The Shaadi Set-Up by Lillie Vale
Chapter 22
I get to Bluebill Cottage by a sheer stroke of luck. I’d raced to the ferry only to be told I’d just missed it since they’d just switched to their new end-of-August schedule, and there wouldn’t be another one for three hours. Right as my eye began twitching at the thought of waiting around, I saw a family with children at the marina loading up their yacht, and asked to bum a ride with them on their day trip to Rosalie.
After I put the food away in the fridge, I’m surprised to find Milan’s wallet and phone on the kitchen island. Why did he come back so soon? I strain to hear any sound of him, but the house is quiet. I didn’t think anything could be worse than yet another house full of yelling, but the cold silence is definitely worse. Silence means not talking, not even caring to try, and we’ve already had six years of that.
If I could do our fight over, I would have called him back to yell at him some more. Let him yell at me. At least we’d be talking through our problems.
Through the glass-enclosed dining room I can see Milan on the back porch, unpacking an oversize picnic basket on the patio table. Harrie runs through the open door. Milan crouches down in surprise, ruffling his fur, then scans the area for me.
I follow Harrie out, amazed at the sheer quantity of food on the glass tabletop. It must have cost a small fortune. On a comically large charcuterie board, Milan’s arranged different crackers, cubes and wedges of both hard and soft cheeses, and slivers of spicy cured salami and prosciutto. Little glass bowls hold rustic dijon mustard and deep colors of fruit preserves. I can smell tart cherry and make out smushed, jammy sweet apricots next to the baguette slices.
Before my eyes he brings out the sesame seed chikki that I love even more than the peanut brittle my mom makes at Christmas; sweet shankarpali, the deep-fried diamond-shaped sugar biscuits I used to eat by the fistful back in high school during an exam week; and spicy spirals of crispy bakarwadi stuffed with toasted coconut. All my favorite Indian snacks. There’s enough food to throw a party for thirty, and he’s still not done removing things from the basket.
I can only stare at him as he unloads a container of carrot sticks and plump red radishes, followed by a tub of perfectly round green grapes and small strawberries still on the vine. His lips are smudged berry pink as if he’s already helped himself while waiting.
I look away from his lips when my stomach gives an unhelpful twist, focusing instead on his hands as he finesses the board arrangement, getting everything to fit.
A mistake. Who knew knuckles could be sexy?
His tentative smile turns into a nervous swallow when I meet his gaze. “Rita, I’m sorry. I was a dick about you having fun in Paris. Part of that is because you did it all without me, and I . . . was a baby about that. So I thought, let me bring Paris to us. Oh, and the pretzels you like. Hearts, not sticks.”
Hearts, not sticks.
“When did you get here?” I ask, smitten, as I slide into the chair he pulls out for me.
He did all this, not even sure whether I’d be here today.
Milan looks sheepish. “I wanted to surprise you. When I saw you coming up the drive I hustled out here to set everything up.”
He proceeds to withdraw cornichons and garlic-stuffed olives, fig-and-olive crisps from Trader Joe’s, salted almonds and crunchy wasabi peas, candied ginger, and red pepper hummus swirled with olive oil, then shuts the picnic basket.
“I know this isn’t the real deal,” he broaches again, “but I chose things I thought you’d like. A charcuterie board like you’d have had there.”
“Just what the hell kind of budget do you think I had?” I help myself to a cracker, loading it up with hummus. “I was an only-slightly-better-off-than-broke college student who wrecked her souvenir budget because she had to buy a new phone the second she landed. I was mostly eating fresh bread, sidewalk Nutella crêpes, and farmer’s market fruit. Nothing like this.”
It’s meant as a compliment, but his face falls. “So it’s not the same?”
“No! That’s not what I meant. This is lovely.” I stare down at my lap, clearing my throat. “It wasn’t, you know. As perfect as it might have looked. I mean, it was fun. But.”
But it wasn’t with you.
He sits, too. “Why did you need a new phone?” he asks, pulling some grapes off the stem. He offers me one, so polite. I take it, my fingers grazing his for a brief, electric second.
His hands tighten around the neck of a bottle of prosecco, thumb stroking the narrowest part and coming away wet with condensation.
I pop the grape in my mouth, trying not to choke when I see Milan’s eyes, dark and intense, watching me. Juice floods into my mouth.
