So much about the world baffled Dr. Trisha Raje, but she was never at a loss for how to do her job. Telling a patient her tumor was not fatal should have been the easiest thing, but Trisha had no idea how she was going to manage it. How on earth did one tell an artist that she was going to go blind?

Trisha stood frozen in Stanford’s neurosurgery ward, staring down the passage that led to her patient’s room. But instead of the clinical gray floors and walls lined with locally sourced artwork, what stared back at her were memories of marble arches inlaid with peacocks of emerald and lapis lazuli. The smell of ancient sandalwood and salty ocean air permeated her lungs, displacing the mild tang of disinfectant.

This wasn’t the time for falling down the memory rabbit hole, but Trisha needed something to ground her and nothing did that quite like her family’s ancestral home thousands of miles away. Wrapping her arms around herself, she tightened her hold on the memories and pulled them closer. The Sagar Mahal, or the Ocean Palace, with its three hundred rooms overlooking the Arabian Sea, was the seat from which Trisha’s ancestors had ruled the kingdom of Sripore in western India for over two hundred years before British colonization.

As warrior kings, the Rajes had held the Mogul invaders at bay on the battlefield, but Trisha was having a hard time channeling their fierceness. Right now, she related more to how the Europeans had felled her ancestors using the more insidious violence of commerce to infiltrate and steal their land. In a befuddling twist of history, the rulers of the many kingdoms that made up modern-day India—the Rajes included—had found themselves stripped of their power and shoved into the role of figureheads, paying taxes to the British Empire.

In return for his indentured allegiance, the eighteenth maharaja, Trisha’s great—add four more greats to that for good measure—grandfather, had been allowed to retain his title and their beloved home and all the royal properties associated with it. So Trisha had him to thank for spending every single summer of her childhood in Sripore.

Trisha’s mother had insisted upon her American children staying connected to their royal Indian heritage. It was her way of holding on to the home she’d given up when she’d married their father and migrated to America. Trisha’s father for his part had gone along with it so long as their heritage didn’t interfere with their assimilation. To His Royal Highness Shree Hari Raje—HRH, as his children liked to call him behind his back—their royal lineage was their past, it was history. Their identity as native-born Californians was their future; it was the history he fully expected them to make.

To Trisha, medicine was where both her identities crossed over inside her, much the same way that the two optic nerves crossed over at the chiasm—the hallowed spot in the brain where her patient’s tumor was tragically located. Which meant that Emma Caine was going to lose sight in both eyes when Trisha performed the surgery that would save her life. In her five years of performing surgery, this was the first time a patient of hers was going to go blind. The irony was cruel.

The year Trisha turned thirteen, her family had been on their annual summer trip to Sripore. As was his routine, HRH spent most mornings visiting the many royal charities. His pet project was the orphanage for blind children that his father had built just before he died.

Trisha was the only one of the children he had asked to accompany him to the orphanage that day—a rare treat she had rubbed in her siblings’ faces. Subtly of course. The Raje children were expected to be dignified in all things, and tormenting one another was not an exception.

At the orphanage Trisha had followed her father up the gray cement stairs where the headmistress greeted them with a welcome party of children lined up along the hallway in their white-and-navy school uniforms. One of the girls, roughly the same age as Trisha, had stepped up to her. She had reached out and touched Trisha’s face, traced her brows over her glasses, her cheeks, her jaw. Her hand had smelled of paint—chemical yet earthy; her touch had been moist and cool.

“You’re pretty,” she had whispered with a smile that wondrously reached her eyes where her pupils were sheathed in cloudy white film. Her shy voice had been at odds with the bold touch of her hand, the unselfconscious whiff of her breath, and when she had stepped away, Trisha had felt punched in the chest by a feeling she couldn’t place. An empty, hungry restlessness that had knocked her completely off-balance.

For the rest of the visit she had felt like a balloon with a leak, pressure siphoning out of her pores and slipping through the silk kurta her mother insisted she wear for public appearances. She had carried the feeling back to the palace with her, like a parasite inside her body she couldn’t expel.

Hours later, her father had found her hiding in the room she shared with her older sister, Nisha, curled up on the four-poster bed the rajkumaris had slept on since the first maharaja built the palace in the 1600s. Often at night, her brothers and sister and cousins gathered on the huge bed and pretended it was a battleship from which they conquered the world. The warmth of the teakwood posts had a way of stealing into Trisha’s bones, and the quilted silk of the coverlets had a way of anchoring her until she felt invincible.

But that day Trisha had felt afloat on it, unanchored. Unable to bring herself back from the gray-washed walls of the orphanage. From the sightless children working in rows at the long workshop tables under ceiling fans that turned the summer air with a ponderous buzz and scattered the smell of ink and shaved wood around the room. They had stamped and glued, the rhythm of their movements keeping time to their chatter as knickknacks and toys gathered into piles in the baskets beside them.

“What about today bothered you?” her father had asked when he found her. Back then he still cared to come looking for her when she was lost.

Try as she might Trisha had not been able to articulate what she was feeling.

HRH had lowered himself into the armchair next to the bed and waited. The quintessential prince, his spine straight but not stiff, his strength at once shaming her and making her want to be just like him. God, she had wanted so badly to be just like him.

“It’s important to identify what bothers you,” he had said in that beautifully clipped diction that always became more pronounced when they were in Sripore. “If you can’t pinpoint what bothers you, how will you fix it?”

He’d waited, his silence insisting that she move her focus from wallowing in her sadness to defining it, turning it active and curious instead of passive and consuming. Finally, it had come to her. What she was feeling was anger. Rage that only felt like sadness because it made a horrid mix with helplessness.

“They shouldn’t be blind.” She had sat up, blinking away her tears, embarrassed by how they pooled where her glasses dug into her cheeks. “Those children should be able to see. It’s not fair!”

Leaning forward only the slightest bit, he had thrown a pointed glance around the gilded room. “Families like ours don’t get to complain about the unfairness of how fortune is distributed. Guilt is a waste of time. The fact that you have the things you have isn’t wrong. Not understanding what you have is. You do understand what you have, right, beta?” He’d paused until she acknowledged the meaning in his brown gaze. “It’s not just sight or comfort. What you have is that brain, and access to resources. But even more important than that is the thing you felt today. That compass inside that told you something wasn’t right. That is your greatest gift. So what are you going to do about what you felt today?”

She’d drawn her knees into her chest. “I’m not God, Dad. What can I possibly do to make someone who’s blind see?”

He’d smiled then, one side of his mouth lifting. “Well, say you did have that power. What would you need to know to help a blind person see?” He’d held out his monogrammed handkerchief. He only used those in India, where the servants laundered and ironed them and arranged them on the clothes butler with the rest of his dress for the day.

Trisha hopped off the bed, her heart racing as though she’d run up the cliff all the way from the beach to the palace. She took the proffered piece of cloth. It smelled like the palace, like sandalwood and history, and yet somehow it also smelled like her father, all-American like the Californian summer, gravelly earth and fresh-cut grass.

“I’d find out the cause of their blindness.” She lifted her glasses and dashed away the wetness.

“Bingo!” This time his smile lifted both sides of his mouth and lit up his eyes. His proud smile, the one Trisha lived for. He cupped her cheeks and dropped the fiercest kiss on her forehead, making joy burst inside her. “That’s my girl. Go find the cause. Then find out if their blindness can be fixed. Then do something with what you find.”

She had. She’d gone back to the orphanage. It had taken that entire summer, but she’d met with the doctors, procured the reports, and pored over them with HRH while her siblings and cousins lay on beach blankets by the crashing ocean and played rummy and Monopoly with the staff. She learned that a lot of those children had early-cataract-induced blindness. Some had retinal dislocation. Issues that had surgical fixes that the orphanage could not afford.

