Chapter Six

It had been three weeks since the letter arrived. I hadn’t responded.

I hadn’t thrown it away either. It remained under the fruit bowl, hidden between bananas and a crayon-smeared grocery list.

I’d meant to call. I’d meant to figure out what it all meant. But then Stacey showed up with playdates and library clipboards, and life had started to fill in around the edges again. I was showering every day. Wearing real pants. I’d even started using tinted moisturizer again—though I was still too tired to blend it all the way down my neck.

This morning, I had Sam and Krista with me. Sam called her “the loud one,” but they got along like two cats in a sunbeam. Stacey had gymnastics duty with her oldest and handed me the reins like it was nothing.

“You’ve got the library on lock,” she said. “Besides, you’re basically one of us now.”

I didn’t correct her.

The children’s room was warm, full of laughter and foam floor tiles. Krista ran straight for the puppets. Sam found a stack of board books and plopped down on a beanbag like she paid rent there.

I stepped out for coffee.

The sky was doing that early-spring Pacific Northwest thing—low clouds, perpetual gloom, and the smell of something green trying to bloom.

For the first time in months, I felt like I was doing okay.

The coffee cart outside the library opened at nine, and the grad student who ran it—Jules—knew my order before I spoke.

“Half-caf, soy milk, two sugars,” she said, already pulling a sleeve over the cup. “You’re like clockwork.”

I wrinkled my nose. 

“Oh, I didn’t mean that like it’s a bad thing. I just meant, you’ve got dependable mom energy. It radiates.”

I laughed. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all week.”

She handed me the cup. “Tell Krista I’ve got more of the cinnamon muffins next time.”

“I will. Thanks, Jules.” I reached into my jacket pocket for a crumpled five-dollar bill.

“Oh no, don’t worry,” Jules waved away my money. “It’s covered.” She nodded over my shoulder.

When I turned from the counter, a man I hadn’t seen before was standing there. Tall. Dark coat. Shoes too nice for Bellingham sidewalks. Tailored suit, long scarf, sunglasses even though the clouds hadn’t moved in hours.

“Allison Brooks,” he said, smiling like we were old friends. “What a lucky coincidence.”

I blinked, caught off guard. Still, I smiled. “I’m sorry—have we met?”

Even as I asked, I knew it was impossible. This was Bellingham. I’d have remembered if we met. No one looked like him.

“Not officially,” he said. He smiled like that didn’t matter. “But I’ve heard so much about you. Your coffee’s on me today,” he said, handing the barista a crisp fifty before I could protest.

“That’s very kind of you, but you don’t have to—”

“I insist. Please. It’s my pleasure.” He handed me the cup like a peace offering. “I’m Naveen Shivdasani.”

The letter under the fruit basket.

I could pretend I didn’t know him, that I never got the letter, but that would be stupid.

“I owe you much more than coffee as you have cared for something very precious to me.” He didn’t talk like a lawyer. He talked like someone who’d never had to raise his voice to win a room. Soft vowels. Polished patience. The kind of voice that turned offers into obligations. “What you have done is very admirable. Not everyone would rise to the occasion. And I am deeply in your debt.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” I laughed, light and easy. Terrified. “I’ve just been doing my best. She’s a wonderful little girl.”

“She is,” he said, nodding. “And she carries an extraordinary birthright. One that’s long been waiting to welcome her home.”

I sipped my coffee.

“I’d hoped we might speak before now,” he continued. “I sent a letter, but I understand how busy things must be.”

“Yes,” I said brightly, because that was safer than telling him I’d read it five times and then hid it under the bananas. “It’s been… a transition.”

“Of course. And you’ve handled it beautifully. But transitions are, by nature, temporary.”

He said it with such ease. Like I should’ve been relieved.

I smiled again, the way you smile when someone mentions the weather at a funeral. “You must care about her a great deal.”

“I do,” he said. “We all do. Which is why we’re hoping to move forward with something a bit more… formal.”

There it was. Still polite. Still perfectly phrased.

But it landed like a countdown.

I took a sip of my coffee. It tasted bitter.

“Sam’s happy,” I said. “She’s adjusting.”

“I’m sure you’ve made Samara very comfortable,” he said kindly. “Children are resilient. But comfort is not the same as belonging.”

Samara. Hearing her name like that—formal, foreign, spoken like a contract—I flinched.

A name that belonged to someone else. She was just Sam. Had always been. Sam who liked applesauce and sock puppets and the pink tutu with the missing waistband.

This man was calling her back into something I didn’t understand and couldn’t trust.

I smiled again. My grip on the cup tightened just enough that the lid creaked. “Of course. She’s been through a lot. Routine is good for her right now. Stability.”

