“Stop!” he yelled as I ran through the house. Tears blurring my vision, I burst out the front door and slammed it behind me.
“It isn’t what you think!” he continued to call after me, pushing the door open. People turned to stare as we ran past.
A taxi was already parked outside, the only luck I’d had all night. I ran up to the open passenger window and relayed my address as Dev caught up to me, pushing against the door so it couldn’t open.
“Rebecca, let me explain! The other bathrooms had a line-up, and Priya’s room was a mess, and she was—”
“Save it, Dev,” I said, wiping an angry tear with the back of my hand. “This isn’t just about Sonja.”
“Then talk to me! What’s wrong?”
“Everything!” I shouted. I tried again, a little quieter. “Everything. The rushed, huge wedding. The moving in with your parents. The fact that you should be with Sonja like you were meant to be. Everything.”
“What do you mean?”
I opened the cab door but hesitated getting in. “We’re too different. It will never work.”
Shaking, I removed the giant ring from my finger and pushed it towards him. He held out his hand, and I dropped the jewel into it. I couldn’t look him in the eye.
I watched in the rear-view mirror as he got smaller and smaller behind me, looking down at the ring I’d left behind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I thought ending things on my terms would lessen the blow. Reduce the pain.
I was wrong.
The hardest part was telling everyone the wedding was off. I’d ignored the calls that had started lighting up my phone after sending the texts, unwilling to even try to find the words to explain what had happened or why. Soon after, the texts had become too much, as well. I silenced my phone.
Sunday passed by in a haze of tears and self-medicating with ice cream. Monday morning came, and I still couldn’t bring myself to leave the house, despite the absence of junk food and liquor.
I called in sick to work. I never called in sick. Another week of staring at a computer screen doing mindless tasks was beyond the current state of my mental health.
To make matters worse, I’d told Jag the meeting he had planned with his investors was off. The last thing I wanted to do was stand up in front of him and a bunch of other people who had probably been invited to the wedding I’d cancelled. Besides, going into business with my ex-boyfriend’s dad sounded like a bad idea. That level of awkwardness made me want to bury myself under a pile of blankets and never emerge.
But without the additional funding, I was only halfway to my goal of making a scale model of the turbine. Now it would never happen. I was stuck, exactly where I had been six months ago before I’d even met Dev. Only now I knew what I was missing out on.
I took a shuddering breath.
It had all come crashing down.Everything.
My mind kept replaying our romance over and over, and over. I should have known earlier it wasn’t going to work between us, that I wasn’t right for him, and that he wasn’t right for me.
It was almost perfect. If the two of us could live in a bubble, unaffected by anything else in the world, we would die happily together at the ripe old ages of one hundred and one hundred and five. Holding hands, like in some Nicholas Sparks movie.
In reality, it couldn’t be so. There were things he wanted from me, needed from me that I was unable to provide. I loved him enough to let him go, to let him find it elsewhere while he was still young. Not that he needed to look far, with Sonja waiting in the wings, eager to remind him of their predestined nuptials.
As much as it hurt, I hoped he and Sonja would be happy together.
I imagined the two of them as children, playing together in the blueberry fields, and then growing into teenagers, exploring their own sexualities and one another’s bodies for the first time. I imagined their wedding, the wedding Priya had described in such detail in her presentation. I imagined their families mingling together and becoming one, as they’d planned since Dev and Sonja had been babies. I imagined her in the red lehenga. Red suited her, as I’d witnessed at the engagement party. The jewels, the bracelets, the nose ring… I bet her nose was pierced.
They’d have beautiful children with tan skin and dark brown eyes and thick eyelashes and gorgeous smiles. They’d live together in his house with his family, and raise their children, and take care of all their ageing parents when the time came. They would cook the type of food they’d both grown up eating. Shawan and Jag would smile at their son and daughter-in-law, glad everything had worked out as they’d always planned. They would all talk and joke and laugh together in Punjabi.
At least Dev would be happy. Knowing that made me feel better. If I had to live my entire life being miserable, at least I’d know the man I loved was happy.
For myself, almost thirty, the dating pool had evaporated to a scummy pond, littered with garbage and used diapers.
I stared down at my muted phone as unanswered calls and texts piled up and reinstalled Tinder. Then, I ordered a cheap pizza and a box of wine to be delivered. If I was going to go through the hell of Tinder I could at least be drunk and full of carbs.