He bites his lower lip as he drives in the corkscrew. “Are you enjoying it?” he asks, oblivious to the fact that I’ve turned into a live wire, and his thumb stroking is going straight between my legs.
Pop!The cork shoots out.
The grape skin sticks in my throat.
“So why did you need a new phone, anyway?” he asks. “You loved your iPhone like it was your baby.”
Here’s my opening. My chance to be that brave, fearless girl.
“Yeah, well, it was the same model as Serena van der Woodsen’s,” I say, forcing a laugh. I want to ask him about the voicemail, about that whole day, but I can’t do it when he’s looking at me with such undivided attention. “I even got her case to match,” I rattle off.
Milan cracks a smile. “How could I forget Gossip Girl and all those dramas you’d get me to watch with you? Friday Night Lights, that one show you said was about basketball but it wasn’t, and oh, that one about werewolves and vampires.”
He’s looking at me again, a question in his eyes. A simple question that I haven’t answered yet.
“I dropped my phone,” I answer. “The screen cracked. It was basically unusable. I had to buy one of those cheap ones with a European SIM at the airport.”
Realization dawns on his face. “That’s why you didn’t return my calls. I tried reaching you a dozen times the first week, but it just kept ringing and ringing and ringing.”
“To be fair,” I say, drawing circles on the glass top, trying and failing to dodge his eyes, “even if I had gotten those calls, I probably wouldn’t have answered.”
“I told you I never broke up with you,” he says in a rush, scowling.
“Your voice in my ear, telling me that it was all my fault . . . That was the first thing I heard when I got off the plane.” I fidget with a piece of spicy salami, tearing it into shreds over a cracker. “The last thing I heard from you.”
My breathing staggers. “That’s why I dropped my phone. You broke my heart, and I had to gather the pieces back together and keep going, or fly home and explain things to my folks when I didn’t even understand it myself.”
The tortured expression on Milan’s face almost undoes me, but I have to keep going. If I lose my nerve now, I’ll never say it.
“So if it looked like I was having the time of my life without you, what you didn’t see was that outside the frame, I was missing you in the pit of my stomach every time I had to do something alone, or with someone else, when all I wanted was to share that experience with you. A broken phone I could replace, but the rest . . .” I swallow. “Can I ask you something?”
He doesn’t even have to think about it. “Anything.”
“After the voicemail where you ended things, or, where I thought you ended things, what happened next? Did you— Did you get cut off? Did you call me back? Did you . . . regret it?”
He stares at me. The breeze picks up, ruffles his hair so it flops across his forehead à la sexy Hugh Grant. He drags his hand through it, pushing it back, but his hair has other ideas.
“I wasn’t breaking up with you,” he says finally. “I was trying to tell you I just needed a break that summer to get back on track academically, but I had maxed out the voicemail time limit. And by the time I realized it, I wanted to take back everything I said and apologize, but I didn’t know what to say that would absolve all the other crap.”
“Was it crap, though? You sounded pretty sure of yourself when you were blaming me.”
His eyes flash, and I brace myself for him to launch a defense, but then he says, “I was twenty. I was a dumbass. Anything was easier than accepting responsibility for my own fuckups. I did leave another voicemail after that first one. I wish to god you’d heard it.”
I wait for him to expand. After an agonizing lull, I ask, “That’s it?”
He holds his hands out in front of me helplessly. “At best, all I have is justification, and that’s not going to be helpful. I was wrong to blame you, Rita. I’m sorry.”
There it is. I finally have my apology. But it doesn’t make me feel any better.
“What did you say?” I ask. “In the second voicemail.”
Milan’s lips quirk into a sad sort of smile. “I don’t remember. I wish I did. All I know is I’d calmed down by then and it hit me like a fucking truck that I’d been a jerk.” He releases a bark of self-deprecating laughter. “The only part I remember is saying ‘Please don’t dump me, I know I’m a jerk.’ ”
Pressure builds behind my eyes. We each thought the other had dumped us.
He sighs with the weight of six years. “I should have pounded down your front door the second you came home. I should have rushed to the airport with flowers. There are a thousand chances I should have taken, and I still want to kick myself for letting all of them go without a fight. Letting you go without a—” He doesn’t say it, but it lingers between us megaphone loud.
This was the truth I was so desperate to find earlier today. I feel pinched and small, flattened in a trash compactor.
