He went around the desk and put a hand on her shoulder. “Tell me what’s going on, Naina. Let me help.”

She pressed her face into her hands. For an endless moment she said nothing. Then she looked at him, letting him see what it took for her to put away all her fears and trust him. “A local gang attacked one of our sites and set fire to it. A caseworker is badly hurt.” She opened up the email and read through the mayhem for him as silent tears slipped from her eyes.

Chapter Eighteen

It had taken Vansh precisely twenty minutes to get the home minister of Nepal on the phone. The home minister. On a video call, no less.

Turns out Vansh had roomed with the grandson of one of Nepal’s longest-serving ministers, who had recently been elected a minister himself. Naturally they were the best of friends.

“Of course you are,” Naina said, trying not to shake her head.

“Is it a crime to be well loved?” he asked as they waited on hold for Naman Thapa to join the call.

It wasn’t a crime at all. Not even a little bit. What it was was a frickin’ wonder, how Vansh could gather so many people so close, across the globe, across time. A smile slipped through the purpose on Vansh’s face as Thapa appeared and they greeted each other like brothers, inside references flying fast between them. Evidently, the home minister and he had some smile-worthy memories together.

At this point, with her entire project at risk of imploding, Naina could not have been more grateful. Maybe she should have asked for his help sooner.

While they’d been waiting for the call to be set up, Vansh had filled her in on their history. Naman had been something of a genius in coming up with exact combinations of sativa and indica for maximum benefit. They’d spent many a night studying the constellations and working around their hopelessness about the state of the world. Naman had been on his last ultimatum from his grandfather to get his act together or be disowned.

The man had dropped out of Harvard, done a few years of med school in India, environmental science in Germany, art in Paris, philosophy somewhere else. Vansh didn’t know anyone more terrifyingly brilliant.

One night Vansh had shared a note with him from his friend Amara that had changed Vansh’s own life. Naman had laughed—as, Vansh said, he tended to do at everything in life. In the days that followed, Vansh had watched in disbelief as his friend went home and turned slowly and surely into a white-kurta-wearing, soft-spoken leader of the masses.