When they came home to California, Trisha had organized a mission of ophthalmic surgeons across the Bay Area to work with the doctors affiliated with the orphanage. Then she had convinced her mother to put together one of her fund-raisers and they had raised enough money for fifteen surgeries. By the end of that year, six boys and nine girls had regained their eyesight. There had been another four children who hadn’t been blind from birth. Their blindness had been related to the brain and none of the surgeons had been able to come up with solutions for it.

The project had gone on to become a global charity that performed eye surgeries. Her aunt who ran it had named it “Trisha for Sight.” Trisha was the Sanskrit word for “thirst.”

Trisha had gone on to choose skull-based neurosurgery as a specialization. She had never even considered anything else. Now here she was, the youngest member of Stanford’s neurosurgery team, and all she could think about was the blind girl’s hands on her face and how, try as she might, she couldn’t remember her name. And the fact that she had no idea how she was going to tell her patient that she was going to go blind.

Standing outside Emma Caine’s hospital room, she took a deep breath, and reminded herself that Emma had received a terminal diagnosis before she came to Trisha. Every surgeon Emma had gone to before had deemed her tumor inoperable. When Trisha had figured out a way to operate on the tumor, no one on her team had been surprised. The word genius might have been tossed about amid cheers. And not for the first time either.

It wasn’t like Trisha minded the label. She did love her work with the combined intensity of every single star in the sky, as her grandmother loved to say. Problem was, the word genius suggested ease. There had been nothing easy about developing the technology that was going to save Emma’s life. Trisha had spent every waking moment for the past five years thinking about how to operate on tumors growing on brain tissue without damaging the brain tissue. Actually, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t just her waking moments; she spent most nights dreaming about her work too.

Trisha pushed into Emma’s room and was greeted with a far-too-hopeful smile, and a very British “Hullo there, Dr. Raje!”

Emma had always said Trisha’s last name perfectly, without Trisha ever having to help with her usual “it’s Ra-jay just like the bird blue jay.”

Despite the electrodes stuck to Emma’s chest that fed her vitals to machines, despite the fact that she’d been in and out of hospitals for months, energy exploded out of Emma like the profusion of curls spilling from her high ponytail.

From the moment Emma had first walked into Trisha’s office and declared that she wasn’t ready to die, her case had consumed Trisha. Her almost fearlessly detached determination to beat her illness made her unlike any other patient Trisha had ever treated.

For the hundredth time that day Trisha reminded herself that she was going to save Emma’s life.

“I have something for you, Dr. Raje.” Emma’s heterochromatic eyes—one brown and one nearly black—shone with excitement as she pointed to a gift-wrapped package propped against the wall next to the bed.

Someone must have brought the package in, Trisha realized with relief. That meant Emma wasn’t alone today.

“Is your brother here?” Trisha asked, looking around the room in one of those ridiculous reflexes that followed a question like that, even though the room was obviously empty.

Emma had come to Trisha because Emma’s brother was an old friend of Trisha’s cousin Ashna. This happened a lot. Sometimes Trisha thought of her family’s network as an actual fishnet that stretched all the way around the globe. She was constantly seeing patients referred to her by someone who knew someone who knew her family. When Ashna had heard about Emma’s diagnosis from her brother, she had insisted Emma come to see Trisha, believing—correctly so, thank God—that Trisha would be able to help her.

Ashna and Trisha were the only two people in the family who had skipped inheriting the Raje social-charisma gene, so Trisha couldn’t help but be curious about this mythical old friend of Ashna’s. But she had yet to meet Emma’s mysterious brother.

“He had to go to work, but he was here earlier.” Emma always got the fiercest look in her eyes when she talked about her brother.

According to Ashna, when the man had found out about Emma’s tumor, he had actually quit some sort of fancy job in Paris, packed up his life, and moved here. Granted, Emma had been given six months to live by the doctors she had seen before Trisha. But still, there was something insanely noble about making that kind of sacrifice, something crazy large-hearted about setting aside the life you’d built when your family needed you.

There had been a time when Trisha’s own brother Yash would have dropped everything to help her, too. But that was before Yash’s dreams had become the only thing that mattered.

“I can come back when your brother is here.” Trisha picked up the package Emma was pointing at. “And you didn’t have to get me a present!”

“Open it,” Emma said, veritable sparks of excitement shining in her eyes.

Trisha stroked the thick handmade wrapping paper before peeling off the tape with care. Tucked inside was a canvas. Trisha reminded herself that an artist’s sight was no more precious than anyone else’s as she stared at the thickly broad-brushed oil painting and blinked as the vivid strokes swirled and danced forming what looked like . . . oh! Was that a fleshy orchid?

Nope. No. It was something a little more human than that.

Definitely a . . . umm . . . vagina? It was angled to look like lips, but there was no mistaking it, especially not if you’d studied anatomy. And they were . . . well, they were popping the cap off a bottle of Sam Adams.

For a full minute, all Trisha could do was blink at the painting like some sort of buffoon. Her face warmed and her lady parts, well, they did more than just warm—they clenched in the most mortifying way.

Emma grinned. “I call it Vagina Before Head.”

Something like a cough choked out of Trisha. “It’s . . . It’s . . . ”—vivid?—“wonderful . . .”

“It’s inspired by you,” Emma added, humor quirking her lips.

This time the laugh Trisha was trying to swallow burst out. If only Emma knew the truth. Given how much use Trisha got out of those particular muscles, popping anything with them was delusional at best. If not for the few and far between under-the-sheets sessions of surgeon-on-surgeon with Harry, things might have even started to atrophy.

“Thank you?” she said on a gulp, making Emma laugh until she teared up.

And it sobered Trisha. Her fingers stroked the painting, tracing the strength that Emma had harnessed with her brushstrokes. Once you got over the initial shock, it was an incredible piece. Not only had Emma understood and captured the force and mechanics of the action, but she’d topped it off with an almost operatic humor.

Maybe it was time for some Kegels?

For anything that made her feel stronger.

What was wrong with her? The news she had to deliver was good news, dammit!

Emma had to have seen something in Trisha’s face because the amusement in her dual-colored gaze fizzled. “The results for the scans came in, didn’t they?”

“Yes.” Trisha pulled up a chair and sat down next to Emma’s bed. For the first time in her life she envied her siblings their ability to tiptoe around feelings, to understand the darned things.

“Spit it out, Dr. Raje. I want to know.” Emma’s voice was adamant, her gaze steady.

Trisha did as she was told. “We knew there was a good chance that the tumor would be too close to the optic nerves. It isn’t just close, it’s wrapped around the nerves. Around both of them where they cross over.”

Emma looked away. Her eyes sought out Trisha’s hand, the one that was gripping her painting too tightly.

She said nothing.

Maybe Trisha should have waited for her to not be alone. Where the hell was this noble brother? “It’s still operable and the prognosis is encouraging. But there’s just no way to save the optic nerves.” She almost apologized, but it was ridiculous to say sorry for keeping Emma alive. “The surgery is our best chance to save your life.” All because Trisha had done nothing for years but work to make the impossible possible. “The robotic technology we’ll be using is spectacular. It can remove tumor tissue with minimal damage to brain tissue. It’s . . .” She trailed off when Emma bit down on her lip and squeezed her eyes shut.

A knock sounded on the half-open door, and the level of relief that flooded through Trisha bordered on pathetic. Her boss strode in, bringing with him his signature air of warmth and understanding.