“Six years lost,” I say, stomach churning in an angry, sickening whorl. Is it grief? Is it anger? I can’t tell. The two are joined too deeply now, too part of each other to separate and identify. “That voicemail . . . lost. Gone forever.”
The ripped salami looks forlorn and unappetizing now, but I force it down, anyway.
“You asked me if I regretted it,” states Milan. “Of course I did. How could I not? I regret it more than anything in the world.”
But we’d both said nothing. We’d both done nothing.
The first real obstacle in our relationship and we’d folded like it wasn’t worth a damn.
“The time we were apart is spent, but it’s not gone,” he says. “Tell me about your life. Catch me up to the day we met again at your parents’ house. Give us that time back.”
His last sentence engraves itself on my mind like the gel pen heart drawn on my Lisa Frank folder. Tracing the heart and the initials over and over, deeper and deeper until the baby-pink ink turned into an indent of magenta.
Give it back? This isn’t a forgotten scrunchie that can be returned.
“I never thought of you as naive, Milan. It doesn’t work like that.”
He dips his head. “Tell me anyway. I want to know you.”
I’m doubtful he wants to know about other boyfriends, the times something reminded me of him and I soaked a pillow with the tears, the sweet Chihuahua I almost adopted until I saw her collar said “Millie.” I’d always thought if we’d had a daughter, we’d call her Millie. I’d even made us a Sims family in high school that I’d never told him about just in case he thought it was as weird as Raj did.
So I tell him some more about Europe, college, and starting Dharma Designs. Milan munches on almonds, asking questions at the right time, but my heart isn’t in it anymore, walking him through memories with giant, gaping Milan-sized holes in them.
He’s silent for a long moment, taking it all in, before he finally collects his thoughts enough to say: “There’s one thing I don’t understand. You helped me with two houses, all the while believing I’d treated you like crap.” His eyebrows draw together. “The first house you were put on the spot, fine. But you could have said no to coming to Rosalie. In fact, you did, at first. What changed?”
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t posed the same question to myself a dozen times.
Each time came with a different answer, all true, but none quite the full story: I didn’t want to see Neil while he was going on dates with MyShaadi girls, so Milan was any port in a storm; shitty service on Rosalie Island meant I could plausibly evade my mom’s calls (and the demanded Milan play-by-play); I wanted a break from my life, taking a walk down memory lane before returning to the regularly scheduled programming.
“I did feel a little jerked around at first,” I admit. “A marionette on a string. I don’t blame my mom. She thought she was doing the right thing. A big part of me wanted to rebel against giving our moms what they wanted.”
I crook my lips. “I don’t want to be browbeaten or manipulated. I want to make my own choices, even if they aren’t the right ones, because at least they’re mine.”
Milan nods and takes the carrot stick dunked in the hummus, forgetting that I was the one who’d put it there. “I had the same knee-jerk reaction. But I’ve spent too much time pissed at my parents. Our relationship finally feels good again. I couldn’t be angry at my mom for this, too. Not when it’s what I always—” He snaps the carrot stick in half, then looks down in surprise.
Worrying my lower lip, I say, “Speaking of choices, do you want to tell me why you failed your classes and lost your scholarship? In high school, you tied for valedictorian. You were the only kid who used study hall for studying and not sleeping. How do you of all people fail?”
It’s been gnawing at me ever since I first heard his voicemail. It had never made sense that someone like Milan, so conscientious and thorough, would let his academics slide.
His jaw tightens and a wall goes up in his eyes.
It’s clear I’ve hit a nerve, but what am I supposed to do? Not ask a question that’s been plaguing me for six years?
“Milan,” I say, vocal cords dry and tight and strangled. “I want to know about you, too.”
He finishes chewing. “You don’t want to know this version of me,” he says. “Hell, there were times even I had trouble recognizing myself. I know you said you’d apply somewhere closer to UNC, but I was so damn proud of you for getting into such a prestigious program. It made no sense for you to give up your dream school just to stay local for me.”
I start to protest but he shakes his head. “I had no idea what I wanted to study, so investment management seemed as good a career as any. And it’s not even like I hated business classes, I just couldn’t find a reason to get excited about much of anything without you here.
“We were used to texting over most of the summer when one or the other of us were in India visiting family, and I thought long distance would be just like that. But it wasn’t. The first semester, I tried to be the one there for you. You were staying cooped up in your dorm room, convinced your roommate hated you, and you didn’t want to sit by yourself in the dining hall. I was worried. So I’d message you during class instead of paying attention to the lecture, and assumed I could easily catch up on the material.”
