Chapter Six
Six
“You can go,” I whisper to Azar. “Party’s over.”
“I’ll wait for you,” he replies, his expression lined with concern.
Wordlessly, I follow the mother of the bride out of the mehndi hall. Down a nondescript corridor. She hasn’t said a word since the bombshell revelation.
I slip into the luxurious bridal suite. Plush sofas. A makeup table with ten different lights spotlighting a singular velvet chair. Which is empty.
“Where’s Avani?” I ask. “What happened?”
Tears spring to her mother’s eyes. She tosses me a balled-up paper.
I unfold it as Avani’s father storms in. The door trembles when he slams it shut behind him. Prying apart the sheets, I see two pieces of paper. The first is a mug shot. Dev, the groom, stares blank-faced into a camera. A booking date from three years earlier is listed beneath it. Felony assault. The next, a court order showing a two-year sentence, commuted to six months for good behavior.
What the hell?
Avani’s parents stand in front of me with their arms crossed. Waiting. The silence in the room amplifies the sounds outside. It’s a loud din, like the roar of the ocean crashing against a cliff—a cliff the three of us inside this room have already fallen off.
I flip back and forth between the papers. I understand anyone is capable of unspeakable actions. Seemingly debonair gentlemen with battery charges sealed away by powerful parents—they exist. But my job is to shake out the skeletons. To ensure that there are no surprises, that moments like this do not happen. And they never have . Until now. And now the people standing before me want an explanation. I can’t explain why these documents are in their possession, but there is one thing I know above all else: These papers are fake. They must be. I trust my team, and I trust our process.
“Well?” Avani’s father asks. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
His Adam’s apple quivers. He won’t believe me. I know before I even open my mouth, but I tell him the only thing I can: the truth.
“These documents are fabricated.”
“Fabricated.” He looks at his wife, who is clutching her waist as though she might vomit. He glares at me. “You’re going to pretend you didn’t miss critical information?”
“They can’t be real.” I try to keep my voice steady. It doesn’t matter that I’m shocked and shaken—I have to keep it together. “A mug shot and a court order are both public information. If they were real, we would have found them immediately.”
“Or they are real, and you missed something glaringly obvious and put my daughter in danger.” He turns and barks at his wife, “How much did we pay her? Because you knew she got results? Because Asha’s daughter is so happy?”
I need to stop this from spiraling out of control. I need to fix this.
“Where did you get these?” I ask.
“What does it matter?” The mother lets out a sob. “There are five hundred people out there. My mother flew in from Toronto last night. She’s eighty-three. She’ll have a heart attack. How are we supposed to show our faces to the crowd out there?”
“Nothing has to happen,” I say as gently as possible. “I understand how scary this is. I’ll ring up my people. They can figure out who is behind this, and we can fix it. If I could speak with Avani—”
“Maybe these papers were sealed by court order,” the father interrupts. “Maybe that’s how you missed it.”
Except we pay Borzu handsomely to get around such seals. To find whatever doesn’t want to be found. Especially what doesn’t want to be found. There’s no use arguing with the father, though. He is terrified. Humiliated. He is suffering and wants someone to blame.
“Where did you find the papers?” I ask again.
“Avani said they were left here, in the bridal suite,” the mother says.
“Did you see anyone acting strange around this area? In the hallways? Someone who seemed out of place?”
“I hardly have time to observe every stranger passing by.”
Except, for someone to have done this, they couldn’t have been a stranger. Before I can press further, the bridal suite door bursts open. Avani’s in an orange-and-green ghagra, her neck layered with ancestral gold. Angry rivers of mascara trail her cheeks.
“He’s denying it!” she shouts. “He had the nerve to get mad at me . I told him if you can’t be honest now—then what are we even doing?” She sees me and lets out a shriek. “Nura. What the hell?”
“The papers aren’t real,” I tell her. “Let’s get Dev in here, and I’ll call my team over. We can resolve this right now.”
“Resolve this?” She collapses onto the sofa. “There’s no resolving this.”
“How did you come across the note?”
“It was on my makeup table when I arrived to get ready. I thought Dev had left me a present.” She lets out a trembly laugh. “I was hoping maybe he’d snuck in plane tickets for our honeymoon. He’s been keeping it a surprise and knew it was driving me nuts.”
“And when you confronted him with these papers, he denied it?”
“Of course he denied it,” her father scoffs.
“He’s a scammer,” the bride whimpers. “Who knows how many people he’s done this to? He acted all insulted when I showed him the proof. Stormed out like I was the crazy one. Classic gaslighting. Like he has anything to be upset about.”
Avani’s mother slides next to her daughter on the couch and puts an arm around her.
