Behind the Curtain - Page 94

He thought she tensed beneath him. She started to say something, but only air puffed past her lips.

“That wasn’t what I meant. Not exactly,” she said after a pause. “Zara started fighting more and more with my uncle Reda and aunt Nadine. She always had a chip on her shoulder. She never wasn’t angry. It was like all of us were responsible for her losing Eric, even though that wasn’t true. Didn’t Eric get married three or four years ago?”

“Yeah. To some toilet paper heiress from Newport. Fitting,” Asher said, his lip curling in amused disgust. He recalled his parents’ anger and cold disbelief when he told them during a phone call once in Damascus that there was no way in hell he was flying to the States to attend that weasel’s wedding. His parents still didn’t know about Laila, or Eric’s betrayal.

His mom and dad still didn’t know Asher had gone past despising his cousin to grinding his teeth in white-hot hatred at the mere mention of his name. His mother had kept calling and needling him persistently about the wedding. He’d finally lost control. He’d informed his mom bitterly over the phone that the last time he’d seen Eric in Crescent Bay, he’d been beating his pretty face to a bloody pulp in a hotel room. He’d gone on to tell her he very much doubted Eric was going to lose any tears over Asher not being at his fucking fake-ass high-society wedding.

He’d ended up feeling guilty for being so tactless and insensitive with his mom. But she had stopped mentioning Eric and his stupid wedding.

“Anyway, about nine months after Crescent Bay, Zara packed up her things and walked out,” Laila continued. “My uncle Reda and aunt Nadine don’t say her name anymore, and we don’t speak it in front of them. But Tahi and I have looked for Zara over the years, without our parents knowing about it. Apparently, she’s been working as either a waitress or a maid at places all over Detroit. She’s always moving on. Tahi and I have never seen her, let alone spoken with her. It’s like she’s always staying two steps ahead of us. We haven’t been in contact for seven years.”

He heard the crack in her voice. He sensed her sadness. The largeness of the issue, the far-reaching impact of that golden, supposedly carefree summer, hit him unpleasantly for the ten-thousandth time in his life. He rolled onto his back and came down beside Laila on the bed. For several seconds, they just stared silently up at the ceiling.

“You still think it, don’t you? That I didn’t show any backbone. That I wasn’t rebellious enough,” she said softly. He rolled his head on the pillow and met her stare in the semidarkness.

“No. I don’t think that. Logically, I understand why you did what you did,” he could say honestly.

She nodded once. “But you feel it.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted you to become like Zara, if that’s what you mean. Cut off from family and friends. If it weren’t for your family supporting you and giving you a home those years while you were in college, you might not have turned out so well. I’m sorry. I know how close you, Tahi and Zara were. It must hurt.”

“You have no reason to be sorry. You never did anything to Zara.”

“No, but a white guy with the same last name as me did. My cousin did. That’s how your parents and your aunts and uncles saw it. Isn’t it?”

“They don’t know you, Asher. They never did. I tried to tell them.”

He swallowed back the bitterness that had risen at the back of his throat. He stared back up at the ceiling. “It’s not the end of the world.”

She didn’t reply immediately. He knew his weary, indifferent act hadn’t fooled her.

“You’re still angry with me.” Her voice clung in the still air and echoed around his head. He couldn’t admit to her that what she said was true. He didn’t like to admit it to himself.

“It was a long time ago,” he said levell

y. “It feels like a lifetime ago.”

“It’s okay. I understand,” she said. He blinked, taken aback by her earnestness. He rolled his head on the pillow. Her eyes glittered with fractured light. Reacting entirely on instinct, he reached and touched her soft cheek. She smiled, but she looked so sad. “I’m still mad at myself too.”

“You are?”

She nodded. A single tear wet his caressing finger. “Not for telling you I couldn’t see you while my parents forbade it and I lived in their home. But for cutting off all ties with you. For giving up entirely. Or at least for giving up in my head,” she whispered. She cleared her throat. “My heart didn’t let go so easily. I told you about it. In the e-mail I sent,” she said after a pause where her quietly uttered words vibrated inside him. Finally, her final sentence penetrated his consciousness.

“What e-mail?”

She rolled over on her hip, facing him.

“I wrote to you,” she said. “Six months after Crescent Bay. I told you I’d realized I’d made a mistake. I asked you if you could forgive me . . . if we could keep in touch. You never wrote back.” Her mouth fell open, and he realized she was reading his blank, stunned expression. “I thought you didn’t write back because you were too mad at me. Or that you’d just realized it was all a mistake. An infatuation. A summertime indiscretion better left in the past. I assumed you’d moved on.”

“I never got any e-mail,” he assured her, rolling toward her and propping himself up on his elbow.

“I tried to call you and text too, but—”

“I changed phone numbers when I moved to L.A.,” he interrupted. “I didn’t think it would matter.”

“When I couldn’t reach you by phone, I looked online to see if you had an e-mail listed at the Times. You did, and I wrote there.”

Bitterness washed over him. “Jesus,” he muttered.

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