I jolted. I’d always assumed he was as lonely as I was, wanting to look busy on his phone so no else knew just how much.
“Eventually you made new friends, though,” says Milan, “and . . . it sucked when you told me stories or talked about people I didn’t know. I didn’t want to get recaps for every story; I wanted to just know it, because I’d lived it with you.
“I could never bring myself to say goodbye in order to hit the books or go to class. I told myself I’d work into the night to get back on track, but with the time difference . . . you were three hours behind, and I hated not falling asleep together. So all those times we video chatted or watched movies together, you assumed I was done with my assignments, but the truth was I usually hadn’t even started. And eventually I couldn’t catch up anymore.”
I’ve never felt smaller. Milan thought I’d see him in a different light when I knew the truth, but no, this speaks volumes about me.
In the beginning, aware of the time difference between California and North Carolina, I’d jokingly told him to go to bed, and he’d always waved me off by saying he didn’t have an early morning class the next day. I’d just assumed it was fine, that he was managing his time well.
“So . . . um . . . now you know.” He rubs at his nose, giving me a weak smile.
I can’t return it. “I’m so sorry,” I say.
His forehead scrunches into lines. “For what?”
I swallow. “I had no idea.”
He shakes his head swiftly. “There’s no reason you should have. Like you said, I had good study habits in high school. You couldn’t have known.”
“But I took it for granted that you had a handle on everything. I feel so selfish now.”
“You were eighteen,” he corrects. “In a new, exciting place doing exactly what you wanted to be doing. It wasn’t your job to look out for—”
“Of course it was, Milan! We were in a relationship.” I shake my head.
“Rita, no. I was wrong to unload that voicemail when you had zero clue about what was going on. I could have told you at any time, but I didn’t. The last six years are not on you.”
But of course they are. How can they not be?
Maybe he sees some of the despair on my face, because he leans in, eyes softening. “I’m so sorry for that voicemail. And for not coming to see you when you came back home. And for freaking out on you yesterday. I was one hundred percent trying to pick a fight because it hurt too much to be that close to you and not tell you how I felt.”
I understand. “But the longer we were here, the more you wanted to stay,” I whisper.
His throat bobs as he jerks his head Yes.
“I want to show you something,” I say, holding out my hand. “Come with me.”
We go to the dining room so I can show him the trestle table. The wide legs are the perfect canvas for the beach panorama. Wild ponies trekking between sand dunes and tall, wispy beach grass painted in soft shades of brown. Bluebill Cottage overlooking the faded footprints that go from one side of the table to the other.
I hang back, let Milan follow the tracks around the corner. His eyes widen when he sees the side view of the couple. They could be anybody; small and featureless, except for one thing.
The parakeet-green scrunchie worn in the girl’s dark hair.
He crouches down, hands gripping the table edge.
“This is the scrunchie I returned to you at your house,” he states.
“Yes.”
He rises, meeting my eyes. “Is this what you’ve been working on?”
I nod. “There had to be some way to mark our time here. Leave a little piece of ourselves behind.”
His lips crook into a crooked grin. “Like the forget-me-nots.”
—
Back on the porch, Milan opens a second bottle of prosecco halfway through catching me up on everything else I’ve missed in his life. “I was irresponsible with my partial scholarship and their money, but I don’t think I’ll ever forgive my parents for stopping me going to the airport.”
I sputter midway through sucking garlic out of the olive. “What?”
“It’s why I left you that bizarro voicemail,” he explains. “I procrastinated on signing up to retake some of my failed classes in summer because I didn’t want to have to ask Dad for the money. So, some alarm bells went off when I asked them for a check to drop at the bursar’s office the morning of the flight.”
“Oh, Milan,” I say with an exhale.
Desi parents do not react well to eleventh-hour surprises.
He gives me a rueful look as he taps his fingers silently against his glass, then refills it, as if he’s building up to the rest of the story. “My dad asked what courses, and I told him, not thinking for a minute that he’d remember I’d already taken them.”
I can see where this is going.
“But, of course, he recognized all the courses right away, and from there it all unraveled pretty quick.” His breath comes out staggered, unsteady. “It was the worst fight we’ve ever had. I’m sure the neighbors thought someone was being murdered. Dad was shouting. Mom was screaming. I don’t blame them. I deserved the fallout.”