The father glances at the two of them and then me. “I was against this from the start,” he says in a low voice. “When she told me about this ridiculous idea to work with you, I told her it would be more trouble than it was worth. I had said to both of them that we were better off seeking matches within our own class.”
“This has nothing to do with class.” Heat floods my cheeks. Dev is a Cornell grad and a software engineer at a successful startup, yet he’d barely passed muster for her father.
“Of course not. How dare I not be politically correct? After all this work. All this effort—” He breaks off. I know what he’s thinking. They paid me to avoid problems. What bigger problem could there be than this?
I hurry out of the suite. Down the hall. Azar catches up to me. He matches my stride. “What happened?”
“It’s a mess.” I fill him in on the pertinent details.
“Nura, that’s awful.”
He frowns in the way he always does when he’s at a loss for words, his eyes full of concern that doesn’t need to be expressed verbally to be felt. Not between the two of us. He gives me a hug instead, and for only a moment, it feels like everything will be all right.
—
By one o’clock in the morning at our emergency meeting in Borzu’s fourth-story walk-up in Midtown, it’s confirmed—as I knew it would be—that the documents are fake.
“Check out these details.” Borzu leans back in his chair. The light flickers above, reflecting against his newly green hair. He stabs a finger at the mug shot. “This is total amateur hour. They superimposed his driver’s license over a mug shot backdrop, see?” He pulls up Dev’s driver’s license. The photos are an identical match. The same deer-in-headlights expression. “The cut-and-paste job is so basic it hurts my eyes.”
“Whoever did this was counting on them to freak out first and ask questions later.” Genevieve yawns.
She’s right. Back in the bridal suite, though I had known the mug shot couldn’t be real, with my pulse beating so loudly in my head, I couldn’t prove it as easily as I can now, clear-eyed, in the still of night.
“It’s the same with this court document.” Borzu nods at the paper. “Someone switched out the names. You can see where they cut and pasted his information onto the document from someone else’s trial.”
“Whoever did it wanted to call off the wedding,” Genevieve says.
“Well, they succeeded,” I say.
Genevieve pulls out her laptop, encrypted in ten different ways. She types furiously, then—“It looks like Avani only had one boyfriend before Dev.”
“Sunil Gupta.” Borzu squints at his own screen. “I’ll see what he’s up to.”
“They’d broken up years before we signed her,” I say. “She said the relationship had no spark—it dissolved into a friendship. I’m pretty sure she invited him to the wedding.”
“He was there tonight?” Genevieve raises her eyebrows. “All the more reason to look into him.”
“I’ll dig into Dev’s past to make sure I didn’t miss anything,” Borzu says. “But he was cleared when we did the deep scrape.”
“Who, then?” I murmur. I regret not waking Darcy up. She’s not an investigator, but having her here to spitball ideas would have been helpful.
“It could have been anyone.” Borzu pulls up Avani’s social media profile. “She was posting details of the festivities constantly, and it was a Four Seasons, not some remote location. The mehndi hall itself had security, but the rest of the place didn’t. Her bridal suite obviously didn’t.”
“Can we go over camera footage of the event?” I ask. “Something’s got to have been captured on there.”
“I’ll see if I can grab that in the morning,” Genevieve says, exchanging a glance with Borzu.
“What is it?” I ask.
Borzu hesitates. “You know this isn’t part of your job, right?”
“We are supposed to give them a turnkey partner. A happily ever after. I’d say we failed on that front.”
“But we didn’t,” he says.
“Avani and Dev were a perfect match,” says Genevieve. “He didn’t actually do any of the things he was accused of.”
“This was an Act of God event,” says Borzu. “You’re not responsible. I’ll dig some more, and we’ll get to the bottom of what happened sooner or later, but you can’t beat yourself up over this.”
Except it wasn’t an act of God. It was the act of someone . Someone went into the hotel and left a ticking time bomb. Did they sit in the audience and watch as the mehndi imploded? Did they cackle with delight to see true love go up in flames?
Did Logan catch wind of any of this? I swallow. One fire at a time, but the sooner we fix this, the better for everyone.
Hours later, my body is stiff from hunching over Borzu’s computer.
“Want some coffee for the road?” Borzu asks. He saunters over to a sleek device resting on the kitchen counter.
“I’m wired enough as is.” I glance around his place. The walls are newly sage green. And I do a double take at the sofa—the white contemporary sectional across from me is a far cry from the lumpy futon he used to have. “You’ve really done this place up.”
“You mean I finally tossed the cinder block shelves? According to my mother, I needed to grow up at some point. She forced me to do a whole renovation. The kitchen cabinets are resurfaced too.”
“The cabinets look great, but I miss the cinder blocks!” I protest. “They had personality.”
