“The honorable thing.” I rolled my eyes. “What does it say, so?”

“Why don’t you take a look for yourself?”

I gave him a look, but curiosity got the better of me and I pulled out the contents of the envelope. They were printouts of newspaper pages, mostly, all reporting about a Jeremy Spencer. I looked at the dates.

“His father?” I asked.

“Yes.” They were all articles about various arrests, made over many decades, the most recent being five years ago. Spencer’s father, it seemed, was very much alive, and still serving out his sentence in prison.

There was a line in one of the articles, which was highlighted—Jeremy Spencer’s wife, Sharon Spencer, who has been missing since her release from California Pacific Rehabilitation Center after being charged with the illegal possession of a controlled substance, was not available for comment.

“And his mother is—?”

My mum squeaked at this. “She’s a drug addict, Kaavi! Can you believe this? An addict in the family? Haiyyo, I won’t know where to hide my head. How could you do this to us?”

But I ignored her.

“How do we know if this is true?”

“So you weren’t aware of this?”

“No, of course I wasn’t aware.”

“Haiyyo, this is the problem with marrying a foreigner, I tell you,” my mother started up again. “If he was a Sri Lankan, then at least we could have found out about him. Asked around. Checked his background.”

“Amma, you’re the one who insisted that I marry him right away.”

“Enough now, both of you.” My father beat my mother to her reply. “There’s only one thing left to do.”

Call the wedding off? Would it be so terrible? We could tell people that my father had a change of heart. It would be the talk of the town, of course it would be, but it would all die down eventually, right?

“And what is that?” my mother huffed.

He looked at me again. “Give Spencer a call. Ask him to come here at once.”

26

KAAVI

Three Days before the Wedding

It took Spencer about a half hour to get home, during which time I got a few more details of what happened this morning. Turned out that Aunty Josephina, that nosy bitch—I didn’t buy her bullshit story about an anonymous delivery at all. She’d probably hired a PI or something—had sent over the package to my father, and then called up my mother directly afterward to “ask what she thought.”

Of course, my father, logical as he was, had no intention of telling my mother about any of this until he found out if it was true or not. He was accosted by her when he was trying to have breakfast, which was when I heard the yelling and rushed downstairs.

I tried to count the number of houseguests who would have overheard. So much for keeping this shit under wraps. My mother was usually so smart and calculating, but the way she’d just fly off the handle like this was a major weakness. And not only to her.