“Your voicemail was a mess,” I murmur. “Stricken and panicked and so, so lost.”
His lips part, incredulous. “You remember that?”
I remember every word, but maybe it’s better to leave it in the past.
“Anyway,” he says, rushed, like he’s embarrassed, “I had to ask them for my passport a couple of hours later, and Mom hit the roof. She couldn’t believe that I was still actually leaving, but I knew you were already in the air. I promised I’d buckle down after we got back home, but . . .”
“They weren’t having it,” I say.
Milan’s forehead creases into a frown. “Mom flung the passport at my feet. Said if I walked out that door, I could forget about them paying for those summer classes, let alone any other semester.”
My heart squeezes. So he stayed for money.
“No, that’s not why I didn’t meet you,” he says, seeing the look on my face.
Most other Indian kids I know either got a full or partial scholarship, or a free ride on their parents’ dime, with the implicit understanding that they would study what their parents wanted. It was hard to put your foot down when it meant turning your back on financial assistance you didn’t have to pay back—at least not directly.
“I stormed off to my room pissed. At myself. At them. Even a little at you.” He interlocks his fingers, clasps his hands as if in prayer. “The first thing on my mind was talking to you. Only I messed that up, too.”
My heart twists. “I wish I’d known. That was a lot for you to handle on your own.”
“There’s nothing you could have done.”
“Don’t. Don’t do that. I could have been there for you, damn it.”
I don’t want to center myself, but it tears at me that I didn’t even have the chance to help him. In keeping his difficulties to himself, he robbed me—us—of the chance to make it through the dark clouds together. Stronger for it.
His laugh is bitter. “I went and spoke to my advisor right away, and while I didn’t get my original scholarship back, he said a lot of scholarship money winds up just sitting there because people don’t apply for the smaller ones.”
I’ve heard that from Dad, too, ever since he started teaching.
“So that’s what I did. I got a job as a department assistant and in the campus bookstore, working every hour I could get to pay my parents back for summer classes.”
“They forced you to pay them back even after you canceled your trip?”
“Oh no, no,” says Milan. “When I presented them with the check, they were mortified. The idea that I thought I had to pay them back for anything made them feel like bad parents. Dad refused to deposit it. But they were right—I wasted their money, and I know how hard they worked to save up for my education.”
There’s a sour film coating my tongue. He had to work so hard to make up for how much I distracted him. I swallow past it. “It’s commendable that you paid them back.”
But his story’s not done yet.
“The next semester,” he says, “a real estate agent from High Castle came to talk in one of my elective classes, and they said their interns got paid twenty hours a week plus academic credit. Figured it didn’t hurt to try?” A rueful smile takes over his face. “Josh Bell took one look at my GPA and almost showed me the door. Somehow I convinced him how badly I wanted it and he gave me a chance. Who would have thought that I’d be that good at it?”
For the first time, there’s a note of pride in his voice. “I didn’t accept another penny of my parents’ money. Then Josh said if I passed the licensing exam, he’d hire me and pay me back the cost of the test. I loved the work, so . . . I had everything to gain.”
Suddenly, his place on the High Castle Royalty wall makes sense.
“Wait, so is that how you got promoted to junior partner so fast?” I gape. “I thought it was weird, but you’ve been working there for years longer than I thought.”
“I switched to the real estate concentration. I worked full time—more than full time, really—to put myself through school part time. I only graduated last year.”
When I’m quiet a few beats too long, Milan gives me puppy-dog say-something-say-anything eyes.
He seems so nervous about what I’m going to make of all this, but how can I be anything other than awed? He’s accomplished so much on his own to prove he wasn’t a fuckup to his parents. He’s done himself proud, and I don’t know how to tell him that I’m proud of him, too.
I reach for his hand, settling my palm over his fingers and slotting my fingers in the valleys between his knuckles. He stills abruptly, breath caught on a gasp. His skin is warmer than mine, and even though there aren’t any static shocks, my entire arm tingles. When I run my thumb over the inside of his wrist, his signature move, his upper body jolts, fingers flexing.
“Milan,” I say, soft as down. “You’re wrong. I want to know every version of you. The one who splurges on food because he knows I’ll love it. The maddening man who will argue for the sake of arguing about two shades of blue tile that’re almost exactly the same. The guy who uses even his failures to learn and succeed. We’re both so much more than the sum of our parts.”