She chewed the PB&J and grimaced. She was doing her best to not think about him. Because it wasn’t her shame or wounded pride that was foremost when she did think about him. It was the heat, when he’d spun her around and placed his body between her and danger.
Between you and a photographer. Girl, please, he wasn’t taking a bullet for you.
She took a swig of her milk and grabbed her phone out of the kitchen drawer she kept it tucked in when she wasn’t working.
Her first clue that something was wrong was all the notifications on her lock screen. Her second was that they were all from family members. Her mother and two eldest sisters, to be exact.
Uh-oh. That wasn’t good at all.
Her phone rang before she could navigate to her texts, her mother’s sweetly smiling contact photo popping up. She answered it with some trepidation. What had she done now? “Hello?”
“Jianna.”
Well. This was already bad, if they were at the name that was on her birth certificate. “Hi, Mommy,” she tried again, though she didn’t know what she was wheedling for.
“Where have you been? I have been trying to call you forhours.”
“I was working.” The joy of her parents not viewing her work as actual work. Her mom would never assume any of her sisters would be glued to their phone at noon on a weekday.
“Video call me. I need to speak to you face-to-face.” Her mother hung up, and Jia flinched.
She steeled herself as she sat on the couch and opened her laptop. Her worry grew as she found not one, but three pairs of dark eyes looking back at her with various degrees of concern and doubt and annoyance. “Oh good,” she said,with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, which wasn’t very much. “Salam. Everyone’s here.” Or at least, her two oldest sisters and her mother. “Where’s Sadia?” Her middle sister was one of her staunchest allies. If Ayesha had to be off the grid communing with nature somewhere, Sadia would be a good stand-in advocate for her.
“We’re trying to limit what disturbs her.”
Sadia was pregnant with her second child, and she was having miserable morning sickness, so that made sense, but the sentence ratcheted her anxiety higher. “What’s going on?” Jia shoved a cushion behind her back. Best to make herself comfortable while she got yelled at for whatever she’d done—or not done—now.
What did I do or not do now?
It wasn’t easy to be the black sheep of a successful family. When she was younger, Sadia had occupied the role, for running off to elope with a boy her parents didn’t approve of. Jia had seen the example her parents made of her sister—not talking to or about her for years, until their precious first grandson was born—so Jia had tried to toe the line. Until she couldn’t take it anymore and quit med school.
“Jianna.”
Again with the full name, yikes.
“Why did I leave surgery to find no less than two WhatsApp messages featuring a photo of you wrapped around some man like a vine?”
“The messages were from us,” her oldest sister, Noor, interjected.
Jia was so preoccupied by how her mother saidman, the same way she might sayserial killer, that it took her a second to process the rest of that sentence. “Uh. What.”How.
Noor crossed her arms over her chest. She was a miniversion of their mom, though her recent illness had taken some of her healthy plumpness away. “We are very worried about you,” Noor said severely. Noor was always severe. The eldest of the five sisters, she felt the weight of being the future matriarch very heavily.
“You didn’t answer our calls.” Zara, her second-eldest sister, tipped her head and gave Jia a concerned look, the same one she probably gave to her psychiatric patients.
“What kind of shenanigans are you getting up to in that city?” Her mother closed her eyes. “I knew you’d fall prey to the evils of Hollywood. Didn’t I tell you girls that?”
Jia held up her palms. “I haven’t fallen prey to anything. I don’t know what you guys are talking about.”Don’t you?A pit opened up in her stomach, and it widened when Zara held her phone up to the camera. It took a second to focus, and then Jia had to swallow.
There she was, she and Dev, against the brick wall of that bar. His face was slightly turned toward the camera while hers was away. It looked like they were hugging, perhaps seconds away from kissing.
While they’d been avoiding one photographer, another had caught them with a nice wide angle lens. And, apparently, he or she or they had known who they were photographing.
“Legend’s Grandson Romancing His Way Through America,” the headline read. Jia squinted, trying to make out the text of the article, but it was too blurry. “Ahhh...”
“It doesn’t name you, thank God.” Zara put the phone down. “Of course, I recognized your scarf right away, I gave it to you last Eid, and then I looked closer at the profile. This is definitely you, isn’t it, Jia?”
Her shoulders sagged in relief. She hadn’t been named in the press. That was something. At least her extended family wasn’t blowing up her mom’s phone about why her youngest unmarried daughter was going around doing something as scandalous as smelling a man. “It’s me, but this isn’t what it looks like.” She paused. “By the way, what do you think it looks like?” Just so they were all on the same page.
