Ashna was so tired. So sick of the apologies.
But Shobi’s words turned over inside her, filling the vacuum Rico’s words had left behind.
“Can we talk when you get home?” Shobi said, voice unrecognizably soft.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I have to go.” Ashna ended the call and picked up her pace.
All her memories around Baba’s death were fuzzy, like someone had gone over them with a marker and blacked parts out. The only clear part was the blood. It was a good thing Rico left her. His betrayal turned out to be a kindness. There was no way she could have faced him when she couldn’t see past the blood on her hands. Too dirty for him, too damaged for anything beautiful.
I love you, Ash. I’ll do whatever you want to make myself worthy of you. Please don’t leave me. I’m going to start playing again. I’m leaving for the UK. Please, just call me back.
When she got that message it was too late. It had been the last time she heard his voice.
Don’t ever contact me again. We can’t be together.
After sending that last message, Ashna had pulled her hand back and thrown her phone into the bay. The last time she’d made a throw. The last time she’d expected to say anything to the boy she loved. She wished her last memory of him wasn’t him calling her father a sick asshole.
Months before, Baba had sent in an application for her to Le Cordon Bleu. A week after the private cremation, she had left the ashes to her aunt and uncle to spread over the cliffs at the Sagar Mahal and flown to Paris and started at the culinary school. The family had used all its influence to hide Baba’s suicide and keep it out of the papers. Baba had never had friends, but his patrons believed he’d gone back to India and left the restaurant to Aseem and Baba’s executive chef.
In Paris, cooking hadn’t given her solace per se, but it had connected her somehow to Baba and eased the boulder of guilt off her chest. Growing up, Ashna had hated being in the kitchen or having anything to do with food. At first it was because she’d wanted to be outside with a ball, but then Baba’s insistence on everything to do with food being just so had felt stifling. This is how biryani must be cooked. This is how a crab shell must be cracked. This is how trifle pudding must be eaten. Focus on the food, Ashna; how will you taste it if you’re too busy talking?
In Paris, his rules, which she had found suffocating growing up, had become comforting. The exact opposite of how Rico had gone back to soccer. He’d found freedom in it and she’d used it to lock herself up. Cooking had been Ashna’s long-drawn-out apology. Every chop, stir, dice had felt like she was doing something to erase what she had caused.
Then Baba’s executive chef and Aseem had absconded with money embezzled from the restaurant over the two years she was in Paris. Ashna had come home to find Curried Dreams stripped dry, its glory gone. Her uncle and aunt wanted to press charges, but the scandal would make the suicide public. No one wanted to open up those wounds, least of all Ashna.
Her first day back at Curried Dreams, she had been filled with resolve, if not hope, that she would turn things around. Everything she’d learned in Paris had been bursting from her fingers.
Then she had tried to make a curried coq au vin.
The panic attack was so severe, she passed out from it. A horrible black gunk had choked her lungs. Congealed blood had filled her nose. The boom of a bullet had deafened her. Over and over and over again, making her heartbeat race to exploding.
She had woken up surrounded by her staff looking down at her on Baba’s kitchen floor.
Instinctively her hands had turned to Baba’s recipes. Recipes she’d placed no value on when he lived. She remembered thinking them too rich, too heavy, too dated. Now it was all she could manage with her chef’s hands. It was the only way to avoid the boom of the gunshot, the near explosion in her chest from the palpitations.
Staring down at her hands, she tried to bring her focus back to her phone, gripped too tightly in her hands.
Where are you? A text from China.
Rico had passed a rolling pin to her that first day, when panic had made her hands tremble.
I’m almost there. She texted back and broke into a jog. The beating of her heart felt somehow different in her chest.
SO excited for today’s show, China texted back. Then, You know how much I love you, right?
Ashna texted a heart back, thanking the gods of technology for emojis.
My pai always said that you couldn’t win unless you played like the game was a matter of life and death. That’s how you keep the goal, Ash.
Sadness and anger overwhelmed her. She had missed Rico’s return to the game, missed something she had hoped and prayed for with all her heart.
So he hadn’t fought for her, for them. But he’d fought for something and won. While here she was. Could it be that he was right? Until she’d met Rico, she had never really given happiness any thought. With her cousins she’d always felt gratitude for having them, more love sometimes than she could bear. It had come with a definitive sense that she wasn’t like them. Never in her life had she expected to feel what she had felt with Rico, that bursting, full-bodied joy of being enough. When she’d tasted it briefly and lost it, she hadn’t questioned the loss.
It had felt natural, inevitable.
How did you fight what was natural and inevitable?
The bubble of emptiness she’d been trying to breathe around for years pushed to the surface. She needed a win.
As she got back to the studio, for the first time in years she felt the adrenaline in her veins. Pushing away the kick of fear and anxiety, she reminded herself that she had cooked just fine in Paris. That she had only developed her phobia of cooking off-script after coming home to Curried Dreams, after letting someone run it into the ground.
Blood and guilt.
Keep your mind on Paris. Don’t think about the panic, she told herself as she made her way through the isolated lobby and to the green room. Everyone else was done with their hair and makeup and was already in the staging area. Jenny, the HMU artist, made quick work of Ashna’s face and touched up her bun.
“I wish you would leave it down,” Jenny said. “It’s so pretty.”
“Never in the kitchen,” Ashna told her. “My first boss would hunt me down.” Andre had sent her a text wishing her luck that morning, so she knew he would be watching the show.
Keep your mind on Paris.
The pulse of panic beat faintly in the pit of her stomach as she made her way into the studio. If she had a panic attack they would just have to roll her out on a stretcher.
God, were they going to have to roll her out on a stretcher?
The image of Rico being carried out of her restaurant sprang to life in her mind just as her eyes found him across the room. His athletic form was slumped over his phone at their kitchen station. He looked up and relief flooded his eyes at the sight of her.
Less than an hour ago this had felt impossible: being here, facing a cooking challenge.
He stepped toward her and something moved beneath the relief in his eyes like dark shadows.
“What happened?” she asked. “You’re in pain.”
He swallowed instead of answering.
She looked at his knee, hands itching with the need to touch him.
“I’m fine.” But the tightness around his eyes and mouth said he wasn’t.