He had returned to California only once, to bury his aunt. If the guys hadn’t wanted to throw Zee the mother of all clichés, Rico would never have gone back to the US at all. And his head would never have turned inside out. The day after the party, he thought he had set it straight again. He’d come home. He’d tried to stop thinking about her and everything she had taken from him.

Moving his laptop to his lap, he propped his leg on the coffee table. On the surface, what he was contemplating seemed like a terrible idea; he was fully aware of that. This wasn’t him googling an ex. What he was doing was actively working on bringing closure to something he had ignored for too long.

Look at where it had landed him. Thirty years old with a string of lovely women who hadn’t stayed with him because he didn’t know how to give them what they needed. Every one of his exes was happily married to someone else. Actually, strike that, not every one of them. He had no idea what the girl who had set him on the path of “emotional unavailability” was up to.

He could imagine her as a society wife. Married to some doctor, or corporate bigwig, or lawyer, someone her father considered appropriate.

How had he gotten her so wrong? It was a question he hadn’t asked himself in a very long time. His fingers hesitated only another second before typing her name into the magic box that was Google.

The first thing that came up was her father’s restaurant, Curried Dreams. Apparently she ran it now. Had the old bastard retired? Executive chef, indeed! Who would have thought Green Brook High’s star goalkeeper would be off making tandoori chicken? He certainly had not seen that coming. She’d wanted nothing to do with cooking. The picture of her was fuzzy, something someone had taken from a distance without her permission, but the bearing was unmistakable.

Next, Rico’s eyes landed on an Entertainment Weekly link about a new show on Food Network. Ashna on TV? He supposed she’d grown out of her obsession with privacy and her shyness off the pitch. Getting her to take a picture for the yearbook with the girls’ soccer team had been hard enough. She was going to be on TV? Really?

The calm that spread through him as he scrolled through the piece was impressive. Time was a healer after all, because he felt nothing.

The article said she was going to be one of the professional chefs who was going to team up with a celebrity and compete with five other pairs to win one hundred thousand dollars. It was all a bit crass for the Rajes.