Chapter 19
The next morning, Kalpana had breakfast alone.
She didn’t feel self-conscious because sometime in the night she’d decided that she didn’t care.
People were judgemental, but there was nothing to judge about her being alone.
Her fiancé had gone away on business, while they were on holiday.
She wasn’t sure which part annoyed her more, the fact that he was working when they were supposed to be on holiday, or the fact that he’d just decided to leave her alone out here, with almost no notice.
Sampath wasn’t here either. She stabbed the straw into her fruit juice. She wasn’t sure how her body would respond to seeing him again. Her body had chosen the worst time to develop a mind of its own. Because, really, she could have done with a friend right now.
Maybe she should have told Nyssa about Sampath.
She had told her about him in general. It was hard to talk about planning a wedding without talking about the wedding planner.
She didn’t think she’d mentioned all the things she’d noticed about him, though.
The way he listened to her as if she was the most important person in the room.
The way he remembered the little things she told him.
How he seemed to know intuitively what was bothering her and knew exactly what to say.
She looked around the breakfast room where families and couples were sitting together, focused on breakfast and conversation.
She was anonymous right now. A nobody. Which meant that no one was paying any attention to her.
All this time she’d been walking around feeling like she was doing everything wrong.
She wasn’t. There wasn’t a wrong way to be herself.
Sampath had told her that and it had taken this long for her to believe it. It was so liberating.
Marcus had texted her to say he was on his way.
She had a few hours before he arrived. She still wasn’t sure how she was going to respond to him.
Being annoyed was one thing, but did she want a fight?
They never argued. Now she realised it was because she hated conflict and just gave in to whatever he wanted.
She took a slurp of her drink. Yes. They would have a talk when he got back.
She had been coasting along all this time, trying to keep things from changing, not wanting to upset him.
But he didn’t seem to care that he upset her.
Was that what she wanted her married life to be like?
There wasn’t a right way to be married, but there sure as hell was a wrong one.
A few hours later, she was sitting in the chair, back in the room, checking her emails on her phone, when Marcus arrived in a flurry of activity. ‘Hello, babe!’ He swooped down to kiss her. ‘Boy, am I glad to be back.’
‘How did your meeting go last night?’
He stepped back. ‘I’m all sticky,’ he said. ‘The air conditioning in the taxi was not exactly top notch. Let me just have a quick shower and then I’ll tell you all about it, okay?’
He was deflecting again, wasn’t he? Kalpana suppressed the urge to sigh. ‘Sure. Um … I need to read this email properly and I can’t do that on my phone. Can I borrow your laptop for a minute, just to check my email.’
‘Oh, sure. It’s not locked. Help yourself.’ He was already stripping his shirt off as he walked to the bathroom. The sight of his gym-toned back did nothing for Kalpana. Interesting.
She pulled his laptop out of his bag and opened it on the table.
There was a dozen or so tabs open. Kalpana shook her head and went to open a new tab.
A tab open at Goodreads caught her eye. Was Marcus checking his own book reviews?
Surely not. He said he had an account as a reader but never checked reviews of his own books.
She wasn’t sure she believed him. How could you go on there and not be tempted to peek?
She clicked on the tab. To her surprise, it was open at the summary of her book Moonlight over Magnolia Allotments.
That was odd. Why was he looking at that?
Was he leaving a review? No. He didn’t review books on Goodreads.
He didn’t even rate them. He had told her that.
He just used it to keep track of what he’d read.
She scrolled down a bit and saw the system was inviting him to add it to his shelves.
Meaning he hadn’t done that already. She scrolled back up.
The first thing on the page was the blurb for the book.
Was he … reading the blurb? On a hunch, she hit the back button on the browser.
The page that came up was another of her books.
The Sweetest Thing, which they’d discussed that night at the villa.
He hadn’t reviewed or shelved this one either …
Had he … not read any of her books?
She stared at the page. He claimed to be rigorous with tracking his reading. He shelved them all once he’d read them, even the ones he didn’t like.
