Isha waved again, but her light tone was at odds with the watchful gleam in her eyes. “Hello, Sejal. I can’t say it’s nice to meet you, but I suppose it was inevitable.”
Sejal tried to follow how that was at all humanly possible. “You’re my... half-sister?”
“No. Full. Same father and mother. Regrettably.” Isha grimaced. “That came out wrong. Regrettably because they were terrible, not regrettably because we’re sisters.”
Sejal slowly cataloged each of Isha’s features. Mira and Sejal had been told their whole lives that they looked nothing like each other. Sejal took mostly after their father, Mira their mother.
But Isha... Isha had Sejal’s nose and forehead, as well as Mira’s lips and chin and hair. She somehow looked like both of them and neither of them. “My mom was pregnant when she left my dad.”
Isha clicked her tongue. “Bingo.”
The memory knocked into Sejal’s brain. “The snowman,” she said quietly.
Isha raised a perfectly threaded eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“My father saved a drawing I made. Mira thought it was a snowman.” The memory slammed back into Sejal’s brain with the weight of a freight train. “It was Mom. She was pregnant. I drew a picture of her.”
Isha’s laugh was genuine. “She loved that, I’m sure.”
“She yelled at me. Threw it in the trash,” Sejal murmured. Her mother’s face had grown flushed, and she’d stormed out.
Left them something.
Feels like something’s missing.
Their dad’s cryptic email to Sunil. He had known he had a third daughter out there.
“How did you know to come here?”
Krish rubbed his jaw. “We saw your—Rushali. I’ve been trying to get answers about what happened to my brother. She said if we came here, we’d be able to talk to Cobra.”
Isha rolled her eyes. “That bitch blew my cover? She must have found out I’ve gotten to know Mira. She’s still pissed that I was able to steal her people’s loyalty away from her.”
“Rushali raised you.” Sejal stiffened. It had been bad enough to be raised by their neglectful father, but at least they’d had Rhea and their cadre of ne’er-do-well but kind uncles as positive role models. Who had the daughter of Cobra had? How could this woman be anything but dangerous?
“Guilty. I didn’t even know I had sisters, to be honest, until my grandmother mentioned it on her deathbed a few years ago. She was a lovely woman, if that helps. She never forgave my mother for leaving you behind.”
“What do you want with Mira? Why have you been pretending to be her nanny?” Fear sharpened Sejal’s voice, fear for her sister and niece.
Isha waited for the waitress to place glass cups of chai in front of each of them. Krish and Sejal both ignored their tea, but Isha took a sip. “I wanted to meet her. And my niece. I rather like children. I imagine I really would have been a nanny in another life.”
“Why not just introduce yourself as our sister?”
Isha lifted a shoulder. “Obviously, I feared rejection. I figured if I posed as the nanny, I could get to know them without being rebuffed. Or without preconceptions. I wanted to see what my life could have been. Had I not been raised by a sadistic, narcissistic mother. Well, ‘raised’ is putting it pretty generously. I was mostly with my grandma and at various boarding schools, but still.”
“Since we were raised by a narcissistic, absent father, I don’t think Mira and I had it much better.”
“Hmm.” Isha’s lips quirked. “I don’t know. Mira’s life is fairly normal. Almost boring.” Longing flashed in her face.
Sejal also longed for parts of Mira’s life. Not the most boring parts, but other parts. “Rushali truly was the worst, wasn’t she?”
“The worst.”
Sejal sat forward. For a second, it was like they were merely two sisters gossiping about their dysfunctional mother. “She kidnapped me, you know that?”
“I heard.” Isha’s eyes hardened. “I was not a part of that. I’m selfishly glad you were able to put her out of commission, by the way.”
“So you could take over Cobra.”
