She Returned to Expose His Sister, He Won Her Heart Again novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Earrings
Mira wakes at the Sunday lunch three weeks before the night she died, refuses Rhea's gift of Maa's earrings in front of the whole family, and finds a stranger reading her messages.
On the night Mira Sen died, her husband read her private messages aloud to forty relatives.
They were not her messages. She said so three times, loudly, in front of everyone.
He put the phone down on the table and said, "I am ashamed to have you in my house."
Then he walked to the front door and opened it for her himself.
Mira drove into the rain with her hands shaking, and on the highway a truck did not stop.
The next thing she felt was a spoon in her hand.
She looked down at steamed rice, a pool of dal and the green-bordered plate she had used every Sunday for fourteen months.
The dining table was full of relatives.
Her father-in-law was telling the story about the cricket bat again.
An aunt was lifting fish bones out of her mouth with two fingers.
A cousin's teenage son was holding his phone up to film the table for the family group.
It was a Sunday lunch, three weeks before her father-in-law's seventieth birthday.
Mira set the spoon down slowly so that nobody would see her hand.
Through the window she could see the driveway and a car parked at an angle by the gate.
Harish had driven himself home from the temple, as he did every Sunday.
His son Dev had ridden in the back seat, as he always did, although the seat beside his father was empty.
Dev sat at the far end of the table now, eating without looking up.
"Mira, don't get up," a voice called from the kitchen door. "I have a surprise."
Rhea Malhotra came in drying her hands on a dishcloth.
She was thirty-four, Dev's adopted sister, and she had been in the kitchen since five.
She had made the hilsa curry that Mira's mother cooked.
She had learned it over three video calls with Mira's mother, and nobody had asked her to.
"Eat first," Rhea said, squeezing Mira's shoulder. "You've been looking tired."
She bent closer. "If anything is bothering you, you come to me before anyone else. Promise?"
"I promise," Mira said, because in her first life she had.
The fish was perfect. She ate every bite.
Then Rhea brought out a small velvet box and set it beside her plate, and the whole table went quiet to watch.
"Maa's emerald earrings," Rhea said. "I've kept them eleven years. Dev and I agreed they should go to his wife."
Dev looked up. He nodded once.
Inside the box, two deep green stones sat in old gold settings.
In her first life, Mira had cried, put them on and worn them to the temple the next Sunday.
Three weeks later, a pawnshop slip with her signature on it had been laid on this same table beside the printed messages.
The signature was almost perfect.
"Put them on, beta," said the aunt with the fish bones. "Let us see."
Mira closed the lid of the box.
"Thank you, Rhea," she said. "I can't take them like this."
Rhea's smile did not move. "Like what?"
"Loose, in my cupboard," Mira said. "They're Maa's. If anything went missing, I'd never forgive myself."
She turned to the head of the table. "Papa, will you keep them in the locker in your study?"
"And write the date and my name on a page, and sign it?"
Harish stopped halfway through the cricket bat. "A written note, between family?"
"My father did it with my mother's gold," Mira said. "He wrote it in a book. It's how I was raised."
That was a lie. Her father had never owned a book like that.
"Of course," Rhea said at once. "Whatever makes you comfortable."
Her eyes had gone bright. "I only wanted you to have something of hers."
"I know. Thank you." Mira looked at the boy with the phone. "Please keep filming. Papa is about to sign."
The boy grinned and lifted the phone higher.
Harish signed on the back of a household diary page, grumbling, and wrote the date.
He put the earrings into his shirt pocket to carry to the locker.
On the stairs afterwards, Dev stopped her with two fingers on her sleeve.
"Rhea cried in the kitchen," he said quietly. "She spent weeks choosing the right moment."
"Did it have to be in front of everyone?"
"Yes," said Mira.
He studied her face for a moment.
"You have never said no to her," he said.
"I know."
She went up to the bedroom alone and shut the door.
Her phone was in the pocket of her kurta.
She opened the settings of her messages and found a menu she had not touched in fourteen months.
Linked devices.
One session was listed under her name, a laptop browser she had never owned.
Beside it were the words: Last active, 1 minute ago.
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