“How are we this afternoon, Ms. Caine?” Dr. Entoff slid his hands under the sanitizer dispenser, then rubbed them together like one ready to fell demons on Emma’s behalf.

The poor man had tried hard over the years to teach Trisha some of that charming bedside manner. But if all her mother’s training had been wasted on her, there wasn’t much hope that anyone else might succeed. Trisha had never understood the big brouhaha over doctors’ bedside manners. She understood tumors. Those she knew exactly how to navigate, and destroy. Shouldn’t that be enough?

“Oh, I’m just peachy, ain’t I?” Emma snapped, her British accent sharpening to a bite. “Dr. Raje here just told me that I’m going to go blind.”

Dr. Entoff patted Emma’s hand, making the exact right amount of eye contact. “I’m truly sorry, Emma. We can’t control the location of the tumor, but we sure can remove it so it stops being a threat to your life.”

Trisha felt another rush of relief. She had spent all morning convincing her boss that the procedure was the right way to go. The new technique was still experimental, and convincing Entoff to use it on this case hadn’t been easy. A failed surgery would lead to bad press and bad press could kill the funding for further development of a technology that was going to save thousands of lives. But Trisha believed in this surgery enough to risk her career on it.

Emma’s only response was a belligerent thrust of the jaw.

Entoff made his way to the workstation and calmly started clicking through Emma’s records. “I know it’s a lot to take in. I would urge you to take some time to process this news. Discuss it with your family. We don’t need to make any decisions today. There are a few other experimental treatments that can slow down tumor growth and possibly impact life expectancy.”

Wait, what? Bedside manner was all well and dandy, but what fresh rubbish was this? Even if Entoff was only trying to keep the patient from going into full-blown panic, none of these experimental treatments were real options. Even if they did slow growth, without the surgery, the tumor would eventually get large enough to kill Emma, and the larger it grew, the smaller the chance of success with surgery would become. Giving her false hope just to make her feel like she had options made no sense to Trisha.

Before she could say anything, Emma turned a suddenly furious gaze on her. “Dr. Raje seems to think the surgery is my only option. Are you two not in agreement then?” Her tone had all the raw force of a bottle-cap-popping vagina.

Dr. Entoff channeled all the cool counterpressure of a beer bottle, and Trisha suddenly felt very much like a bent-up bottle cap. “We are in agreement that the surgery is the best option. But the technology is seminal—and if you feel like you want to explore other options, I want you to know that we will help you do that.” He threw Trisha a placating look and she forced herself to swallow her objection. “Having said that, I want to be clear that Dr. Raje has been working on the technology for years, and if she believes it’s ready, I would put my faith in her.”

The look Emma threw Trisha was a punch to the gut. “And you think losing my sight is my only option, Dr. Raje?”

Trisha met her gaze. “Yes. Removing the tumor is the only way to save your life. And we can’t remove the tumor and also salvage your optic nerves.”

Emma looked at her painting again, and Trisha tried to ignore the desperate pain in her eyes. Skirting the truth was not her job.

“I need to think about it,” Emma said finally.

Trisha stood, hugging the painting to her chest. But before she could get out the arguments that rushed up her throat Dr. Entoff cut her off.

“Of course,” he said. “We have more tests to run before we can schedule anything. Dr. Raje will go over the details of the procedure tomorrow and answer any questions you have.”

Again, Trisha almost objected, but then she thought about the noble brother. Maybe if he were present it would be easier to make Emma see sense.

Instead of responding, Emma stared off into the distance, no longer willing to meet Trisha’s eyes. For the first time since they’d met, instead of hope, despair wrapped itself around Emma, and it caught at something inside Trisha like a sharp hook piercing skin.

“TAKE HEART, TRISHA. We’re saving her life.” Her boss patted her shoulder kindly as they took the elevator to their offices. “Sometimes you need a soft touch.”

Trisha forced a smile. A soft touch hadn’t gotten her where she was.

They stepped out of the elevator. “That’s better. Now let’s turn that smile real, shall we?” He pointed to the surgeon’s lounge. “Care for a cup of coffee and some good news?” His grin was so wide, Trisha stopped midstep and turned to him. She knew what he was going to say even before he opened his mouth. “I just talked to the foundation director. He’s been trying to reach you. Your funding was approved.”

Trisha slapped her hand across her mouth but a squeak still escaped her. And then another one. A ten-million-dollar grant, for shit’s sake! She had just won her department its largest grant in history. They were going to fund the most ambitious multicenter clinical research for robotic brain surgery ever conceived.

“This proves that the rumors are true,” Entoff said. “We have a genius in our midst!” He had never made her work for his proud smile, but the one he was flashing at her now—the one that made him look like a man who was blessing the day he hired her—it made her want to pump her fist in vindication and shout Yes! Take that, Dad!

Instead, she took the hand he held out and thanked him for being such a great boss and mentor.

“No, Dr. Raje,” he said through that proud smile, “what I am is a very lucky boss.”

Damn straight!she wanted to yell. But she thanked him instead with all the poise she could muster.

Coffee was probably a bad idea given the adrenaline racing through her, but she took the cup her boss handed her, thanked the two colleagues who congratulated her with somewhat less enthusiasm, and carried the cup back to her office along with Emma’s painting. The first thing she did there was push the door shut and let out one woot . . . okay, two! But her heart wouldn’t stop racing. She’d done it. She’d done something no one else had ever done before her.

Without thinking about it, she dialed Nisha’s number. Her big sister was the only person who really understood how hard Trisha had worked on her grant and on this case. Her call went straight to voice mail. Right. Today was the big day.

Or more accurately, today was yet another big day. Tonight was yet another preannouncement shindig for her brother. Possibly the tenth “small celebration” Ma and Nisha had organized in the four weeks since Yash had decided to finally announce his candidacy for governor of California.

Within the last five years the venerable U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, Yash Raje, had foiled a terrorist attack on Alcatraz, hunted down a fifty-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme a bunch of venture capitalists were running out of Cupertino, and been instrumental in convincing the largest airplane manufacturer in the world to move to California. So really, who were they kidding with all this hush-hush around announcing his gubernatorial plans? If the people of the great state of California hadn’t guessed his intent by now, they were too idiotic to be worth governing.

Nonetheless, Nisha—the only one in the family who still discussed Yash’s career with Trisha—had assured her that there was a method to these things and currently that method involved their family systematically courting California’s elite to shore up Yash’s path so it held steady beneath his feet as he marched toward Sacramento and the destiny he had been groomed for since the day of his birth. Nisha managed Yash’s political campaigns, so she would know.

“Crazy busy right now. Need something?” Her sister’s text buzzed through. Trisha imagined Nisha, her hair elegantly twisted on top of her head, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand as she wrestled down the million moving parts that seemed to make up these events. Even the word “event” gave Trisha heart palpitations. Nisha, on the other hand, was a badass deftly putting out fires as they exploded in tiny mushroom clouds around her. For their brother.

Trisha realized with a start that she was still holding Emma’s painting—a painting about strength that she had inspired. The feeling of getting her skin caught in a hook tugged at her again, bringing with it a restlessness she couldn’t quite contain. She thought about Emma being by herself when Trisha had broken the news. She thought about the brother who had dropped his life and moved across continents to help her through it. Setting the canvas carefully on the desk she stared at her sister’s message on her phone. Then before she could stop herself, she tapped out her response. “Were you serious when you said I should come to tonight’s dinner?” She hit send before she could delete the words. Then instantly regretted doing it.

Within seconds her phone rang.

“Seriously?” Her sister sounded exactly like someone charting a war from a control tower.

