A Change of Heart by Sonali Dev Read Free Book Online

aloneness with all its familial bonhomie, and he couldn’t bring himself to care about any of it.
    He poked around at the screen looking for more paperwork, but his eyes drifted back to Jess. Her arms were wrapped around herself and her hood was pulled over that ridiculous red hair Jen and he had fought so hard over. He had loved Jen’s hair, her real hair. He could have spent a lifetime watching the jet-black strands catch the light, a black so rich and deep, even the sunlight couldn’t insert any gold into it. It shone blacker in the light, as immutable and stubborn as his wife herself.
    He had spent every night he got with her with his face buried in it. It was that sleeping by her side, wrapped up in her scent, buried in the comfort of their marriage, that he had missed most when they had been apart.
    It was that entangling of spaces with no borders, no separation, skin to skin, existence to existence, that had summarized his too-short marriage. It had been the miraculously healing end to even the hardest day, all-consuming, all-forgiving, like the deep shade of the magnificent oak in his parents’ backyard. He had counted on it so completely that the uprooting of it had taken away his entire forest. His everything.
    When he’d seen Jen at the airport that last time he visited her in Mumbai, he had walked right past her. She had followed him and tapped his shoulder. He had almost had an aneurysm when he realized that it was her under the punk-rocker-red hair. She had let the local beauty salon in the slum color it, her version of a trust-building exercise to get the girls to come in and get checkups, and it had turned that disastrous red. He had gone completely nuts and refused to let it go.
    It’s a lesson, Spikey, to teach you to get over things and deal. You hold on too tight.
    She’d been right. His completely disproportionate hissy fit had gone on for days.
    Then they’d gone to that fair. Their last day together.
    The screen in front of him blurred. He squeezed his eyelids together. But, unlike tears, he couldn’t squeeze away the blast of pain cramping in his heart.
    Of all the things he remembered from that day, his starkest memory was of that ball of panic unfurling in his belly when he couldn’t find her in the ocean of people. She was the strongest, most competent person he knew and perfectly capable of taking care of herself. But those minutes of not knowing where she was amid the crush of bodies stretching for miles had been like a flash forward. One of those moments when the universe spins around you and you have no clue what just happened. Just a sense that something did and you missed it and it was important.
    He’d seen her hair first. In the unbroken mass of black hair and un-deodorized sweat, the red had flashed at him. He’d been shaking when he pulled her to his chest. She had done what she always did—been overwhelmed by his display of affection and covered it up with amusement.
    See? With this hair you’ll always be able to find me when you lose me. It can be our beacon.
    Holy.
    Shit.
    â€œI’ll be right back,” he shouted to the nurses and rushed out the door.
    Jess’s only reaction when she saw him jog out of the clinic was the slightest softening of her eyes.
    â€œCome on,” he said and headed for the stairs without waiting for her.
    She followed him. No protests, no questions. He led her up the stairs, flight after flight. She kept up with him, her steps tracing his as they broke into the sunlight on the main pool deck. The pungent burn of chlorine filled his nostrils. He kept going. They had to dodge people, flashes of bright bikinis and sunglasses and multicolored wraps. Up to the next deck level. Then the next. The number of people thinned as they went higher. Until the sunshine and the wind grew angrier, fighting each other for power over that topmost deck. Until the only ones there to witness it were the two of