I forced myself to breathe. “It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s just... I know I have this tendency to see what I want to see.” Gray used to mock my rose-colored glasses. And he was right. Because I’d looked at him and seen my soul mate. “I imagine things. Even if what I’m looking for isn’t really there. I don’t want to make another mistake. I’m not ready to jump into another serious relationship.”
“It doesn’t have to be serious,” Reeti said. “If Sam makes you feel better, if he boosts your confidence, that’s a good thing.”
A good thing. I took another sip of chai, relieved. “What about you? I don’t see you with anyone.”
“I date. Dated,” Reeti amended. “I got tired of the bullshit. All these guys saying I’m so exotic. Or asking me where I’m from. The last boy I went out with waited until we were naked before he told me he’d always wanted to be with ‘a foreign girl.’ ” She hooked air quotes around the words. “So I tell him my family is British. Like, is that foreign enough for you, you Irish arsehole?”
“Ugh. I’m so sorry.”
“It is what it is.” Her nails, perfect pale-blue ovals, tapped her mug. “My parents want to introduce me to a boy while I’m home over the break. He’s Sikh.”
“How do you feel about that?”
She raised one shoulder in a delicate shrug. “It’s just a meeting. If I don’t like him, that’s fine. My parents are progressive. They would be happy if I found someone suitable on my own. But I’m twenty-three. When my sister was my age, she was already married and expecting a baby.”
I was twenty-six. “And you’re in grad school.”
“Sheena was taking her Legal Practice Course when she married Aaraav. And now she is a solicitor with two children.”
“Did your sister have an arranged marriage?”
“Arranged, not forced. First the boy and the girl have a meeting, to see if they like each other.”
“Did you call him a boy? How old is he?”
Reeti grinned. “In arishta, the men are always boys, and the women are always girls. He’s twenty-seven. An architect. A good son, a good match. He just moved to London. Close to my father’s restaurant. My parents love that, of course.” She rolled her eyes.
“Isn’t that where you want to teach? In London.”
“Southall, yes. Not that it matters. My mother is hardly going to say, ‘Good, Reeti, be a teacher, at least you’re not an old maid.’ ”
I laughed. “I think it’s great that they care. I’m just trying to imagine having my romantic partners vetted by Uncle Henry and Aunt Em.”
“They never met Gray?”
I shook my head. “Aunt Em invited him once. But...”
I’d told myself Gray would be bored at the farm. I couldn’t picture him discussing grain prices with Uncle Henry or recipes with Aunt Em. Maybe I’d worried he would judge my family home, with its fading wallpaper and scarred linoleum. Maybe I wasn’t sure what my aunt and uncle would think of him.
Maybe my reluctance to find out should have told me something.
“All hat and no cattle,” Henry had remarked after one of my mother’s flying visits. I’d never forgotten.
“When we were growing up, it was like two worlds,” I said. “Our mother’s world”—full of glamor and color and terrifying independence—“and Kansas.” Flat, predictable, safe, and gray. “Even when she’d bring us there—Toni and me—she never stayed.” I swallowed. “After she died, I guess I did the same thing. Two separate worlds, school and the farm. I made myself into oneperson when I was with my aunt and uncle and another person with Gray. I didn’t know how to be both at once.”
“When worlds collide,” Reeti said.
I nodded. “Boom.”
“You like Sam’s family, though,” Reeti said.
“IloveSam’s family,” I gushed.
“More than Sam?”
I opened my mouth and closed it. Several times, like a fish.
“Look, I get it. Family is important,” Reeti said. “I love my parents. And when I get married, I want to get along with my husband’s family, too.”