Trisha couldn’t get herself to bring up the grant. She’d do it at the dinner. Because maybe it was time to go to one. “You’ve been saying I should come,” she said tentatively. “I’m free tonight.” The high of winning the grant had to have shrunk her brain.

The awkward beat of silence was swallowed up by a voice asking Nisha something about flowers. Nisha let off a string of instructions that sounded to Trisha like dolphins clicking, entirely indecipherable.

“Okay. That’s great,” Nisha said distractedly, when she came back on the line. “I’ll see you at six then.” That was it? Nothing about the years of campaign events Trisha had missed. Nothing about how HRH would react when he found out she was going to be there. “Do you have something to wear?”

Of course she didn’t. Thankfully, it was a rhetorical question. One her sister always asked before she decided exactly what Trisha should wear.

“Okay, I’ll take care of it.” Something clattered ominously in the background. “Gotta go. And do not be late. I mean it.”

Just that easily Nisha was done. A two-minute conversation to condense all those years of Nisha trying to mend the fences Trisha had burned down. And by “mend” Trisha meant “ignore.” Nisha subscribed to the ostrich philosophy for conflict resolution—if you acted like a problem didn’t exist, well, then it didn’t. In that respect Nisha was every inch their mother’s daughter.

HRH and Yash, on the other hand, were incapable of ever letting anything go.

It was too late to have second thoughts now. Trisha walked around her desk and sank into her chair.

Crap, who was she kidding? Second thoughts stampeded through her like a herd of wildebeests sensing a ravenous lion. She pressed her forehead into her desk, then banged it against the cool wood. She was a genius, dammit! Surely that meant she could handle a family dinner. Even one she wasn’t welcome at.

It had been fifteen years. Fifteen years since Trisha had been shut out of her brother’s political career, the family’s most precious dream. Finding excuses to avoid Yash’s rallies, and speeches, and celebrations for so long hadn’t been easy but she’d managed it, and the family had long since heaved a sigh of relief and stopped involving her. For fifteen years she had existed on the fringes of her family—where all was seemingly normal, because they were the Rajes, after all, but where the fact that she had almost destroyed her brother’s life hung in the air at all times, like a truth bubble ready to pop.

But Yash was finally running for governor—surely that meant things had turned out fine in the end. Maybe it was time to let the past go.

She maneuvered her Tesla up the curving, deeply forested drive that led to her parents’ Woodside home. The mechanical gates recognized her car and slid open under the wrought-iron arch that spelled out the name of the house she had grown up in: The Anchorage.

A rare nod to the old country. Houses in India all had names. Not just the mansions and the estates but every little bungalow and building had a name. Looking for the often grandly ill-fitting names displayed on the houses had been one of Trisha’s favorite pastimes as a child. Crumbling four-floor apartment blocks called “Royal Towers.” Tiny stone cottages called “Raj Mahal.” Metal placards and stenciled signs that proclaimed self-worth and told you that they were something more than just brick and concrete.

When Trisha’s parents had built this house, nestled into five acres of gorgeous redwood forests, her grandmother had called it “the Anchorage.” The name had been a tribute to her oldest son who had been a naval officer and the twenty-second maharaja before he died in the plane crash that had altered the family’s destiny. Only the family ever called their home by the name Aji had given it. To everyone else it was just a number on a private street. The way the rest of California did it.

Trisha pulled to a stop under the white-columned porte cochere. A caravan of parked cars signaled that the dinner was in full swing inside, underscoring the fact that she was late.

Because, yes, she was late. She hadn’t meant to be. Not on the day when she had recklessly decided to unfreeze herself out of banishment. Not when Nisha had probably taken the time out of her crazy day to prep their parents and Yash so this would be as easy as possible on Trisha.

Trisha hated not knowing how to handle things. Why couldn’t everything be like surgery? She had just excised an adenoma on a thirteen-year-old’s pituitary gland and known exactly what to do. Sure, the surgery had taken two hours longer than expected, and made her late, but a thirteen-year-old girl was going to get her life back. And sure, Trisha could have let another attending surgeon pick up the emergency surgery, but it had been the exact kind of procedure she loved. Complicated. The tumor had gone rogue and grown talons into brain tissue. Trisha had needed the sweet satisfaction of snuffing out every bit of that baby after her unexpected bout of bravado with her sister.

As if facing HRH and Yash weren’t scary enough, the idea of socializing with people she barely knew made Trisha want to gnaw her limbs off. Maybe she should turn around and go back to her condo.

She groaned the kind of groan one can only groan in the privacy of one’s car, loud and pathetic, and looked up at the bright white stucco facade, the marble columns, the black plantation shutters with Japanese roses and jasmine spilling from window boxes, and focused on the click of belonging that only ever happened here, in this place that mapped her life, this place where the memories of her at every age would always live.

Stepping out of the car, she handed her keys to the parking valet, a preening teen dressed like he was off to prom. One of Ma’s friends’ kids looking to impress her, no doubt. Ma was, after all, the Go-To Goddess for summer-internships-that-look-good-on-college-applications with her direct line to:

The managing director and head of general surgery at everyone’s favorite hospital, HRH, Dr. Shree Raje.

The United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, the most illustrious Yash Raje, and . . .

The youngest judge on the San Francisco county court, Trisha’s half-angel, half-saint brother-in-law, Neel Graff.

Speaking of said sainted brother-in-law, there was Neel now, smiling his sainted smile at Trisha, all dapper in what had to be an Armani jacket because her sister didn’t understand why anyone would want to wear suits that weren’t Armani. Although how Nisha could tell the difference between one suit and another Trisha would never understand. He tried to wave from under the assortment of garment bags and shoeboxes spilling from his hands. Only Neel could look just as comfortable buried under Nisha’s fashion emergency stash as with a gavel in hand doing his best by juvenile offenders.

Trisha thanked the prom-boy valet, who seemed a little too eager to get into her Tesla, and slid a few of the garment bags off Neel’s arm while dropping a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks, Neel. I’m so sorry to put you through this again.”

“Of course. It makes these things kinda fun.” He grinned and straightened his rimless glasses. If he was surprised that she was here, he hid it well and she loved him for it. “Nisha wants you to wear the green one.” He nodded at the green garment bag Trisha had taken from him. “But she thought you should have choices.”

They smiled knowingly at each other. If Nisha had decided on the green one, the green one it would be. Trisha was currently wearing standard-issue blue scrubs with a coffee stain that spanned her entire torso, which pretty much summed up her fashion expertise.

“Which shoes?” she asked.

Neel handed her a box and glanced at the stain painted across her chest. “Tough surgery?” He pointed to the cobblestone path that circled around the side of the house.

She followed him toward the pool house. “Hit the wrong artery. You wouldn’t believe the force of the blood.”

“You’ve been watching Kill Bill again, haven’t you?”

“It’s surgeon catnip. I can’t stop.” Smiling, she twisted around and pushed the door to the pool house open with her back. “Is Nisha going to come and help with my hair?” Because if she didn’t get to tell her sister about the grant in the next two minutes, she was going to burst. Plus, she had to know how Nisha had managed to break it to their father that she was going to be here.

“Your hair looks just—” Neel’s cell phone buzzed and he looked down at it. Her own phone sat dead in her pocket. She’d forgotten to charge it. “I’m not supposed to tell you your hair looks nice. Nisha’s sending someone. And you’ve got to hurry. There’s an angry emoji. She can’t believe you’re late.” He kept his face carefully neutral as he dumped the rest of the items he was carrying on the couch.

