Whoa. Take it easy, Business Barbie. The tournament starts in four days, so there’s time. It’ll take me a day or two to get my car serviced and then—’

‘Service-shmervice. Let’s leave now. I’m coming over. Okay, bye.’

‘Wait, what? Hello? Gehna?’

But she wasn’t there any more. Eram stared at the screen of his phone, looking for a clue to help him figure out whether or not she had been joking. He hoped she had been. Eram himself almost never acted on impulse alone; like the Baron said, in poker and in life, do a cost-benefit comparison first. Calculate the odds of success versus failure. Always do a SWOT analysis before embarking on a particular course of action. Evaluate its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

The course of action Gehna had suggested seemed highly weak and threatening to Eram.

What does she mean ‘leave now’? I can’t leave now. There’s shit to be done, plans to be made, stuff to be packed. On a trip like this, preparation is key. If this is her idea of a joke, fine, ha ha. If not, I’ll just tell her politely but firmly that it can’t be done.

It was 6 p.m. Gehna arrived at 7 p.m. Ten minutes after that, Eram was reluctantly packing a bag. Gehna could hear him muttering from her perch on his desk.

‘You’re grumbling,’ she pointed out.

Eram was trying to fold his lucky hoodie in a way that left the least number of creases. He paused in the third attempt and glowered at Gehna. ‘Yeah, well, this was going to be the most important trip of my life and now you’ve gone and turned all my plans inside out, so, yeah, I think I’m entitled to grumble a bit.’

‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘Firstly, this is never the most important trip of your life. It’s just a card game. There’ll be lots of trips like your honeymoon or . . .’ Gehna stopped when she saw Eram’s face. ‘I didn’t mean that. I take it back.’

‘I don’t think you can just take it back.’

‘Sure I can. I just did.’

‘This card game is what I’ve been training for, for three years. This card game is going to get your business off the ground. I think it’s pretty damn important. But you clearly don’t, so maybe you shouldn’t come.’

Gehna could see that he was really upset, and that he needed to hear something from her. But what? The truth? There were so many truths that she didn’t know where to start. If she stayed back, she would have to face both sets of her grandparents at the birthday lunch tomorrow, and that would mean trouble. One of her nosy grandmothers would pinch her cheek and tell her she had put on some weight and Gehna, irritated, would say something like yes that’s what having a little human growing inside your uterus does to you and then everyone would have the mega freak-out of the century. She couldn’t handle it.