One Good Friend Deserves Another by Lisa Verge Higgins

would have nipped the idea of medical school in the bud while I was still in college.”
    “No, they wouldn’t.” Desh put up the score—two points to zero—on the battered scoreboard screwed into the cement wall. “I watched them during the engagement party. They dote on you.”
    Dhara felt a little bubble of warmth. Her parents had doted on Desh too, squiring him around to all her crazy relatives. And Desh had gone right with the flow, even greeting her grandmother by bending down and touching the old woman’s feet without hesitation and with great reverence. Desh made it all so effortless. There was no awkwardness. No strained smile. No panicked looks from across the room, amid milling crowds of curious aunts.
    Stop.
    “It’s one of the many reasons,” Desh said, crouching down to line the balls up in the dirt as they reached the end of the court, “why I agreed to this arrangement. You can tell a lot about a woman from the way her family behaves around her.”
    He unfolded himself from the ground and looked at her. Behind the rim of his glasses, she met his soft brown eyes. Steady, honest eyes. And Dhara felt a little shiv of guilt slide between her ribs.
    Dishonesty. That’s what had killed her relationship with Cole. The lies he kept from her, the truth he was unwilling to confess. That was the reason she had to confess to Desh the one secret that concerned him, before he made the irrevocable step of tracing the vermilion upon the part in her hair.
    She took a deep, shaky breath. “You seem like a very sweet man, Desh.”
    He froze for a moment. “Now I know I’m in trouble.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “I always hope for dashing or romantic . I’d even settle for interesting .”
    “Desh—”
    “ Distinguished even.” He tried a casual shrug. “Maybe rugged .”
    “There’s nothing wrong with sweet .” She swept up a ball, weighing it in her hand. “Not many men are sweet.”
    “You are trying to be kind.” He stepped back, ceding the space so she could throw. “But I suspect you called me because you are having second thoughts about this arrangement.”
    The guilt shiv slid a little deeper. Why did she think she could hide her motives? Desh understood how out-of-the-ordinary this unchaperoned date really was, in Indian eyes.
    “Dhara, let me tell you something.” He traced patterns in the dirt with his feet. “I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve been a full professor for three years now. You’ve probably heard that this is not my first serious relationship.”
    Dhara remembered her aunt Nisha’s secretive little whisper about the American girl Desh chose not to marry.
    “It’s a difficult thing, for someone without an Indian background, to understand my situation.” He squinted as he gazed to the end of the court. “My brothers have their own families, their own houses, but I am the youngest and the last. I will take care of my parents in a house we will share. Perhaps you can imagine that this has been an issue with the women I’ve brought home to meet my family.”
    Dhara could almost hear Marta clacking her fingernails, in her post-Tito-breakup era, over a man she’d once met. Mama’s boy, Marta had called him—a man in his thirties who still lived with his mother.
    But in a traditional Indian family, a mother-in-law ruled the house and expected to rule the bride. Dhara adored Desh’s mom, a dumpling of a woman who’d hugged her so enthusiastically at the engagement party. His mother was round and energetic and bursting with good humor—a dream of a future mother-in-law.
    “And so,” he continued, gesturing for her to go ahead and toss the ball, “I finally decided that it was time to stop trying to fit square pegs into round holes. I needed an Indian bride who would understand my family obligations.”
    An Indian bride. A soft, malleable virgin, who’d submit without question to the will of her husband.
    Dhara lobbed the ball blindly. It fell considerably short of the