32

AMAYA

The Day of the Wedding

All the deep breaths and counting to five and checking for numbers didn’t reassure me. Things had gone wrong. Things had gone very, very wrong.

I’d known it this morning, and I knew for sure when I saw the video. If we were still sticking to the plan, then why on earth didn’t Kaavi just name Spencer in the footage? Why did she just keep it vague? Was she trying to screw me? I thought back to how angry she’d been with me up until then. She was definitely trying to screw me.

I was certain Miss Padmaraj was going to have me arrested.

I was so sure of it that I’d already started grasping for straws, spilling out my heart, trying to figure out how I could get out of this.

But then a security guard barged in during the middle of my interview and I was forgotten, for the time being at least. I didn’t even have to look at the numbers to know that luck was on my side.

Miss Padmaraj stood up and rushed out of the room.

“Mey miss-va mehe thiyaganna please,” she barked to one of the younger-looking security guards on her way out. Keep this lady here please. He looked scared out of his mind at being acknowledged directly by her, but nodded, his eyes wide.

The rest of the guards followed Miss Padmaraj, and I was suddenly alone, my mind reeling. A situation in Spencer’s room. What was it? Had he finally come clean? Had he hurt himself? Had he tried to escape?

Escape.

It was like a light bulb went off in my head.

I wasn’t under arrest. Not yet, anyway. I could leave if I really wanted to. The young guard was just outside the door to this conference room, which was left open in the rush. Not high-security by any sense of the word. Good.

I checked my watch. I had been left here for about five minutes.

The deep breaths I took calmed me down.

I hated having to do this, but there was definitely no other choice.

Holding my head high and my shoulders back, I stepped out of the room.

“Miss Padmaraj called me,” I said in my most American, non–Sri Lankan accent. “She wants me to come down and join her.”

The panic on the security guard’s face made me feel like a real villain. I knew what I was doing. He knew what I was doing. I was playing my Colombo 07 Privilege Card. The card I hated everyone else in this town for playing. Where I would use my perfect westernized English and the wealth I had the luck of being born into to make someone else feel so small, so insignificant, so afraid of their status in life that they felt that they had no choice but to let me do what I wanted. Rich kids, the children of the politically connected, did it every day. Standing in lines, stopping for traffic cops, following procedure in public administration buildings wasn’t for them. For us. We’d breeze by in life, while security guards like the one who was stuck with me today feared for their jobs. Because a complaint against him to a higher-up that I would no doubt have connections to would take away his livelihood in one swoop.