As he headed for the door, he stopped and turned around, reading off his phone again. “She says it’s okay. Don’t worry. Smiley emoji.” Neel did the most adorable subtle eye rolls he thought no one saw. “And she wants you to know you won’t be sorry you came.” He looked up from his wife’s message, the slightest flush on his cheeks. “An emoji’s winking at you, and fanning itself. And—oh, for heaven’s sake. Just hurry up and get in there. Apparently, there’s a butt in there you have to see to believe.”

TRISHA PUT HER dress on in record time. Not a small achievement given how complicated it was. Admittedly, it was a gorgeous green thing, but it was made up of innumerable stretchy silken bands that wrapped around her like a full-body postsurgical dressing, and it took almost as long to put on. Nisha insisted green went well with Trisha’s neither-too-dark-nor-too-light brown eyes, and her neither-too-dark-nor-too-light skin. It came down to just a little above her knees—a length Nisha insisted worked best for her five-foot-eight-inch frame that bordered on being too broad. And it was off-the-shoulder, a style her fashionista sister had undoubtedly chosen because it went well with Trisha’s neither-too-curly-nor-too-straight hair that was cut to hit just above her freakishly long neck.

She slipped her feet into the precariously high wedges and left the pool house feeling somewhat equipped to prodigal her way back into the fold. And ran right into J-Auntie, their housekeeper, waiting just outside the door in her usual silent-ninja style. Trisha prided herself for not jumping in fright.

“Trisha Baby, His Highness wants to see you.”

For Trisha’s entire life J-Auntie had only ever called HRH that, but it still made Trisha want to giggle like a six-year-old every time she heard it in that dead-serious tone.

J-Auntie didn’t crack a smile. No big surprise, she never smiled at anyone except Trisha’s two brothers. “He’s in his office. He wants you to use the public entrance.”

With that super ominous directive she strode away in measured steps, her body as severely held as her supertight jet-black bun.

So Trisha’s plan to avoid HRH wasn’t going to work then. She couldn’t quite remember when she and her siblings had started calling their father HRH, but it fit him perfectly. All you had to do was picture a photograph of a modern monarch of an Eastern nation in a pretentious glossy magazine—thick silver hair, proud brow, patrician nose—and there you had His Royal Highness the twenty-third maharaja of the princely state of Sripore. Even though it was a title he’d unexpectedly inherited after the death of his older brother.

The title meant nothing in America, of course, and HRH worked hard to keep it out of the family’s public narrative here, where assimilation was the word. The title no longer officially meant anything in India, either. Not that the staff at the Sagar Mahal or the media put too much stock in the Indian government’s stand on the matter. They were royalty, and that was a matter of blood and destiny, and Trisha’s grandfather had proven it by reclaiming the family’s power by throwing himself into the freedom struggle and then becoming a democratically elected member of Parliament as soon as India finally overthrew the British Raj in 1947.

Three decades after that, HRH, a second son, had migrated to America hoping for a grand adventure and a little bit of his own independence from all that royal legacy and ambition. Things hadn’t turned out quite the way he had expected and now all he ever seemed to focus on was legacy and ambition.

His summoning her was entirely unexpected because there were currently at least fifty people in the house who needed to be awed and inspired, and the fact that he was spending the time on her was more than a bit disconcerting. Would he throw her out? That wasn’t quite the HRH way. Silent disapproval had so much more gravitas. They had skirted each other for fifteen years, through family gatherings and working at the same hospital. It was amazing how easy it was to shut out problematic parts of your life when your work took up the entirety of your time and attention.

She had even forgotten when exactly she gave up bemoaning the loss of her title as her father’s precious little girl.

Could Dr. Entoff have told him about the grant?

Don’t get excited. Do not.

He had to have heard about the grant. They never interacted at work—they worked in different departments and it was a big hospital. Not too big for a thriving grapevine though. The excitement that bubbled inside her made her a certified idiot. Her grant, no matter how groundbreaking, couldn’t crack the surface of her father’s disapproval. Nothing could. Not after what she had done.

As instructed, she used the outside entrance to his office and took the half flight of stairs that led up to the heavy leaded-glass doors. The night was unusually warm for March but not warm enough to justify the sweat that gathered under her arms. With a cursory knock she let herself into the small mahogany-paneled waiting area. It was empty, as expected. She made her way through the open door of his office.

There he stood, across the pristinely ordered room infused with the smell of the leather-bound books lining the walls: HRH, in all his HRH glory. Perfectly groomed and tailored to highlight his tall, proud bearing. She sent a silent thank-you to her sister for making her look halfway civilized and for these heels that suddenly gave her a modicum of power.

He was staring out the window at the elegantly lit patio with a breathtaking view of the mountains. It was sprinkled with guests, who were no doubt contemplating the beauty of the estate and California’s good fortune that Yash Raje was about to deliver them from all their woes.

“I had told you this wasn’t over.” He opened with that, and without bothering to turn and look at Trisha.

Whatever was in his voice, it certainly wasn’t pride. Strike off Option One. This wasn’t about the grant. Something told her it wasn’t about the fact that she had decided to show up today either.

“What—” she began to ask, but he cut her off.

“That friend of yours is back in town.” The words reached her in slow motion, one clipped syllable at a time.

The sheen of perspiration she’d acquired from the stress of seeing him picked up the chill of his office and froze against her skin.

There was only one person he could be talking about, only one person who would dredge up all his anger at Trisha and trap it in his voice. Julia.

Julia was back in town?

Trisha hadn’t heard from her college roommate since their disastrous friendship ended in their sophomore year at Berkeley. Trisha’s family hadn’t even let her talk to Julia before they ran her out of town. She tried to breathe around the shame. All those years, and yet the kick of betrayal landed hard and swift between her ribs.

“Has she been in touch?” He still didn’t turn around and look at her.

Everything inside Trisha singed at the edges and burned inward. The pride for her grant, the anticipation of trying to make amends. All of it gone as though it had never existed in the first place. All her words were gone too. She shouldn’t have been surprised. There was nothing new about words failing her, especially when it came to her father. At least not since she had allowed Julia Wickham into their lives.

“Now is not the time to withdraw into your shell,” her father snapped impatiently.

“Thanks, Dad, now that you’ve issued the order, I’ll just stop with the withdrawing.” That’s what she wanted to say. But no one spoke to him that way. “Does Yash know?” she whispered instead, working to unlock her jaw.

Finally he turned around, his face flushed with rage. “No one is to tell Yash! Is that clear? He does not need the added stress of this. Steele is considering running against him in the primaries. Steele is a worthy adversary. A viable option for the party who could ruin everything. Our focus has to be making sure that does not happen.”

Trisha had no doubt that between Dad, Yash, and their considerable armaments, they would come up with something.

“You need to make sure she stays away from him.”

And how exactly was she supposed to do that? She hadn’t had any contact with the woman in fifteen years. She had only found out that she was in town three seconds ago. But sure, Dad, whatever you say.

The disappointment in his eyes would have hurt. If she weren’t so used to it. “He had a spotless record, Trisha. Spotless.”

Didn’t she know that? No one had stopped bludgeoning her with that little fact. She hadn’t stopped bludgeoning herself with it. She had done this, created a weak link in the chain of her brother’s otherwise flawless candidacy. She could apologize again, but how many times could you apologize for the same transgression? Not that all her apologies had ever meant anything to the family.

“If she makes any contact with you, you will report it to me immediately and you will not engage.”

Trisha suppressed the urge to laugh. As if she needed those orders. The last thing on earth she wanted was to have anything to do with Julia ever again. And if Julia was stupid enough to try and contact Trisha, her father’s spies would make reporting anything to him redundant.