Khala used to get on my case all the time about my own bungalow with its original wood flooring and creaky front door. Just get a few upgrades, she used to insist. But as contemporary and modern as my office might be, as expensive as the purses and shoes I own to keep up with my clients, when it comes to my personal life, I keep things simple. If life has taught me anything, it’s that things can turn on a dime. Besides, I like my cozy cottage with its original chimney and exposed-brick kitchen. I have so few memories of my childhood before Atlanta, but I know my mother and I had lived simply. Maybe that’s why simplicity is what always makes me feel most at home.
“Before I forget”—Borzu yawns—“I looked into the podcast.”
“Yeah?” With everything else going on, I’d nearly forgotten all about it.
“Whoever it is, they made a crude website for it. It’s a basic account. The IP address puts them in Texas somewhere.”
“That’s a relief. It’s not someone local,” Genevieve says.
I think of the anger in that man’s voice. “How accurate is the location?” I ask.
“I’m guessing it’s pretty accurate,” he says. “The site didn’t appear to be the work of an online sophisticate.”
“Like you,” Genevieve says dryly. She’s never had any patience for Borzu’s tech talk. She just wants the results. “Darcy and I will go through the database tomorrow to rule out any potential rejected client. And Borzu, you can hack into the website and take it down, can’t you?”
“It’ll be down by tonight. That’s way easier than removing the podcast files, but I’m not giving up on that either.”
“There is one more person I’d love to look into,” I say. “I ran into a journalist tonight.”
I give them a quick summary of my conversation with Logan Wilson. “He couldn’t have done this to get a good story, could he?” The question seems absurd as soon as I say it aloud.
Borzu types his name into his computer. “Wait. We’re talking about the Logan Wilson? Not that this rules anything out, but he is a journalist. One of the best tech reporters out there. I can’t believe you actually met him.” Borzu’s no longer looking sleepy. He’s downright perky. “Look, he’s got eighteen bylines on here alone. A Wikipedia page. The Brad D’Angelo piece went viral.”
“Who’s got time to read a ten-thousand-word profile?” Genevieve retorts.
“When he discloses that D’Angelo sleeps on an eighty-thousand-dollar bed and has a panic room outfitted with a movie theater, I’ve got time. No way he’s behind this. Logan doesn’t make up stories, he breaks stories!”
“I’ll track his whereabouts on the hotel security footage when we get it.” Genevieve shoots Borzu a withering glare. “Doesn’t hurt to rule things out.”
—
The sky has shifted overhead by the time I reach my home and pull into the driveway. Flecks of pink and purple fill the horizon. I rest my head on the steering wheel. The wired feeling from earlier has worn off. Now my eyes feel scratchy like sandpaper. I want nothing more than to unbuckle my seatbelt, crawl into bed, and sleep the day away. But my work is not yet done.
Entering the house, I turn off the beeping security alarm and sidestep my running shoes lying askew next to the front door. Gertie hops down from her cat tree and hurries toward me. Pressing against me, she purrs.
“Sorry I’m late.” I scoop her up and snuggle her. “It’s been a day, and it’s not officially over yet.”
With a free hand, I pull out my phone and sink into the couch. It’s five o’clock in the morning, but I doubt Avani is sleeping given the night she had. I need to tell her what happened. She needs to know as soon as possible that Dev was exactly as advertised: a perfect match. My agency did not screw this up. She picks up on the first ring.
“It wasn’t real,” I tell her. I explain how the mug shot was fabricated. The court record cut and pasted from someone else’s. “It was a prank. A cruel and horrible prank.”
There is silence on the other end.
“Avani? Are you still there?”
“So he isn’t a criminal.” Her voice breaks. “So what? I already accused him of being one. I accused him of lying to me. It’s not like he’s ever going to forgive me. I can’t even blame him, can I?”
My chest tightens. I want to fix this. But how does Dev get over the fact that his fiancée accused him of felony assault? That she hadn’t taken him at his word, her trust in him dissolving in an instant, like salt in the sea?
After some halfhearted reassurances, I hang up with Avani and bite my lip. Running a hand through Gertie’s fur, I look down at her. “What would Khala have done in this situation?” I ask her. “She’d have sorted it out, wouldn’t she?” Gertie leans up and licks my chin with her rough tongue in response.
I refill Gertie’s food bowl. Replenish her water tray. Glancing at my sneakers, I’m tempted to go for a quick run. It’s always the surest way to clear my head. But this isn’t something a simple jog will sort out. My team thinks I should let it go, that I shouldn’t take it personally. Maybe they’re right. Contractually, I’m not on the hook. But there’s no getting around the reality that there were people at the mehndi eager to meet the “world-renowned matchmaker” and who instead watched a disaster unfold. How exactly am I supposed to let it go?