“Want to come inside?” she asked.
He waited. The quiet became oppressive, and Meena regretted her invitation. But she stood firm. He would have to reject her. She wasn’t going to give him an out. Mostly because she could see in his eyes that he wanted to say yes.
“Another time.”
Meena dismissed her disappointment.
“Another time.” She turned and opened her door.
“After a date.” Sam grinned.
Meena turned her head, raised her brows. “I see.”
“Just want to do things in order,” Sam said. “With you.”
The smile fell. She faced him again. “Sam.”
“I’m not asking for anything except a night out,” Sam said. “The two of us. One where we both agree that there is something interesting between us and see where it goes.”
Meena took a breath. “I have to go back to my regular life soon.”
“The thing about the word regular is that the constant pattern can change,” Sam said. “Can be redefined based on circumstances.”
“Did Neha teach you that?”
“I learned all of my vocabulary from her,” Sam said. “Think about the possibility.”
He leaned down and pecked her on the cheek before going to his apartment.
Meena let out a long breath before going inside hers. She hung up her coat and flopped on the couch. She put her small cross-body bag on the coffee table. The strap got caught on her cast, and the bag fell under the sofa. Meena sighed and knelt on the rug to pull it out, and it was stuck to something. She used her free hand to pat the underside of the couch to figure out what it was. The thing wouldn’t come loose. She pulled with all her effort, and her elbow caught the side of the coffee table. “Soap on a stick!”
She distracted herself from the pain by glancing at what she’d yanked out. A book, of course. The Glass Castle. And inside it two fortunes, the kind found inside cookies. Neha had written over the originals in red ink.
There is no order to life. While time is linear, we do not have to live within its confines.
The second one: Expectations of how things must be are an anathema.
Ugh. Enough with the riddles. Meena added them to the growing stack of notes. Frustrated, she sat on the couch. She was beginning to think Neha was messing with her.
She grunted. “Just say what you want to say, Neha.”
She sighed and got ready for bed. She’d deal with it in the morning. She changed into her pajamas and tucked herself under a blanket on the couch. Her cased arm lay heavy on her stomach after she turned off the lights. It wasn’t just the cast; exhaustion weighed her down.
Dust it off. Her mother’s favorite saying. Hannah had been pragmatic to a fault. Meena hadn’t gotten the part she’d wanted in the school production of The Nutcracker? Move on. Find something else. Hadn’t gotten on the gymnastics team? There were other clubs. If something hadn’t worked out, Hannah hadn’t seen the point in dwelling on it.
They had been so different, Neha and Hannah. There had never been any meandering to Hannah’s practicality. Always straightforward, always efficient. Neha had hidden little notes in odd places, notes that had no dates, no timeline, no logic. Like a jigsaw puzzle Meena wasn’t sure she wanted to solve.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Daylight fading, Meena huddled in the garden with a red-and-green checkered blanket she’d found in the bottom drawer of a large antique cabinet. She’d been relieved not to find a note. They were starting to make her twitchy.
She crossed her legs and put both feet on the metal bench so they were tucked under the blanket. The lights in the back garden gave off a soft glow. It was pristine, even as fall closed in on winter. The bare branches and twigs were trimmed. The sturdy winter plants bloomed, arranged in a row of pots that were color coordinated from deep red to light pink, like ombré but with planters. Even the rocks around the large dogwood in the corner were in immaculate order, each piece the exact same size and shape as the one beside it. There was too much symmetry. Too little color now that the leaves had been cleaned away.