“Yash makes the official announcement next month. There’s no margin for error anymore,” he said, enunciating each word as though speaking to an imbecile. “Does you being here today have anything to do with her being back in town?”

“Excuse me? What exactly are you accusing me of?” That’s what she wanted to say. “Of course not. I had no idea she was back.” That’s what she said instead, but at least she let her anger leak into her voice.

He had the gall to look taken aback at her tone.

Suddenly she wanted him to tell her to leave. Suddenly, she didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to face Yash.

“This dinner is important to your brother.”

Really? A dinner to gather support for his campaign for governor is important to Yash? Gee, Dad, thanks for filling me in!

A deep frown folded between his brows. “Was it too much to expect that you be on time?”

She almost blinked. From her father’s lips that sounded practically like an invitation to rejoin the Force. But she knew better. All this meant was that he wanted her where he could keep an eye on her.

That was it. They were done. He walked past her and left the office.

She may not be as infallible and brilliant as her oldest sibling, but she was pretty sure that meant she had been dismissed.

“Bye, Dad,” she whispered to the empty room and followed him out.

There you are, finally!” Her mother’s greeting made Trisha look up from adjusting the straps on the miraculously comfortable wedges Nisha had selected knowing full well Trisha’s talent for wobbling gracelessly in any other type of heels.

Ma, on the other hand, at sixty-five could pull off four-inch stilettos like no one else. To say nothing of how she rocked a hot-pink pantsuit. Not that anything she ever wore looked less than spectacular on her marathoner’s body. Her ex-Bollywood-star face didn’t hurt either. It was a good thing Nisha helped Trisha with clothes, because having to take fashion advice from a mother who wore everything better than you—and two sizes smaller—was just more torture than anyone should have to endure.

“You look lovely, Ma.” Every bit of the sulky awe she always felt around her mother bubbled up in her voice, making her feel like she was groping for approval as though it were high-hanging fruit on the tree she had fallen woefully far from. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

Her mother responded by tucking a lock of hair behind Trisha’s ear, doling out understanding—for her lateness, for the mess she had made, for everything—with her characteristic graceful nonchalance before reaching into her pocket and extracting a pair of solitaires. “I don’t understand how you can stand to go bare-eared. You’re a surgeon, you need to make sure your appearance doesn’t get masculine, too.”

Trisha took the earrings—and a calming breath—and slipped them on without bothering to answer. The list of things her mother would never understand about her was endless, especially where her appearance was concerned. Trisha would do anything to never let her mother see her in scrubs, clean or perpetually coffee stained.

“There you go, now you look like my Shasha,” Ma said, using Trisha’s nickname. “Regal, just like your dad.” Ma paused reverently the way she always did when she mentioned HRH—a pause so perfectly pitched it did the work of clashing cymbals to herald his magnificence. “By the way, there are at least three men in that room any single girl would kill for.” And there it was, the perpetual mantle of Trisha’s singleness. It had taken Ma precisely three sentences to bring up her grand flaw.

Funny how Ma had suddenly developed a problem with Trisha’s singleness the day she had graduated from med school. Until then Ma’s only concern ever had been Trisha’s grades and her career path. It was like being raised as one person and then being miraculously expected to leap across a chasm to being an entire different person. It reminded her of the chalk painting in Mary Poppins that magically transferred you between realities.

Trisha tried not to slouch like a gangly teen who didn’t have a date for homecoming. She wanted to tell her mother about the three surgeries she had done today, about Emma, about the grant. But before she could get any of that out, her mother took her hand and led her through the crowded living room where Trisha hoped she wasn’t about to introduce her to these men who supposedly turned single girls murderous.

The idea of her mother playing matchmaker for her was so mortifying she briefly considered telling her about Harry, her maybe-boyfriend-but-more-likely-casual-acquaintance-with-benefits. But the only thing Ma might find worse than her daughter’s inability to form relationships in her thirties was her daughter’s inability to know if she was actually in the relationship she might be in.

Suppressing another groan, she followed Ma into the dining room where the twenty-seater cherrywood table had been moved against one mahogany-paneled wall. Some fifty-odd people were scattered in groups around the room, their elegantly pitched voices creating nothing more than a harmonious din. The sixteenth-century Belgian crystal chandelier that usually lit up the table when it was just the family gathered around had been raised and dimmed. What the guests didn’t know was that the king of Belgium had presented it to her great-great-grandfather after they had become friends at Oxford.

The chandelier had hung for over a century in the Sagar Mahal. Her oldest uncle had shipped it to California as a housewarming gift when HRH built the Anchorage. There was a story there, involving a cricket ball and three young princes, and emergency superglue repairs to keep their father from finding out. HRH never talked about his brothers anymore, but Trisha remembered him laughing about it with Ma long ago.

As Ma stopped to let someone gush over her pantsuit, Trisha did a quick sweep of the room for HRH, but she didn’t spot him, thank God. She forced herself not to think about the expression on his face when he had informed her that the worst mistake of her life was back to haunt her.

Her sister wasn’t here either, which was frustrating. As soon as she told Nisha about the grant, she would feel less like pond scum. All she needed was for just one person to know and be excited for her. Telling Ma could wait until later, when she was less preoccupied.

Someone else waved Ma over and she gave Trisha’s hair another pat and tuck. “I’m glad you’re here.” The pain she let slip into her eyes proved the ostrich theory wasn’t failproof. How had Trisha never thought about how hard it had to be for Ma to deal with Trisha’s issues with Dad and Yash? “Make sure you find Yash and congratulate him before you go hide behind your sister, okay?” With that she clicked away toward a group of political wives who opened up their tight circle at her approach.

“Of course,” Trisha mumbled—because Ma was gone and couldn’t lecture her about how it was uncultured to mumble—and scanned the heads in suits to find her brother’s halo.

There he was. The soon-to-be governor of California. He looked as serene as ever, reminding her of the mythological Prince Karna from the stories Aji loved to tell. Born encased in armor and glowing from within, eternally protected by his father the Sun God himself. Yup, that would be our Yash.

Trisha watched as he did his practiced politician hug thing with the suit he was talking to. One hand on the shoulder, the other in a handshake, grip firm yet friendly. I’m here for you, that gesture said; I can fix everything.

She knew her brother meant it, believed it with every cell of his being, but the ease of the gesture made her despondent. It swallowed up the brother he had been, her Yash. And even after all these years of being shut out, she missed that brother every single day. That was the thing about Yash; even perfect strangers found it impossible to forget him after having met him once. Charisma, the media called it. Imagine being loved by him, she wanted to tell them. And then losing him.

Not that he had ever said an angry word to her after Julia had violated him in every way possible because Trisha had let her. There had been no confrontation, just a slow-bleeding falling-out, aided by the monstrous demands of their work and the constant presence of a plethora of people to hide behind at family gatherings. He didn’t even seem to notice, but standing here watching him like this brought back the full force of how very much the loss still hurt.

As if he could hear her thoughts, Yash’s eyes met Trisha’s over the bald patch of the man who had practically melted into an awestruck puddle beneath his touch. Yash was the only one of Trisha’s siblings and cousins who had inherited their grandfather’s gray eyes. A gray so unique Cosmo had felt the need to coin a term for it—Yash-Raje-Gray—in last month’s issue, the one that had featured him on a list of the country’s hottest politicians. What they didn’t know was that it was a genetic marking of their blue-blooded family, always inherited only by one child in every generation. It had skipped a generation for the first time with her father and his siblings, but it had returned with Yash. Of course it had.

