Chapter 2
Leo looks at his watch and sighs as he rushes into the elevator, dragging his carry-on suitcase behind him, a thick brown paper bag balanced on top of it.
He knocks on the front door to his sister and Simran’s apartment and quickly smooths his hair—though it falls back on his forehead like always—before discreetly pressing his nose to his shoulder.
He doesn’t smell like sweat or too much cologne, equal offenses in his book.
If he didn’t have to prepare for the most important work trip of his life, he’d have spent the day with Simran.
Instead, he’s showing up after eleven p.m. on her birthday to see her for a couple of hours before he has to get on a flight to New York.
“Bonjour, Léo! Le cheval est beau mais court vite,” Liv declares as she opens the door. “I’m practicing my French for my trip.”
“I gathered. You anticipate horses coming up a lot?” he asks. “Duolingo sure seems to.” He tries to step inside but she blockades the door, crossing her arms. “You have anything to say to me?”
“Rarely,” he says dryly. “You do enough of the talking.”
Liv narrows her eyes. “I mean about Simran.”
“Oh! Yeah, of course!” he says. He holds up a finger. “One: Butt out.” He raises a second one. “Two: I’m here to see her, not you. Move.”
“Show me some respect. I’m older than you.”
“But I’m taller than you,” he replies, using the flat of his forearm to push his sister to the side, a move that he’s perfected in the many years since he started towering over her. She huffs in outrage but Leo’s already inside the apartment, tucking his suitcase into a corner.
“How do I say ‘Where is the closest bar?’ in French?” she asks.
“Où est le bar le plus proche,” Leo replies, setting a small bouquet of red tulips down before emptying the contents of the paper bag onto the dining table.
She cranes her neck in suspicion. “Is that actually how you say it or is it something really embarrassing?”
Leo slants a look at her. “Guess you’ll find out.”
“Nah. You believe too deeply in some nonexistent translator code of ethics to lead me astray,” Liv says. Leo says nothing, but she’s absolutely right. She glances down at the crowded table. “Bruh. She’s genuinely not into celebrating. Never once in the fourteen birthdays I’ve known her.”
He pauses and looks at his sister. “Yeah. What’s that about?”
Liv shrugs. “I gather it has something to do with her parents.” Leo nods and goes to the left drawer to grab a corkscrew. “It’s Simran. You know her well enough to know that there’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Yeah, but you’re nosy,” he says.
“She’s impervious to even my superlative powers,” Liv says.
He tucks the stems of two wineglasses between the fingers of one hand.
Walking back to his sister, he pulls the bar of dark chocolate she swiped from his spread out of her hoodie’s kangaroo pocket with the other.
“Hey!” she complains. “Be nice to me or I’ll tell Simran how you watched Titanic every day for a month when Winnie Chan dumped you. ”
The threat bounces off him. “There are butter tarts for you in the bag,” he says, rounding the table to grab the bottle of wine, Simran’s favorite white from Peller Estates, before heading down the hallway.
“Just kidding, you are a passably acceptable brother!” Liv calls to him.
Simran’s not in her bedroom and, for a moment, he wonders where she could be—then he looks through the glass sliding door at the end of the hall.
There, on the love seat that barely fits in the tiny bucket of a balcony, is Simran, her thick, dark hair piled over one shoulder, skin burnished and smooth under the ambient light from the street.
“Hi,” he says, sliding the door open. Her arms hold her legs tight to her chest, chin resting on her knees, a compact ball. She startles at the sight of him, swiping at her face roughly.
“Hi,” she replies, and her voice is thick. She clears her throat and gives him a small smile. “You’re here.”
“Wanted to say goodbye before I left,” he tells her. Actually, he wants to kiss her again, to lock this thing down so that when he is back in a few days, they can pick up right where they’ve left off.
But Simran’s body language is all wrong.
He sits on the other end of the love seat, mind racing.
What happened between the last time he saw her and now?
He holds off on opening the wine and puts the glasses down.
“How did prep for your interview go?” she asks, still curled into that ball.
“Do you feel like a lock for the dream job?”
She’s pretending nothing is wrong, so he follows her lead.
“I’m nervous—presenting to the head office is a big deal.
But I’ve prepared a really good presentation.
All I can do is be myself and bring my best. The rest is on them to decide if it’s good enough,” he says, eyeing the full seat of space between them.
“How was your day? Heard the recital went really well.”
“It was great.” She doesn’t say anything more, looking out at the zig and zag of cars on the street, tires slushing over the wet asphalt after an evening summer shower.
The silence jabs bluntly at him till he has to speak.
He turns to her, though he has no idea what he’s going to say, when he sees tears dripping down her face.
This is not about them, Leo realizes. This is something else entirely.
He slides across the bench and slips his arms around her.
He feels her hesitation at being held, braces in anticipation of her pushing him away.
But she turns into his body, burying her face in his chest, and then begins crying quietly.
