Have they seen everything?
I head back inside in a daze, my scrambled brain unable to process what has happened.
Why am I not panicking? Why am I so calm as I come back inside? How am I not completely falling apart at the seams?
“Beta,” my father says as he greets me when I walk back inside.
Everyone else—my uncle, my aunts, my cousins, my mother, and even my sons—stays at a distance, waiting to see how I’mgoing to react. Identical looks of worries paint all of their faces, except my boys, who seem completely lost.
Oh, how I’ve failed them.
“Are you all right?” my father asks, placing himself right in front of me so that I can’t move forward in my continued daze.
“No.” The word comes out without emotion.
“Come here, Beta.” Dad clasps my shoulder with one hand and ushers me forward. “Martine, watch the boys for a minute, why don’t you?”
“Of course,” my mother utters in a voice that nearly breaks.
I let Dad direct me up the stairs without a single argument. When he gives my shoulder a light press to sit me down on my bed, I follow along and stare at the hardwood floor below me.
“What happened out there?” Dad asks once he takes a seat next to me, his gaze burning a hole through me, the weight of his expectation bearing down on me like a mountain.
I don’t answer. My mind swirls like a storm.
Rachel.
I amnotlosing my Rachel.
I can’t say it out loud. Can’t manifest it into reality.
“Karan. Talk to me, Beta.”
I know my father is rubbing my back and shoulder, but I can hardly feel it. It’s only a superficial sensation, like I’m outside my body looking in.
I can still talk to her. Of course I can. There’s no way this tiny mistake—as much as I realize it may have hurt her—is going to sign the death warrant of everything we are.
I vehemently refuse.
“Karan. Come on. I only want to help.” I’ve never heard my father sound so dejected, so desperate. “We all know something’s wrong between you and Rachel. If it wasn’t obvious in the way she was cold to you before Christmas, it became a near certainty when the two of you went to that getaway.”
“Maybe we only wanted some time away from all of his,” I finally say, gesturing all around us.
“You don’t mean that. You love your family.”
Instant guilt claws at my throat.
“I do, Dad.”
“So, it was more than just a lover’s getaway.”
I pause, my hands beginning to tremble as panic continues choking me.
“I can’t lose her, Dad.”
I still haven’t spoken the truth out loud. Haven’t admitted how deep this goes. It’s still not too late for me to fight for her.
Dad sighs, a deep, full-body breath that seems to rattle him. “You know that no matter what happens, we’ll all be here for you, right?”
