Then Baba’s executive chef and Aseem had absconded with money embezzled from the restaurant over the two years she was in Paris. Ashna had come home to find Curried Dreams stripped dry, its glory gone. Her uncle and aunt wanted to press charges, but the scandal would make the suicide public. No one wanted to open up those wounds, least of all Ashna.

Her first day back at Curried Dreams, she had been filled with resolve, if not hope, that she would turn things around. Everything she’d learned in Paris had been bursting from her fingers.

Then she had tried to make a curried coq au vin.

The panic attack was so severe, she passed out from it. A horrible black gunk had choked her lungs. Congealed blood had filled her nose. The boom of a bullet had deafened her. Over and over and over again, making her heartbeat race to exploding.

She had woken up surrounded by her staff looking down at her on Baba’s kitchen floor.

Instinctively her hands had turned to Baba’s recipes. Recipes she’d placed no value on when he lived. She remembered thinking them too rich, too heavy, too dated. Now it was all she could manage with her chef’s hands. It was the only way to avoid the boom of the gunshot, the near explosion in her chest from the palpitations.

Staring down at her hands, she tried to bring her focus back to her phone, gripped too tightly in her hands.

Where are you? A text from China.

Rico had passed a rolling pin to her that first day, when panic had made her hands tremble.

I’m almost there. She texted back and broke into a jog. The beating of her heart felt somehow different in her chest.

SO excited for today’s show, China texted back. Then, You know how much I love you, right?

Ashna texted a heart back, thanking the gods of technology for emojis.

My pai always said that you couldn’t win unless you played like the game was a matter of life and death. That’s how you keep the goal, Ash.

Sadness and anger overwhelmed her. She had missed Rico’s return to the game, missed something she had hoped and prayed for with all her heart.

So he hadn’t fought for her, for them. But he’d fought for something and won. While here she was. Could it be that he was right? Until she’d met Rico, she had never really given happiness any thought. With her cousins she’d always felt gratitude for having them, more love sometimes than she could bear. It had come with a definitive sense that she wasn’t like them. Never in her life had she expected to feel what she had felt with Rico, that bursting, full-bodied joy of being enough. When she’d tasted it briefly and lost it, she hadn’t questioned the loss.