“Hello? Who’s this?” Her voice was the same – bright, rapid-fire, the vocal equivalent of a hummingbird.
“It’s me,” I said. “Marlowe.”
A beat. Then two. Then an explosion.
“MARLOWE? Oh my God – oh my GOD – where have you BEEN? You vanish off the face of the earth – no calls, no texts, you’re not at college, your phone goes straight to voicemail – I thought you’d been kidnapped! Or joined a cult! Or both! Is that how you treat your best friend? Is this-“
“Priya.” I cut through the torrent with the precision of a woman who had exactly enough emotional bandwidth for one conversation and couldn’t afford to spend it on preamble. “I need to ask you something, and I need you to be completely honest.”
She went quiet. Priya’s silences were rare and always significant, like a gap in the weather.
“Okay,” she said carefully. “Ask.”
“Are you and Sterling together? Are you two… a thing?”
The silence that followed was so dense it had texture.
“Excuse me?” Her voice dropped an octave, which meant she was either deeply hurt or deeply furious, and with Priya, those two things were often the same thing wearing different shoes. “What kind of question is that?”
“Just answer me. Please.”
“Marlowe.” She said my name the way you’d say the name of someone you loved who’d just kicked you. “Sterling was your boyfriend. Your disaster of a boyfriend, but yours. Why would I – I don’t even LIKE Sterling. I never liked Sterling. I told you that every single week for six months. I made a PowerPoint presentation about why Sterling was a bad idea – remember? Slide seven? ‘He doesn’t read books and that’s a red flag’?”
A wet laugh escaped me before I could stop it. I did remember the PowerPoint. She’d actually made it.
“He told me,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted. “He told me you two were dating. That you were going to… that you two were going to sleep together.”
The silence returned, but different this time. Angrier. The temperature of the phone call seemed to drop.
“He said that.” Not a question. A verdict. “That manipulative, lying, garbage-brained-” She stopped herself. Took a breath. “Marlowe. I have never touched that boy. I have never looked at that boy with anything other than the contempt he richly deserves. He told you that because he wanted to hurt you, because hurting people is the only language he’s fluent in. Please tell me you didn’t believe him.”
“I… I did. For a while.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“Get in line.”
“Are you okay?” Her voice changed – the fury giving way to something softer, more worried. “Did he do something to you? Where are you? Why aren’t you at college?”
“I’ll explain everything. Just… not now. I’m not in a good place to talk about it.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” I said, and then a knock sounded at my door – Sable, I hoped, with the snacks and the answers I’d asked for – and I told Priya I’d call her back.
“You’d better,” she said, and hung up with the energy of a woman already composing Sterling’s obituary in her head.
I opened the door. Sable stood there carrying the weight of my request on her face.
“Come in,” I said. “Close the door. Sit.”
She sat beside me on the bed, and I could feel her worry – a tangible thing, radiating off her like heat.
“I need you to tell me everything about Caelum,” I said. “Everything. No filter, no diplomacy, no protecting anyone’s feelings. The full picture.”
Sable relaxed slightly. “Oh thank God. I thought something had happened – your brother, or-“
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.