When he first spotted her, those eyes lit up, and his smile flashed wide and carefree for a full instant before disappearing again behind the memories that had built a wall between them. He pulled on his public servant’s I’m-your-man mask that Trisha hated to admit wasn’t a mask anymore, but who her brother had now become. They had both come so far from being two kids who loved sneaking out the attic window to sit up on the roof where all they could see were the hills and all they could be was who they were.

He walked up to her and leaned in as if to give her a hug, but then she moved in the wrong direction and it all turned terribly awkward and he shook her hand instead.

“Congratulations, Yash,” she said, fighting to channel her mother’s graceful nonchalance instead of the stiffness that gripped her.

“How’s my favorite skull-based neurosurgeon?” Only Yash would use the exact right terminology to describe his sister’s surgical specialty.

“Super. Destroying rogue cells across the world one skull at a time. How’s my favorite messiah of the masses?”

He frowned at that, hurt flashing in his eyes. His mouth twitched as though he had something to say, as though he almost cared enough to say it. But then someone across the room caught his eye, someone more important than her, and he gave her an apologetic smile so practiced she wanted to punch him.

But then he raised a finger at the person, asking for a minute, and looked at her again. “I’m glad you decided to come today, Trisha,” he said sincerely, striking her speechless with surprise. “Is everything okay?” His eyes flicked briefly to the person who was waiting for him.

Trisha was tempted to grab his arm and apologize for missing years’ worth of his events, apologize for everything, again. She wanted to puke out all the mad highs and lows of her day at his feet the way she used to do back in school. She wanted to tell him that Julia was in town and HRH was hiding it from him. She wanted to do it so badly, she had to press a fist into her belly to hold it inside. In the end all she could say was, “Of course everything’s okay. Go.”

He did his pat and pass-over thing and moved on with a promise to catch up soon.

It was more than she had gotten from him in a very long time. Instead of feeling better, guilt grew spikes inside her. Before the full wallop of it overwhelmed her, she was saved by her sister’s voice.

“Don’t you look lovely!” Nisha said as she strolled over. Finally, a family member who knew exactly what she needed to hear.

Trisha grabbed her sister in a too-tight, too-long hug, then realized how ridiculous she was being and let her go.

Nisha cupped her cheek—always the big sister—and studied her handiwork. “The forest green is great on you. And the ankle straps on those wedges make your legs look endless. How is it fair that you can look this hot without even trying?”

Trisha grinned, because it was a fact universally acknowledged that she was an approval slut when it came to her family. She was about to burst forth with the story of her brilliant funding coup and Emma’s surgery when the wide doors that led to the tiered wooden deck opened and the guests started to pour out into the night for the fireworks display that was about to start. Unlike her, Nisha felt the need to greet every single person who passed by.

“My two favorite Rajes,” a warm and familiar voice said, and both Trisha and Nisha leaned over to give Dorna Matunge a hug. Dorna was one of the first female neurosurgeons in the country and also one of the first African American physician scientists. She had retired years before Trisha joined the neurosurgery department, but she was a dear friend of HRH and Ma’s, and an early supporter of Yash Raje for Governor.

More recently she had also become Trisha’s patient. She was wearing a black-and-gold sari and carrying it off with poise that belied her eighty-five years and the fact that she’d been fighting cancer for the past five of those. “I don’t understand why you Raje women don’t wear these beautiful saris more. Mina bought me this one from India, but if she’s not going to wear hers, I might as well steal all of them!”

Trisha smiled. “I’d wear one if I could carry it as well as you do, Dr. Matunge,” she said worshipfully. But she couldn’t imagine wearing a sari at a dinner like this. It would feel too much like a costume outside of an Indian wedding or a Diwali celebration.

Dorna patted her shoulder. “I’ll see you at my appointment next week.” Then she turned to Nisha. “The food was exquisite. I’m going to need the number of the chef!” And with that she followed the crowd to the patio.

As Trisha watched her walk away, she realized with horror that being this late meant she had arrived after the caterers had cleared out the food.

Her stomach let out a long, incredibly inelegant groan. Nisha’s eyes widened before she broke into giggles exactly the way her daughter, Mishka, did.

It wasn’t funny. Trisha had yet to eat today. “Please tell me the food isn’t entirely gone. I think I’ll die if I don’t eat right now.”

Nisha shook her head. “Not again. How can you wait until you’re dying of hunger before realizing you’re hungry?”

It was annoying as hell, but Nisha was right. Trisha found it impossible to remember to eat—or do anything else—when she got lost in her work. Then when she did remember, her hunger kicked in with such force that she could scarf down an entire pizza without stopping to breathe.

More laughter came from her sister, and no understanding whatsoever of her predicament. “Mishka is exactly like you. But she’s eight, for heaven’s sake!”

Her niece was the world’s most perfect human, so Trisha had no problem with the comparison.

“Did you go upstairs and see her?” her sister asked walking with her toward the kitchen.

“Of course I did.” Trisha had made a quick detour to the upper floor after her disastrous heart-to-heart with HRH. It was a matter of habit; the first thing she always did when she came to the Anchorage was go see their oldest cousin, Esha, and their grandmother. Both Esha and Aji lived here but they never left the upper floor when outsiders were in the house because Esha couldn’t handle the stimulation. Since this was a grown-ups’ party, Mishka got to stay up there with them while the rest of the family did what it did best: awe the good citizens of California.

When Trisha had gone up to their suite, Aji, Esha, and Mishka had been completely absorbed in their game of rummy. So Trisha had done no more than drop quick kisses on all three heads before coming back down to join the party. For years she had come and gone to the house and blocked out what had grown into the soul of the family—Yash’s political career. Being here today she wondered how she’d done it.

“Mishka is having fun with Esha and Aji up there. Good luck taking her home tonight.”

“I wasn’t planning on taking her home tonight.” Nisha’s eyes danced. “Neel has the day off tomorrow and I’ve been plying the good judge with fine wine all evening.” Her smile turned so suggestive that Trisha blushed, and she remembered that her sister had promised her something!

“Hey, I believe I was promised a butt that has to be seen to be believed!”

DJ CAINE STOPPED short at the kitchen door. His hand stilled on the heavy, tastefully antiqued brass handle. Something about the voice on the other side locked him in place and made him smile. DJ hadn’t smiled all day.

“I’d rather hear about the promised butt than your . . . your plans for later tonight,” the voice said. “And if you tell me he’s gone because the dress you chose for me took half an hour to put on, I’m going to kill you with my bare hands!”

DJ couldn’t help but laugh at that. There was something about that voice, husky and sultry with an underlying lilt of sweetness. It hit him exactly the way the blast of sunshine had hit him when he’d stepped out of San Francisco airport last month. And it made the tension that had clamped his shoulders all day ease in a quick rush. He leaned his forehead into the door and listened, enjoying how completely comfortable the person was laughing at herself.

DJ was almost afraid to push the door open and see what she looked like. A strange kind of anticipation bubbled inside him. It had been so long since he’d felt anything but a gnawing sadness that he indulged himself by standing there and soaking it in. Just for a few seconds before he got his arse back to work.

“There you are, boss,” Rajesh said behind him and DJ spun around with a little prayer that his assistant didn’t come bearing bad news. “The timer on the soufflés just went off and I’m not risking my job by—”

DJ sprinted past Rajesh and was at the ovens before the kid could finish that thought.

A chef never runs in the kitchen, Andre had taught him. Never ever. The soft scrape of Andre’s French r’s sounded in DJ’s head as he skidded to a stop in front of the ovens. He took a moment to allow his hands to steady before pulling the water bath lined with soufflé ramekins out. Plump and perfect. He held his breath, counting the seconds to see if they’d hold. He had yet to sink a soufflé. But every single time he made them, the experience shaved a bloody month off his life.