He nodded like he agreed. Like he was letting me have a moment before pulling the rug out from under it.

“Samara belongs with those who understand not just who she is—but what she’s destined to become,” he said, gentle as glass. “Family is more than blood. It is preparation.”

I don’t know why his words felt personal. Like he wasn’t just talking about her.

“What was denied to my cousin will not be denied to her daughter,” he said smoothly. “Samara deserves the education, the mentorship, the legacy that should have always been Jnaneshwari’s.”

I blinked. “I’m sorry… who?”

He tilted his head slightly, as if surprised I didn’t know. “Jnaneshwari. Samara’s mother.”

It took a full breath for the name to settle. For the weight of it to connect.

Jnaneshwari was Ziya.

Ziya, who’d been a millionaire before graduating from college.

Ziya, who’d been called the female Steve Jobs in the tech blogs no one around here ever read.

Ziya, who built software empires and smiled like she didn’t care when they called her a tech bitch behind her back.

Ziya, who left all of it behind without a second thought—the money, the headlines, the world that kept trying to turn her into something predictable and consumable.

She left Palo Alto and moved here. To Bellingham.

Remodeled a historical high-ceilinged home in the Columbia neighborhood.

Stocked her spice cabinet alphabetically.

Taught Sam how to play hide-and-seek and make wishes on dandelions.

And she never, not once, mentioned a name like Jnaneshwari.

We’d gone to school together since we were kids.

She joined my seventh-grade class halfway through the year—tiny, awkward, and already two grades ahead. The teachers said she needed “socialization,” but everyone knew that was code for let’s not make her too weird.

She was so smart she probably could have skipped all of school entirely.

I didn’t know she was psychic. That didn’t come out until high school, when things started getting strange for all of us.

Back then, Bianca wasn’t interested. She had other friends. Popular ones.

And in all that time—in twenty years of friendship, across sleepovers and heartbreaks and weird high school rituals and the long, slow slide into adulthood—not once did she ever say the name Jnaneshwari.

Not once.

Whatever that name meant, and who it meant something too, was not here. Not even her parents had used that name with her.

Ziya had made her choice—to raise Sam here, in Bellingham, far from the expectations wrapped in names like Jnaneshwari. Far from men like Naveen. And now, they wanted to rewrite it.

My heart beat faster. Just a flutter. But I felt it in my wrists.

He wasn’t threatening me. Not really. But he didn’t have to.

Because I knew what people like him could do. Not just legally.

Maybe magically.

“Ziya’s condition is… unfortunate,” he said quietly, like it was a line item in a quarterly loss report. “Her parent’s disinterest in their grandchild, unsurprising. Her father never did understand the advantages of family. But our responsibility to Samara remains unchanged. And there are precious few of us who still understand what that means. Fewer still who will act on it.”

The words lingered in the air, smooth as silk and just as hard to hold. I didn’t know anything about the Shivdasani family. Hadn’t even known they existed.

Ziya never talked about her relatives. Just brief mentions of an older brother back East somewhere. Or maybe it was the Midwest. The last time she’d mentioned her parents, they had moved to Florida after graduation in 1990. Their lives recounted like elevator music. Polite, inoffensive, and easily forgotten background noise.

I’d assumed that was all there was to know. A brother. Two parents. Distant, small. Contained. But now, the Shivdasani family was here. Something vast, and old, and powerful.

This wasn’t just a man in a scarf. This was a tiger in a tailored suit.

He handed me a card.

Thick paper. Heavy enough to feel expensive but not flashy. Just enough to let you know you were supposed to take it seriously.

Naveen Devendra Shivdasani

Shivdasani Family Trust | International Affairs & Legacy Management

I nodded and took it like it was something polite, not radioactive.

“If you’d prefer a more private conversation, I’m available through the week,” he said, his voice warm and unhurried, like he was offering a dinner reservation instead of a custody battle. “After that, I’m afraid things may become... more complicated.”

This was the nicest it was ever going to be.

When he left, it would be lawyers.

Paperwork. Hearings. Cold signatures on colder forms. Money. Lots of money.

“Thank you,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to do. Because I was still smiling. Because if I wasn’t smiling, I might cry, or worse—show him I was afraid.

He walked away without another word.

I didn’t watch him go.

I stood there, one hand tightening around the paper cup, the other curling the card so tight the edges bit into my palm.

For a moment, all I could hear was my own heart, too fast, too loud.

Then Sam’s laughter floated through the open doors of the library.

I turned, just enough to see her through the glass, curled up beside Krista with a pile of picture books in her lap. She looked up and waved with sticky fingers and a crooked smile.

My breath caught.

Just for a second.

And I remembered why I had to fight.