“She wouldn’t have lost control. Especially not on a clear evening like today—it would’ve still been light out when she went over. I ran down to check on her when I spotted the car, and the hood was dead cold. She’d been there for a while.”
He also noted that despite her annoying driving habits, she was a “nice lady” and well-liked by her few neighbors. The Musgrave residence is the biggest property on the road, right at the top.
There were no skid marks, and she appears to have gone over the edge at high speed while going downhill. Seat belt on and her car’s a newer-model Jeep that held up well to the crash, so she might have survived if not for the steep nature of the drop—it looks like she took a serious bang to the head and I don’t like the way her neck’s sitting.
It’s possible she suffered a medical event that caused her to go off the road. Have to wait for the ME’s report on that. Vehicle to be towed to LAPD forensic facility for further investigation after the techs finish up here.
Case open for now.
Chapter 3
In that endless moment when my feet left the earth, Diya’s bloody body clutched to my chest, I saw her as I had that very first time: a butterfly beauty of a woman who laughed with open delight under the colored bulbs strung across the roof of a West Hollywood tequila bar that buzzed with people and conversation.
Her dress had been short and a glittering green so dark it was almost obsidian, her hair tumbled black curls that fell to just past her shoulders, and her presence so bright that she glowed. I hadn’t known her name then, hadn’t understood that her parents had seen that glow, too, right from the moment she’d first come into the world.
Diya. A light against the dark.
Only later had I begun to understand that her candle flame was one with an internal flicker, ever in danger of going out. Sometimes, there was an insubstantial quality to my wife that panicked me—as if she were a will-o’-the-wisp that might slip out of my grasp one moonless night.
I couldn’t lose her. Not as I’d lost the others.
I’d woken with my heart thudding night after night during our first weeks together, needing to see her beside me. Her chest rising and falling. The feel of her skin a relief because it meant she was realand not a figment of my need for her. This woman who was as fragile as a dandelion against a storm wind…and who burned incandescent.
To not go to her the night I’d first heard her laugh had been an impossibility. She’d seen me weaving my way through the crowd, watched me with those enigmatic eyes she’d made up smoky and smudged that night.
Every step I took had been a step closer to my destiny. Every tiny hair on my body had prickled, my charmer’s mouth suddenly dry, and my words jumbled up in my head.
She’d known. So had I.
Strangers to each other or not, this was it. We were it.
But when I’d asked her for her number, she’d told me I better have a good memory before reeling off a long cell number with an unusual country code.
Then her friends had decided to change bars and she’d left me with a smile that was a teasing challenge, the quiet enigma of her morphing into sweet, playful beauty. “Call me tomorrow…if you remember the number.”
We’d run laughing out of a Las Vegas wedding chapel five weeks later.
—
I, Tavish Advani, promise you, Diya Prasad, that I will protect the candle flame of you against any and all storms that may come. Nothing and no one will ever get between us. You will ever be my guiding light, the warmth that shows me the way home for the rest of my life.
I love you, Diya. Now and always.
—
My knees hit the earth.Hard.Pain was a starburst in those knees, vibrating up my thighs, but I still had Diya in my arms. I didn’t care about anything else.
Rising with a grunt, I began to run again.
Sirens wailed in the distance as the neighbor scrambled up and ran ahead. He was yelling at his wife and kid about a possible survivor. The woman pelted toward me at that, and I suddenly remembered what Diya had mentioned the other day. A nurse—the woman was a senior nurse. Worked in the same hospital at which Diya’s parents were consultants.
“It’s too close!” I yelled to her when she made a motion for me to put Diya down so she could examine her.
Staring behind me at the fireball of the house, she nodded, and the two of us made our way to the manicured grass on one side of the drive, across from where I’d parked the Alfa Romeo. “She’s hurt,” I said as I put my wife down with care. “There’s blood.” I couldn’t make the word “stabbed” come out of my mouth again.
If I didn’t say it, maybe it wouldn’t be true.
“She might’ve sustained an injury getting out if she escaped through a shattered window.” The nurse was taking Diya’s pulse as she spoke, now placed her ear by Diya’s mouth. “Faint but present pulse, shallow respiration.”