Leaning over the tray he inhaled deeply, letting the steam-laden aroma flood all the way through him. The soft green clouds edged with the most delicate golden crusts smelled as perfect as they looked. Pistachio with a hint of saffron. Was there even such a thing as a hint of saffron? It was the loudest understated spice, like a soft-spoken person you couldn’t stop listening to. Like the hidden lilts inside a well-held aria. Like the beauty within making what someone looked like on the outside meaningless, slowly, one encounter at a time. No matter how subtle you tried to make it, saffron always shone through, it became the soul of your preparation.

He nodded at Rajesh, who stood at the ready with the cashews DJ had candied to perfection with butter and brown sugar. He started to arrange three at the center of each ramekin in a clover of paisleys, then tucked a sugarwork swirl next to it to top things off just so.

“Have you seen the maal here, boss?” Rajesh said, pulling DJ out of his plating reverie.

Based on the glint in his assistant’s kohl-lined eyes, DJ was quite certain he wasn’t talking about the soufflé. Not that Rajesh talked about much other than women. DJ just wished he would stop calling them things like “packages” and “freight.” He’d asked him not to often enough, but Rajesh was twenty-one and blessed with the thick skin of the truly obnoxious. He was determinedly impervious to criticism.

“Have you ever seen Indian chicks so fancy? Strutting about as if they’re goris? Soft like rasgullas, hot like halwa!” He wiggled his eyebrows lecherously.

Good thing that plating the soufflés required the lightest touch and all his focus, because that meant DJ could block Rajesh out.

That didn’t stop Rajesh from blathering on. “Usually, I keep away from Indian chicks. Too much emotional drama. But doing these would be like drinking desi booze from fancy English crystal.” He made a sipping sound. “What say, boss?”

DJ straightened up. “How about we stay out of our client’s guests’ knickers and focus on work, what say you, boss?” he snapped and Rajesh looked appalled at the idea of staying out of anyone’s knickers.

DJ reminded himself that he needed an assistant and he could only afford this one because he worked for room and board. Add to that the whole moral obligation to Rajesh’s grandmother for her saving-his-life thing and DJ was well and truly stuck with him. The man was competent enough. And uncouth as he was, DJ couldn’t exactly set every wanker straight, now could he?

However, DJ could not afford to have Rajesh go anywhere near the client’s guests.

The fact that DJ had this job was nothing short of a miracle. A miracle called Ashna Raje. Ashna was one of the few friends DJ had in this world, and she’d proven that when it came to friends, quality mattered vastly more than quantity. Man, had she come through for him. First by getting his little sister in to see her cousin, who was some sort of genius surgeon at Stanford. That would have been above and beyond on its own, but then she had gotten him this gig with her aunt, Mina Raje.

He pulled out his phone and quickly checked to make sure he didn’t have any new messages from Emma. She had seen her surgeon today, but she was refusing to tell him what had happened over the phone. He felt horrible about not being at the hospital when she got the scan results, but without this job, there would be no money to pay for the scans or the surgery that was his little sister’s only hope.

Hope was something that hadn’t exactly been abundant these past few months. Not until this surgeon he’d never met had come along. It had been three months since Emma had collapsed while teaching at the nursing home where she worked as the resident art therapist. The monster headaches had turned out to be a tumor in her brain that was so unfortunately located that the doctors had labelled it inoperable and given her six months to live.

Emma being Emma, she had only told him after the doctors had declared that she was terminal. Up until then she’d faced everything alone. The day she had called him, DJ had quit his job at Andre’s. Two days later he had subleased his Paris flat and flown to San Francisco to find his little sister shrunken to half her size, one of her eyes a strange new light brown, unable to walk in a straight line.

She had learned how to walk holding his hand. He had taught her how to ride a bike, bought her her first sketchbook and box of paints. He had painted her little hand with a rainbow of colors and shown her how to stamp it on the paper, to transform it into peacocks and Christmas trees and daisies.

And she was alone right now in a hospital with information that would decide the course of their lives.

He looked at the time. It would be a few hours before he could get to the hospital. Until then he couldn’t let himself think about anything but dessert, which was all he had left to do. He quickly squeezed his fingers into his eyes and scrubbed them on his smock. He could not lose Emma. She was all he had.

“I mean it, Rajesh. Clients and their guests are strictly off-limits.”

The tosser winked at him. “Our client is that ancient Bollywood star. I’m most certainly not bonking that. Although have you seen the baps on the ol—”

“All right! I think these look about ready to go into the cooler for a bit. Do the honors, won’t you? I need to get my caramel started.” He turned away briskly, and luckily the man got to work. A world-class wanker he may be, but he understood how crucial it was for them to make a success out of this dinner. Without DJ’s help Rajesh would have to return to London, where, by all accounts, a number of boots were waiting to connect with his dangly bits.

As for DJ, he didn’t have the option to fail. Not with Emma’s treatment hanging in the balance. He had saved every penny he could while working with Andre. Paris was not a cheap place to live, but he didn’t have to live on avenue Montaigne like the other chefs in Andre’s crew. Growing up the way they had in London, in an attic flat in Rajesh’s grandmother’s Southall house, meant a Porte de La Villette studio had felt almost luxurious. As for being ridiculed by his peers, so long as they couldn’t ridicule his work, nothing else mattered.

Turned out it was a good thing he hadn’t picked up expensive habits, because after paying Emma’s astronomical medical bills and the deposit on his Palo Alto flat, all his savings were gone. He was as dead broke as he had been the day their mother died leaving them orphaned.

The good news was that he wasn’t sixteen anymore and he had this, his art. His food. And if this dinner continued to go the way it was going, if Mrs. Raje stood by her word and gave DJ the contract for her son’s fund-raising dinner next month based on tonight’s success . . . well, then they’d be fine.

Mrs. Raje had been more than impressed thus far. Everything from the steamed momos to the dum biryani had turned out just so. The mayor of San Francisco had even asked to speak to DJ after tasting the California blue crab with bitter coconut cream and tucked DJ’s card into his wallet.

Only dessert remained, and dessert was DJ’s crowning glory, his true love. With sugar he could make love to taste buds, make adult humans sob.

The reason Mina Raje had given him, a foreigner and a newbie, a shot at tonight was his Arabica bean gelato with dark caramel. DJ had created the dessert for her after spending a week researching her. Not just her favorite restaurants, but where she shopped, how she wore her clothes, what made her laugh, even the perfume she wore and how much. The taste buds drew from who you were. How you reacted to taste as a sense was a culmination of how you processed the world, the most primal form of how you interacted with your environment.

It was DJ’s greatest strength and weakness, needing to know what exact note of flavor unfurled a person. His need to find that chord and strum it was bone deep. It was why he had dreamed of being a private chef from the day he had walked into culinary school. After ten years of working at Andre’s, unable to cut the cord of financial security a paycheck provided, here he was, pushed—no, tossed out on his bum—into his dream by the threat of losing the only person in the world who meant anything.

Granted, he’d only had the chance to pitch for the job because Mrs. Raje was Ashna’s aunt, but turning the meeting into a gig had been all him. During the tasting, Mrs. Raje had done what most health-conscious women do, taken a small nibble of his gelato, meaning to simply taste it. After scraping the bottom of the bowl less than five minutes later, she had told him that she couldn’t remember the last time she had finished an entire serving of dessert. Then she had offered him the job.

Now he needed to make sure he got all her jobs going forward. He placed the heavy-bottomed pan on the stove. All that remained for him to do tonight was turn out a perfect salted caramel, and nothing had ever stopped DJ from doing that before.