They stay like that, her sobbing and him holding her.
After several minutes, she sits up, scrubbing a palm across one cheek, then the other.
“I never cry,” Simran says defensively. He thinks that’s the end of it. But she speaks again, voice so small. “I am thirty-one now. My parents died when I was fifteen. As of today, I have officially lived more than half of my life without them.”
All Leo can do is add this scrap of information to the small collection of things she’s let slip over the years.
He knows that her parents passed away in a car accident.
And because of that, she had to relocate from India to the U.S.
to live with her aunt and uncle before moving again, to Toronto, seven years ago.
Simran never talks about her deceased parents or the family who still lives in New Jersey whom she doesn’t talk to very often, though he doesn’t know anything beyond that.
Sometimes he’ll catch a look of pure sadness in her eyes and then watch as she pushes it down where no one else can see it.
That’s the space she puts between her and the world, and she wears it like armor, ever present even when she is laughing or happy.
“Most days, I function normally. But some days, I’m stuck in it, like quicksand.
I don’t understand why it’s still so raw.
” She lets out a shredded laugh. “It’s not like those beautifully melancholic movies where time heals all wounds.
My parents are gone. I’m never getting them back. It hurts. The end.”
Leo listens. He knows Simran isn’t asking for something to solve this for her; if she was, it wouldn’t be him who could. But his helplessness claws at him. It hurts him to see her feel so broken.
She sniffles. “Every year, at midnight, they would sneak into my room and wake me up by singing to me. And then they would sing to me again at 11:59 p.m., while it was still my birthday. The first and last people to wish me. They loved my birthday. And now I’ll have more without them than I ever did with them.
I’ll miss them for longer than I knew them.
” She rests her head on his shoulder and he runs his hand gently over her hair.
A few minutes later, church bells start to chime on the next block, the low notes melting into the dark as they announce that the day is almost over.
“Happy birthday,” he murmurs into her ear. He doesn’t want the tradition to be lost in her parents’ absence.
She pulls away slightly to look at him and gestures to where her mascara runs down her face in inky tracks. “Clearly, I’m having a very happy birthday.” She attempts a chuckle but it sputters out. He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Okay. Sad birthday, then,” he says. Below them, the city has gone hushed and still, as if to mourn with Simran. She falls back into the crook of his neck and, softly, he sings to her, “Sad birthday to you, sad birthday to you. Sad birthday, dear Simran, sad birthday to you.”
He can barely hear her quiet, watery laugh over his own voice, but it’s real.
It feels so good to be the one who can make her laugh.
She’s invited him past that wall she keeps up, after all these years, and it’s what he’s always wanted but he’s paralyzed by it.
He is a little in awe of all that she’s survived—losing her parents, moving and starting over in a new country so far from her home, not once but twice.
What if he presses on the bruise instead of easing her pain?
“What were they like?” Leo asks. He feels Simran stiffen and he knows he’s said the wrong thing.
Her breath becomes stilted. “I can’t talk about them. Can we just …”
“Yeah,” he says, tightening his arms around her. “We can.”
From the street below them, voices spike and peal with laughter and they lapse back into a silence that’s interrupted a few minutes later by an insistent rumbling from Simran’s stomach.
“I guess I skipped dinner,” she says as she sits up.
“You know what would be so good right now?” Leo says, picking up the bottle and glasses with one hand, holding the other out to her.
She takes it as they stand. “The mushroom tagliatelle from Gusto.”
“So, let’s have it.”
“It’s late! They’re closed,” she says.
“But what if someone picked up takeout on his way over?” Leo asks as they reach the dining table.
Simran rips the top off a container and inhales deeply. “Leo, this is perfect.”
He takes the plate she hands him, thumb brushing against hers. “Just a preview. When I get back from New York, you are getting wooed.”
From the other side of the table, Simran points to herself, eyes glinting. “I’m getting wooed?”
“So wooed.”
After they finish eating, Leo stands reluctantly, telling her that he needs to go if he’s going to make his flight. Simran holds his hand as they walk to the front door.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be such a bummer tonight,” she says, looking down.
He frowns. “Don’t say that.” He gets that she feels vulnerable, but she should realize he wants that part of her too.
“I just mean that it’s not an ideal day one of … you know,” she says, gesturing between them. So they’re at least a “you know.”
“Today was a wash anyway,” he says. “I do my best work without a time constraint.”
When she looks up at him, the glint is a spark. “You’re setting a high bar.”
“Hold me to it,” he says as he drifts in towards her again.
She kisses him back, deeply, and when they separate, he feels wrecked, almost drunk, his hair falling all over where her hands tugged at it.
He blinks a few times, dazed, and she giggles as she pushes him and his suitcase out the door, wishing him good luck.
He can’t think of a better send-off than the sound of her laughter trailing after him from the doorway of her apartment as he gets in the elevator.