twenty-one years ago | 1991
SOMETIMES, TRAGEDY CAN LIVE in the blood. Breathing and waiting for the right moment to strike, to cause your entire world to collapse around you into tiny, minuscule fragments of 'what ifs' and think that perhaps if you'd simply made one different choice in your life, you wouldn't have experienced such tragedy. But that's pointless, for when tragedy lives in your very bloodstream, it is impossible to escape it.
Especially if such tragedy comes in the form of love. Unrequited love, rather, where no person's love is returned, causing an eternity of tears, heartbreak and torment. And in our tale of four people, it creates a love square. One doomed to fail no matter who temporarily wins.
She didn't know any of that, however, as she sat in the small chalet of the property belonging to the family that hers worked for. It was where she and her father had lived since forever, as her mother had left when she was a baby since she hated the life of working under someone else. Especially in a town such as Glésford, and especially for a man like Sadiq Gulzar.
It didn't matter that Gulzar and her father were best friends, just as their fathers had been before that. Their modest life hadn't been enough for her mother, resulting in a childhood that completely lacked a maternal touch for Meera Pillai. The closest person she'd had to a mother was Gulzar's wife and Jalal's mother, Firdous, but she'd passed away six years ago and it was also never the same as having her own flesh and blood.
A knock on her door pulled Meera out of her reverie and she stood with a sigh, grabbing her school bag as she walked to her front door, where her best friend stood waiting for her.
Jalal smiled the second his eyes landed on her, everything suddenly seeming just a bit brighter as her molten chocolate eyes found his. "Morning, kanmani."
She returned his greeting softly before stepping out into the early spring morning. "Let's walk. It's nice out today."
He agreed, just as he always did when it came to the girl he'd been in love with for as long as he could remember. Not that she realised. She was too obsessed with another man — Jalal's other best friend, Callahan Vanderbildt — to open her eyes to the man whose every thought started and ended with her.
But Callahan had never seen her as anyone beyond Jalal's friend and the daughter of Jalal's family's housekeeper. Well, that, but also the obvious fact that Esther LeSaux was the only woman he'd ever wanted to attain. Only, she seemed to detest him with a burning passion, instead infatuated with Jalal.
Remember that love square?
"Is your dad feeling better now?" Jalal asked.
Meera nodded, still looking ahead. "His fever's gone down, so he woke up at the crack of dawn and went back to work."
His lips pursed. "I'll talk to Dad and make him give your dad some mandatory time off."
She started to shake her head. "Don't. He'll hate that."
"But—"
"Leave it, Jalal."
"Yeah. Leave it, Jalal." Meera's heart skipped a beat as an arm enveloped her shoulder and she looked up to see a mischievous grin on Callahan's face, the dark blue of his eyes gleaming. "What are we talking about again?"
YOU ARE READING
The Ashes Of River
Romance... ❝He was the poison I was dying to taste on my lips.❞ ... I was a coward. The coward who wanted to leave behind the wreckage of her life for the man who had tormented her for as long as she could remember. The boy who had spit venom at me gro...
