Despite every woman in my family threatening me with death, I go back to work on Monday. I didn’t even actually sprain my wrist, just bruised it pretty badly. And the concussion was mild enough that I could drive. In sum: I simply fell off my bike like a dweeb.
I watch Sunny and Emoni shuffle furniture around in my office. Sunny places a cushion on my chair.
“Guys! I hurt my wrist, not my ass.”
Emoni tsks. “That mouth.”
“Always so foul since you were little,” Sunny says as she lowers a blind so that the beam of sunshine on my desk disappears.
“Well, geez, guess who I picked it up from?” I say as I reach to help Emoni pull an ottoman under my desk. She swats my hand.
“Nice try.” Sunny helps us. “The bad influence was always Evette.”
There’s a familiar beat of silence, a pause in the buzz of energy whenever Mom is mentioned. Mom was the glue between all of us: Sunny’s sister, Emoni’s niece, Halmoni’s daughter. We feel the pain of her absence acutely.
“Your mother would have been the worst matchmaker,” Emoni finally says.
“Evette was the most cynical romantic I knew,” Sunny confirms, perching herself on my desk.
“Because she didn’t choose to be with her fated.”
Halmoni, with her soft ballet slippers and tiny bones, has slipped into the room without us noticing.
“Subtle as always, Halmoni,” I say.
“It’s true. We all knew your dad was wrong for her from the beginning. But she never listened to me.” Fondness crosses her features rather than vexation. Halmoni has long since come to terms with her daughter’s rebellious nature. “But we got a pretty good granddaughter out of it, I suppose.”
“Thanks,” I say dryly and roll my eyes. It’s a joke and I’m reacting to it as a joke, but somewhere inside me, a tender spot feels poked. My mom rejected her fated and picked my father. She was a romantic, a rebel, and just as stubborn as her mother. My father left us. Maybe because he wasn’t her fated, but definitely because he wasn’t able to handle fatherhood. We have no relationship and never will. He didn’t come to my mother’s funeral and that was all the closure I needed. He’s more dead to me than my mother is.
Halmoni touches my brow. “I heard you hurt your head,” she says with a frown. “We can’t have you hurting your head. It might affect your readings.”
“It was just a little concussion.”
Halmoni inspects my face further, her eyes incredibly sharp. “You also have some scratches here.” She touches my right cheekbone. “A woman should take better care of her face.”
I bat her hand away. “Okay, okay. Enough, I’m fine!”
I shoo them out and have about a second of peace before Shreya knocks on my open door.
“Come in.”
Her eyes scan my face behind her metal-framed aviator glasses. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, god, I’m fine,” I say, pushing my chair back to look up at her. “Everyone’s fussing over a few scrapes.”
She sits down across from me with a folder in her arms. “Oh, good. Today’s going to be a little hectic.”
“My favorite,” I say, without a trace of sarcasm. Being a workaholic is a no-brainer for me. I love this job—One & Only has been a part of my life since I was born. When Mom had to go back to her freelance illustrator work six weeks postpartum, the Park women toted me to the K-Town office and took turns wearing me in baby carriers. When I learned to crawl and walk, they set up a playpen for me in Halmoni’s office. Once I went to middle school, Sunny would pick me up after class—blasting Fleetwood Mac in the car—and drive me to the office where I would do my homework in the conference room, a plate of mandarin oranges and chestnuts delivered to me by Emoni. The table made it all the way to our Beverly Hills office—if you look closely at it, you can still see where I scratched in “LEO” surrounded by a heart. Because I knew my fated was going to be Leonardo DiCaprio.
My life and One & Only were always intertwined and the business runs in my blood just like the magic does. I know people think romanticizing workaholic lifestyles is bad, but matchmaking energizes me. And it never gets boring—because no two love stories are ever the same.
I ask Shreya, “What’s first?”
The folder is pushed across the desk. “The interns populated a few matches for the name Peter Cruz.” I open it to find printouts of photos and social media profiles for twelve different Peter Cruzes in the L.A. area. Since Shreya’s watching, I take my time reading eachone, even though by the time I see the third choice, I know who the correct Peter is—the man with the strong jawline and serious brows who I saw in Gemma’s past life.
Shreya leans in. “Well?” Her fingers tap in her lap, excited to see what I have to say. This is always a little tricky, as I have to convince her that I’m able to do a match based on photos of the candidates’ faces.
“Hm, well these five are definitely out,” I say, placing a pile aside. “Ages are not a match for what she’s looking for.” I grab two more. “And these two are not quite right.”
