8

AMAYA

Four Days before the Wedding

I melted into my room and turned on the air-conditioning as high as it would go. I would start to shiver soon, but I didn’t care. My face felt like it was coated in a layer of oil and grime, and my bra cut into my sides, which were starting to itch from the sweat.

I didn’t plan on sleeping, even though the dull thud in my head had developed into a full-blown pounding. I paced around the room, anxious, unsettled, trying to confirm my next move. I had been waffling when I got here—I knew that Kaavi shouldn’t be marrying Spencer, but I was also giddy with the thought that the Fonsekas might finally want me back in their lives. It was bittersweet. My chance to make amends marred with the knowledge that I had to stop a wedding. But now that I knew I had been tricked—that the Fonsekas never intended on making peace—there was nothing bittersweet anymore. Just plain old run-of-the-mill bitterness.

Kaavi can’t marry Spencer. In the past she’d always depended on me to make things right, but everything wasn’t about her anymore. It’s time for me to launch my first plan.

Seetha knocked on my door and brought a cup of milk tea. I accepted it but left it on my desk. I was too wired for tea.

Seeing Kaavi was . . . interesting, I suppose. Everything that happened left me so broken, so hurt, so painfully raw that when I finally pieced myself together, I thought no one could get through my armor again. But I guess that’s the problem with broken armor. There will always be cracks. And Kaavi knew exactly how to leak through mine.

Often, things we were in awe of when we were younger feel oddly unimpressive as adults. I used to think my house was a palace. I used to think my mother was the tallest woman in the world. Food laid out for me was a feast. Things change as you grow. As you understand the world for what it is. That we overcompensate in our memories because we didn’t know any better at the time.

That was how I was expecting things to be with Kaavi and the Fonsekas.

I had hoped that it was all in my head. That I’d put them on some sort of pedestal because I’d missed them so much. That I had been looking at my past through glasses that were so rose-tinted that everything was just fluorescent pink at this point. But with Kaavi, it was the opposite. In our time apart, I’d withered away to less, and she’d blossomed to be more. More than I was and more than I ever could be.

I remembered the quiet girl who used to let me copy homework off her. The girl who was always so shy, who’d only show her true self to me. The girl who fell in love as easily as catching a cold, who needed rescuing, for whom I was more than happy to take the fall. But I couldn’t protect her anymore. There was someone more important to me now.