Page 109 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

“Here it is,” she said, and turned the computer around for them to see it. “She came back to Delhi and opened another bookstore.”

Mariah looked pale. “A bookstore?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Um, nothing.” But she looked unsettled.

“Chowpatty is barely a mile,” Henry said. “Let’s do it.”

“Wait,” Veronica said. “Let me see what Google has to say about Darshan Irani.” She ran the name. “Oh. That’s not helpful.” She turned the screen to show it to the others. A long line of results with the same name showed up.

“We don’t know when he died,” Mariah said.

“Let me try another way.” She ran the name and the name of the café together and got three hits, all showing the same dry paragraph. “Darshan Irani, son of Farroukh Irani, owner of the Café Guli, died tragically on June 1, 1996.”

The end of Rachel’s time in India.

No one said anything. Finally, Mariah said, “I wonder what happened. And I wonder why my mother never talked about this, ever.”

“Sure you want to keep going?”

“Can’t stop now, can we?”

Henry stood. “Let’s go check out the beach. We’re here. We might as well catch a sunset.”

They arrived as the sun was lowering over the Arabian Sea, and people were collecting rocks or shells on the beach in the long red-gold light. They walked in the sand, Henry taking pictures with a kind of glee—photos of the people, of the signs and buildings, of the water and the curve of buildings framing it.

Using her phone as a source, Mariah narrated their journey. “‘Chowpatty Beach is known for a Ganesha celebration every autumn,’” she read. “That would be cool to see.”

“It would be. A lot of things would be great to explore,” Veronica said, again feeling that pinch of yearning. “It’s a big world.”

“I like thinking of my mom here,” Mariah said. “Hanging out with her friends.” She paused. “I feel close to her here.” She pointed to a bank of buildings. “Those must be some of the apartments she talked about, right?”

“Probably,” Veronica agreed.

“It seems weird that the buildings are still here and she’s not.” She looked at her feet on the sand. “Like maybe she walked right here. How strange is that?”

“It is. The restaurant my mom worked in is still there on Taos Plaza.” Veronica snorted. “And Tomas is probably still making moves on unsuspecting young women.”

“Did he make moves on you?”

Veronica gave her a rueful grin. “Oh, yeah. I fell hook, line, and sinker.” For the first time, she realized she’d been sixteen and her boss nearly thirty, and the person in charge was the bad guy, not her.

Not her.

Henry walked backward as he took shots of their conversation. Veronica felt the moment acutely—Henry looking so dashing that women cast looks his way under their lashes, the sense of a moment in time she’d never forget, and again that feeling of being here now and remembering it later, the sweetness of being here, the fleeting sense of it already flying away.

“I think we all knew somebody like that,” Mariah said. “I had a really shitty boyfriend when I was sixteen. He was so jealous of my ability, and he was honestly just a dick, but I couldn’t think of anything except him.”

“I remember that guy,” Henry said. “What was his name, Georgio or Davido or something?”

Mariah laughed. “Sergio.”

“How about you, Henry?” Veronica tossed out. “Any bad girlfriends at sixteen?”

“God, no.” He turned the camera vertical and took a series of shots. “I was the worst geek in my neighborhood. Big camera, big glasses, feet like a Great Dane. Girls ran the other way.”

Both women laughed. Veronica then said, “You’ve grown into your feet now.”