Hesitantly, she looked at his book list. Not one of her books was on it. He hadn’t read her books.
For some reason, this hurt her more than anything that had happened before.
Marcus had pretended that he liked her books.
He had even claimed that The Sweetest Thing was his favourite book.
Suddenly, she remembered Sampath saying, ‘I knew The Sweetest Thing wasn’t about an artist.’ She had assumed Sampath had simply forgotten for a moment, but now she realised what he wasn’t saying.
‘I knew The Sweetest Thing wasn’t about an artist, but Marcus didn’t.
’ Marcus hadn’t corrected Sampath’s ‘mistake’, he accepted the comment as true and carried on talking.
How had she missed something that was so obvious?
Now that she was thinking about it, other things started to look different.
He was always talking about how fast she wrote.
She’d assumed it was a compliment, but …
what if it wasn’t? He’d never said anything about her characters or stories or the themes she touched on in her books, because he’d never read them.
He always talked about her books in terms of how commercial they were and how fast she produced them.
In literary circles – the places Marcus moved in – both those things were regarded with suspicion, often derision.
Had he been patronising her this whole time?
How could she have been so stupid?
She thought of Sampath saying, ‘You have a gift, Kalpana. Don’t let that go just because some entitled dickhead thinks that joy is somehow inferior to suffering.
’ She’d assumed he was talking about Bob, the Aussie tourist that they’d met.
But what if he’d meant Marcus? After all, it looked like he’d knowingly said something wrong about The Sweetest Thing to trap Marcus.
The bathroom door opened and Marcus walked out wearing a towel around his waist. She watched him walk across the room and felt …
nothing. No attraction. No butterflies. No insistent tug from her body towards his.
She’d never really felt that way towards him.
Of course, she’d been glad to be his girlfriend.
She’d always felt lucky to have caught his eye.
She had been so busy marvelling at her luck that she hadn’t stopped to check what she was really feeling.
Marcus found some clothes and pulled them on. Then he rummaged through the small bag that he’d taken to Colombo with him. ‘Where’s my phone charger?’
She didn’t reply. How on earth would she know where his phone charger was? He tipped the contents of the bag onto the bed and put it all back in again. ‘Damn. I must have left it in … the hotel last night. Damn.’
‘They might sell chargers in the hotel shop downstairs.’
He pointed towards her. ‘Right. Good thinking. I’ll go down and ask.’ With that, he shoved his feet into a pair of sliders and disappeared out of the room.
Huh. He had barely looked at her since he got back. Kalpana swallowed the tightness in her throat. How had she not noticed that he didn’t really care about her work? If he didn’t respect what she did, how on earth would she be able to live with him as his wife?
A ping from her phone made her jump. Of course.
She was supposed to be checking this flyer and replying to her agent.
She turned her attention back to the laptop and quickly logged into her email.
It didn’t take her long to read the document.
The publisher had arranged for a book signing at a popular bookshop chain, four weeks after she got back to the UK.
She’d done signings there before. They always had a good turnout.
She wrote back confirming that she was still able to do the signing and that she had no special requirements apart from an ice pack for her wrist afterwards.
Then, like someone poking at a wobbly tooth, she went back to Marcus’s Goodreads account and scrolled through his ‘read’ shelf.
Yes, she remembered him talking about all these books.
He often told her his opinions of a book.
Their reading tastes differed, but because they both got sent a lot of advance review copies, their reading sometimes overlapped.
Her books had never once come up in conversation.
She had assumed that was because he didn’t want to subject her to the sort of literary criticism he liked to level at other people’s books, but now she realised it was simply because he didn’t care enough to even read one.
Slowly, she shut the laptop. What now? She should make sure that she wasn’t jumping to conclusions. Give Marcus a chance to explain … After all, she and Marcus were supposed to be spending quality time together for the next few days.
She checked the time. Then she did the only thing a girl could do in these circumstances. She called her best friend.
Nyssa wasn’t fully awake when she answered. ‘Kally? Is everything okay? You know it’s like, 5.30 a.m. here.’
‘I don’t want to marry Marcus.’