Rico had waited there all night. She hadn’t come back. No matter how much he’d begged after that, she hadn’t come back.
“What did your father say to you, Ash? What did he say that changed everything?”
She pushed her hair off her face with both hands and gaped at him, so much horror in her face it was like these past hours hadn’t happened.
“I had never fought with my father, Rico. Never. Not until that day when I told him I couldn’t live without you, and I wasn’t going to. But when I came to you, you had already met him and you didn’t want me. Not after you’d seen the ugliness I came from. Just the way my father said you wouldn’t.”
“I sat under those bleachers all night, waiting for you to come back. You didn’t answer my calls. Didn’t respond to my texts. And then you told me you were done with me. You didn’t even ask what he said to me. He called my mother a whore, Ash. He was terrible to your mother, too. A real charmer you’ve got there. How can you believe anything he says?”
She sank down on the bench next to her, breathing hard. Something was very wrong. She looked up at him and he knew her response would change everything. Like the silence in a piece of music before it hits a crescendo.
“He died.”
The muted horror in her eyes said there was more.
“When?”
Her hand pressed into her belly. “Twelve years this month.”
“Twelve years this month,” his whisper echoed hers, knowing exactly where they’d been twelve years ago. Done with high school. Excited about their future together. She on her way to UCLA on a soccer scholarship. Him taking a year off. Maybe coaching for their high school until he had enough money to figure out what he wanted to do. His father’s friend, his old coach from Rio, had taken a managerial position with Sunderland and he’d been trying to get Rico to try out. But at that point playing had still felt impossible.
He sat down next to her, but she was staring straight ahead at the gold wallpaper.
“How did it happen?”
Her hands clasped together and pressed into her lips, memories flashing in her eyes, creasing her forehead.
“He shot himself in the head.” She spoke the words loud and clear, as though practicing diction. “That day.”
“Oh God.” He lifted his hand to reach for hers, but she jerked back.
Silence wrapped around them, a silence so corrosive, it shoved miles and years between them.
“That’s why you didn’t come back.”
She laughed again, or maybe it was a sob. There were no tears in her eyes. “The family kept the suicide out of the papers.”
When he’d tried to reach her he’d imagined every scenario except this one. The only response he’d gotten from her was that she was done with him. Rico hadn’t wanted to believe that her father had convinced her that he wasn’t good enough for her. But he’d seen her horror at his anger at her father and he’d believed it. He had walked away and never let himself turn back. Now he wondered if the horror in her eyes had been about her thinking he was leaving her.
She was in a trance. Her body rocked back and forth, the barest motion. “I heard it. The gunshot. I found him. After I left you and went back to the restaurant to see him.” Her voice was the thinnest, strongest thread. “If I had been there one minute sooner, he’d still be alive.”
Rico slid closer to her. When she didn’t draw away from him, he placed a hand on her back, and when she didn’t shrink from that, he wrapped his arm around her, a horrible coldness engulfing him. “I’m so sorry.”
She said nothing; he wasn’t even sure she had heard him, but she let him hold her.
Losing her had felt like being on fire. His lungs blackened and useless, his skin singed off. Solid stabs of pain separating muscle from bone. Turned out his pain had been nothing. He had abandoned her when she had needed him most.
How would she ever forgive him? How would he ever forgive himself?
“I’m sorry,” he said again, then again. “I should have tried harder to reach you.” But he had believed that she had forsaken him and chosen to believe her father’s lies. “I should not have left.”
She touched his face, generosity that brought him to his knees. “You couldn’t have reached me. No one could. Not for a long time. He wasn’t the only person that bullet destroyed that day.”
They sat there like that. The immensity of what they had just learned hanging in the air between them.
“Rico,” she said suddenly, her voice oddly stronger. “When you went to see him. How did you know he was terrible to my mother? Is it because of what I told you earlier?”
“No. Because she walked in when he started yelling.” Rico remembered her father rummaging in the drawer. Was that where he kept the gun he used to kill himself? The maniacal rage in his eyes was something Rico would carry to his grave. There had been something unhinged about him, something about that moment that had always felt odd, but Rico had tried to bury the memory deep, like the rest of that meeting. Now he wondered if Ashna’s mother had saved his life that day.
“That can’t be right.” There was an odd confusion in her eyes when Ashna focused on him. “My mother wasn’t in America when it happened. She only arrived after his death.”
“I’m one hundred percent sure it was your mother.” Suddenly Rico remembered everything in stark detail. The ponderous gloominess of the room covered from floor to ceiling with books. The sharp scent of alcohol, sweat, and vomit in the overcooled air. The congested, raspy note in her father’s voice.
“I even remember that she was wearing a sari . . . it was blue . . . and she had a huge red bindi on her forehead.”
Ashna stood, her face leached of color. “I have to go.” She opened the door and let herself into the elevator lobby.
He followed her. “What’s going on, Ash?”
She came to him then and grabbed his face. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? “Tell me what I said. Tell me what to do. I know what I did was unforgivable, but please don’t leave me again.”
“It wasn’t unforgivable.” She bit her lip and looked at him in a way that made his heart burst with love and gratitude. “It wasn’t your fault.” The fierceness he’d missed shone in her eyes. “It wasn’t mine either.” She dropped a kiss on his lips. “I’m not leaving you. I promise. I just need to go right now, okay?”
“Let me take you home.”
“No, I need to do this myself. It’s something I should have done a long time ago.”
He had no idea what she meant, but she had that look again, a look that reinforced her words. She wasn’t leaving him, just leaving. Please let that be the truth. “At least let George take you home.”
That of all things made her smile. “This is the birthplace of rideshares, Rico. You’re not summoning George to drive me home, but will you please give him a raise?” She pressed a finger into the elevator button.
“Actually, you’re wrong,” he said. “Rideshares originated in Africa—Zimbabwe, it was crowdsourcing of carpools . . .” He trailed off, but it made her go up on her toes and kiss him again, hard and fierce.