“Cassia.”My grandfather’s voice is booming, stern. He never ever talks to me like that and it only drives home the seriousness of the situation.
“So is it true?” I ask, my voice miraculously calm.
Everyone, including Halabuji and Stu, are silent. That’s confirmation enough.
When my mom died, I prayed for any kind of sign that she was still with me. That her spirit had remained on the earthly realm even after we scattered her ashes in the Pacific. I would lie in my new bedroom at night and stare intently across the room at my vanity mirror. Hoping for a glimpse of something translucent and spectral. I was never scared of ghosts. I would have loved to be haunted by my mom.
This fixation eventually faded, but I was always looking for magical signs anyway. And when you look for them, they’re easy to find.The random car backfiring in the street when you want a sign that you should get bangs. The friend who texts you the morning after you had a dream about them.
And eventually, I didn’t need to look for magic. It found me. When I was thirteen, I realized that I could read people’s faces. The first time it happened, I was in geometry class. I couldn’t pay attention because I found the subject to be complete nonsense. Instead, I stared lovingly at the back of Jeremy Zaid’s head. The cutest boy in eighth grade. When he turned to me, and I got a good look at his face while in this crushy trance, I suddenly found myself in a courtyard full of olive trees and saw Jeremy carrying a jug of water on his head. I was so freaked out that I screamed in class and was sent home by the principal. It was that day that I learned of the gift in our family. Ever since, it’s been the guiding principle of my life: Through this ability to read faces, we find past loves—thefatedmatch for everyone.
Believing in true love since the age of thirteen got me through life. I knew my fated was waiting for me at the end of this journey—that even if everything else was unpredictable, this one thing was preordained. It’s a powerful assurance for someone who lost their mom at a young age.
A kid’s entire life and sense of security are wrapped up in the proximity of their parents. Their mother. When I lost her, the earth beneath me fell apart. Even with my grandparents, Emoni, and Sunny—I felt alone in the world. Broken and cursed with a tragedy that made me feel separate from the kids at school, from my cousins. But when I found out I had this ability, thissuperpower, I felt equipped to take on the world again. It was a gift I shared with my mother, and I felt closer to her and all the women in my family because of it. I had found the key to not just love, but happiness.
I stare at my family sitting around the table. “Does this meanthat there are no fated matches?” My voice is shaky, my entire body turning clammy. This is the question that’s been haunting me since I found out.
Halmoni closes her eyes for a second before answering. “No, of course not. Wedofind past loves. That’s what the red thread of fate shows us in our visions. That’s real. Your souls are drawn together life after life. And at some point in our family’s history, hundreds of years ago, we realized that we could find that person in someone’s current life. And that when they met, they almost always fell in love again.”
“Almost,”I say, pinching the bridge of my nose, my head starting to throb incessantly.
Halmoni looks at me. “Before your mom, a fated match had never failed. At least in my lifetime. We thought it was a fluke. There were no records of such a thing.”
“Because you were the first to keep records,” I say out loud, mostly for myself. Before Halmoni, matchmaking was done in village homes. There were no offices, our family business was intimate, a whispered secret between women. Halmoni was the one who brought it into the future. All my lists and organizational systems—they come directly from my grandmother, the most meticulous person I know.
“Exactly,” Halmoni says.
“Then, Evette…” Sunny says, her voice shaking. “When your dad left you both, we thought, no this can’t be. They’ll get back together. They have to.”
“When he didn’t come back, we thought it was becausehewas flawed, not the system.” Halmoni sits back, looking very small, suddenly. “We built our business on this concept. On the belief that you were meant to meet your past love, that it was the way to happiness.”
“And you couldn’t face the truth and, what, lose all the moneyyou’ve made?” I say, my voice getting loud, waving my hand at their beautiful house.
“Hey.” My grandfather again, and this time he’s angry. “You’re allowed to be angry, but you are not allowed to disrespect us.”
A hush falls over the room. I say my next words carefully. “I just need to know why my entire understanding of how the world works was built on a lie.”
“To protect you!” Halmoni cries out. “To protect everything!”
“I’m forty fucking years old!” I shout back. “You couldn’t tell me before this?”
“And admit that it wasmyfault that your mother died alone?” my grandmother says with a wrenching sob.
I do start crying then. “She didn’t die alone. She had me.”
Halmoni gets up from her chair and stands next to me. Then she gets on her knees. Through my tears, I stare at her. Shocked. She grabs hold of both my hands and I try and pull her up. “Halmoni, stop it. Get up, please. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
But she just shakes her head and clasps my hands tight. “Forgive me, Cassia. I never wanted you to find out about your father. I didn’t want you to hate me. Like your mother did.”
Silent tears are falling down her face and it’s breaking my heart. “Halmoni, she didn’t hate you, what are you talking about? She loved you. She loved all of you until the very end.” I look at Sunny and Emoni, who are in various states of crying as well.
Halmoni shakes her head. “No, she never forgave me for telling her your dad was her fated.”
“Listen to me,” I say firmly. “She loved you guys so much. Even if she couldn’t show it all the time. She had the part of rebellious daughter to play.”
Sunny laughs through her tears. “She really did.”
Halmoni still looks at me mournfully. “If she had a partner who was a quality person, she might have…might have not had the aneurysm.” And it’s like she’s uttered our shared secret—one bigger than our magical gift. A dark belief that has lived in both of our minds for more than thirty years. It’s only in that moment that I realize how wrong both of us were. Seeing my grandmother heartbroken in front of me—this is wrong. We were both wrong to carry this burden.
