Asha’s text tone rang then. She glanced at her phone. “It’s Maricel. She’s bringing some shelter dogs here for a walk in a bit.”
“Oh, good.” Kamila grinned. “I found some possible spaces for her puppy academy.” Maricel was one of Asha’s employees at the shelter, and Kamila was helping her launch a dog-training business. “I was totally going to call her earlier, but it slipped my mind after the calamity at breakfast.”
“What calamity at breakfast? Your dad didn’t like the sweet potatoes?”
“He’d have liked them fine if he’d actually eaten any.” She managed to get a few more pictures, some miraculously with both dogs’ faces in the frame. “The toaster went up in flames before I could serve anything.”
“Holy shit, Kamila! Fire? How did that happen?”
Kamila put her hands on her hips. “It wasn’t my fault. I’m pretty sure Mercury is in retrograde or something. It would explain a lot about my day. I was following the recipe and suddenly the sweet potatoes were on fire.”
“The sweet potatoes were in the toaster?”
She’d already put up with Rohan’s incredulous rant about why she’d put vegetables in the toaster—she didn’t need to hear it from her best friend. “Asha, it was sweet potato toast—how else was I supposed to toast them?”
Asha shook her head, clearly straining not to laugh, so Kamila went back to photographing the dogs.
“You should have at least kept an eye on them in the toaster,” Asha said.
“I know. I was distracted. I’d just heard Jana Suleiman is coming back to town.”
Kamila was fully aware that pettiness wasn’t an attractive character trait, so she’d kept her father’s best friend’s daughter’s status as her secret nemesis to herself. Asha had only met Jana a few times and barely knew her.
“Oh. It’ll be great to have your old friend back in the neighborhood.”
Kamila shrugged. Old friend? Hardly. Not when Jana had always been smug about clearly being a better daughter to her parents than Kamila was. But there was more to Kamila’s dislike of Jana. When Kamila and Jana were both in their last year of high school, the nosy aunties in their circle told Kamila’s parents that they saw Kamila in a parked car outside Jana’s house with the neighborhood bad boy, Bronx Bennet, when she was supposed to be at school. That was bad, because Kamila had been forbidden to see Bronx since the last time she’d been caught in a parked car with him.
But the thing was, even though Kamilahadskipped school that day, and even though she and Bronxhadstill been secretly hooking up, she hadn’t actually been with him that day. Kamila had spent the whole day at the mall. But of course, Kamila’s mother hadn’t believed her.
Mom used to throw these massive parties back then…and she’d hosted a huge one for Shelina a few years earlier for her high school graduation. Kamila didn’t really want a graduation party, but Dad (bless him) insisted that Kamila deserved a party, too. But after the Bronx-in-the-backseat accusation, Mom deleted Kamila from her party. Deleted Kamila, not canceled the party, because she’d already hired the caterer and rented a hall. She proclaimed the celebration was now in honor of Jana’s fancy scholarships. When Kamila confronted Bronx about the incident, he told her it had been Jana in the car with him. Jana had known Kamila had lost her graduation party because of this accusation, and she hadn’t come forward to admit it was really her steaming up Bronx’s old Toyota’s windows.
But even though Kamila lost the hookup buddy, and any respect she had for Jana Suleiman, she decided not to tell anyone the truth about it. Jana was heading to Oxford in the fall, and the last thing Kamila wanted was for something to jeopardize her nemesis’s school admission. Kamila preferred Jana on another continent.
Kamila didn’t want to talk or think about Jana anymore. She shook her head while mounding the leaves in a pile. It wasn’t working; Darcy was diving in and destroying her progress the moment she had more than three leaves assembled. “Darcy! Can you not?”
“How is your kitchen?” Asha asked.
“The kitchen’s fine. The toaster is…toast. Rohan put the fire out before any other damage.”
“Thank goodness Rohan was there.”
“Yes, yes.” She waved her hand. “Super Rohan saving the day, like always,” she said with plenty of sarcasm in her voice. “I could have dealt with it. I know where the fire extinguisher is. But whatevs. Anyway, a new toaster will be delivered tomorrow. I got a turquoise one this time. Do you think it will work with the brass fixtures? Or should I—”
“He’s over a lot lately,” Asha interrupted.
Kamila gave up and lifted Darcy out of the leaves. “Who?”
“Rohan.”
“Yeah, of course he is. He loves Bollywood, and he and Dad talk business after breakfast every Saturday.” Dad pretty much ran the show at Emerald, but it was technically a subsidiary of Rohan’s company. And Dad still had a minority share in that company.
“I just hope it’s not because he’s lonely, but yeah, I think that man is into Bollywood even more than Nicole. Did I tell you I caught her reading theTimes of Indiagossip pages?”
Kamila flashed a satisfied smile. “You two have the perfect marriage. I did really well there.”
“Do I get any credit for the success of my marriage?”
Kamila beamed, shaking her head. “Nope. It’s all on me. I have a gift, you know.”
