He cut her off. “It’s okay.” How was she supposed to know that he and Rohan weren’t that close, that they’d regularly gone a year or two without seeing each other? “When did this happen? Do you remember the date?”
The date she gave him was a couple months before Rohan’s death and matched up with the date on the first message Jia had sent him.
Dev tapped his fingers on his chin. There was something else about that date, though...
“Next time, I will be sure to verify with you over the phone before I give your information to anyone, family or not,” she finished.
“Thank you,” he said woodenly. “Don’t worry about this. And don’t tell Chandu.”
“Yes, sir.” She sounded relieved, like she’d expected him to fly into a rage. The rage was there, for sure, but it was directed where it belonged. At his late brother.
He hung up and looked at Adil. “It must have been Rohan. They gave him my password, and the dates match up.”
“Why would he do this?”
Dev closed his eyes, remembering. “I saw him the night before.” It had been at an awards show. Dev didn’t go to many of those, but his friend had been honored that night.
The main times he did see Rohan were at industry events. That night, his brother had been holding court at his table, dressed in a bright peacock-blue sherwani.
Rohan had noticed him and waved him over. Dev had reluctantly gone.
His parents had raised them with love. They’d had a good relationship for thirteen years, him and his pesky little brother. But after their parents were gone, the industry and their grandfather’s favoritism and distance had driven them apart. Dev hated that he couldn’t be close with Rohan, andevery time he saw him, it was like that icy longing pierced his heart anew.
He didn’t think he was a particularly haughty person, but his brother’s devil-may-care attitude and playboy lifestyle had never failed to prick his temper and annoyance. The louder his brother had gotten, the colder Dev had gotten. “We fought,” Dev murmured. Rohan had asked if he’d wanted to come to an after-party, and he’d told him that he needed to get up early for work.
You must live a little, Bhai. God, you’re boring.
You live too much. Don’t you have your own responsibilities?
Rohan had stomped off. Later, Dev had felt bad, holding Luna over Rohan’s head when he barely knew the child.
“So he did this as a prank?”
“Possibly.”
“But you said this woman’s been getting messages as of a week ago,” Adil said slowly. “Reincarnation doesn’t work that fast.”
“Right.”
“So what? Someone took over for him?”
Dev scratched his head. “They’d need Rohan’s phone, at least, right? Or access to his information. Luna has it, I believe. She wanted the photos off it.” Dev had scrolled through the photos first before giving it to her. He’d had to delete two folders full of nudes. At least Rohan had been organized in his porn collecting.
They locked eyes. Dev could tell the second the realization crashed into Adil because it hit him at the same time.“No,” Dev said, his voice low. “It couldn’t be.”
“She’s better with phones than we are.”
“You cannot possibly be saying our thirteen-year-old niece picked up the catfishing torch for her father.”
“If she did, Rohan should have named her Anjali,” Adil mused, referring to the famous Bollywood movie plot moppet who had matchmaked her widowed father and his childhood friend.
“Implausible.”
“But not impossible. You should speak to her.”
Dev did not want to do that. “Perhaps I should speak to her therapist first.”
The lines around Adil’s eyes crinkled. “You must learn to trust your own gut sometimes when it comes to parenting.” The man clapped his hand on Dev’s shoulder. “Your parents didn’t have therapists on speed dial when you were young. And look how you turned out.”
