Although what she was feeling right now wasn’t exactly panic. It was rage. How dare he? How dare he show up at her restaurant?

Now, after all these years. Now, when she no longer thought about him. Ever.

For all the things he’d been, he’d always been proud. Yet he had never given her a hard time about keeping him secret from her family. They had both been comfortable with secrets. She’d believed that they had both wanted to—needed to—keep what was between them private, because the intensity of it had felt so overwhelming, so intimate.

How wrong she had been about him. In the end, the intensity of their connection had meant nothing. Having his pride hurt was all it had taken for him to betray her. One thing she knew for certain was that she would never depend on anyone that much again, or let anyone abandoning her cripple her that way.

She pulled her trembling hand away from her knee. She couldn’t let that time in her life emerge again. She turned off the TV and called China.

“Hello, superstar!”

“I can’t do it.” Ashna hugged her phone to her ear with both hands as though it were a puppy in pain.

When China didn’t respond, Ashna started to pace the length of her room. Outside her window the town was waking up; newborn sunlight caught the copper finial on the roof of Curried Dreams. Would she ever be able to look at her own restaurant again without seeing Rico slam down on his hurt knee?

“You have to find someone else. Please.”

“Ashna! What are you talking about?” China said finally.

“You have to understand. It’s . . . it’s . . .” How on earth had this happened? Gold and green eyes flooded her thoughts.

“You can’t back out. Not now,” China said, her tone unshakable.

It didn’t matter how unshakable China was, Ashna couldn’t do this.

“My . . . my mother needs me.” Dear God, she was going to be reborn as a frog in her next birth for this—the Hindu version of hell. “It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s Shobi! You know how things are with her.” As a matter of fact, China had no idea how things were with Shobi. Like everyone else in Ashna’s life, China simply avoided the subject of Ashna’s mostly missing mother as though it were an unfortunately located wart.

China responded with silence.

Ashna soldiered on. “Well, she just won this crazy prestigious award, it’s the Indian version of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She wants me to be there when she receives it. I have to go to India. She needs me there. Shobi never needs anyone!” God, she wasn’t just going to be a frog, but her frog self was going to get struck down by lightning and burned to a crisp.