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Lucky has always been perceptive, Dina thought, and it was a valid question. “Things have been . . . difficult between me and Arshad lately. My family is so preoccupied with Hania’s wedding—as they should be,” she hastened to add. “It’s just bringing up a lot of things for me. Regrets. Hopes. When I saw you again, I remembered how things used to be between us. I suppose I got a little nostalgic.”

He nodded his head slowly. “So what you’re saying is, you’re here for a distraction.” Something shimmered in the air between them, heady and dangerous. The expression on his face was a challenge, and it unlocked the same restless energy that had led her here, that would have brought her here, to Lucky, even without Samir’s convenient excuse. She lifted her chin, meeting his gaze.

“Maybe I am,” she said.

“All right, then,” he said. He switched direction, heading to the pickup truck parked in the driveway. He unlocked it with the keys he had used to open the door to his apartment and then stood in front of the car, a challenge in his eyes. Would she accept?

She walked over to the passenger side and climbed in without a word.

Chapter Twenty-Five

What am I doing? Dina asked herself this question approximately twenty-five times while Lucky called his mom to tell her that Dina had to go and then reversed the truck out of the driveway and started driving.

Beside her, Lucky was silent, navigating through his neighborhood, eyes trained on the road ahead. Only once, when he rolled to a stop at a red light, did she catch him glancing over at her, and then almost immediately away. The tension between them felt thick and electric, and Dina resisted the urge to tell him to turn around, because she just remembered that she had left her curling iron on at Yahya Uncle’s place and had to go turn it off quickly. Coward, taunted the same voice that had forced her into his car.

She straightened her spine. She was not afraid. Not of Lucky nor of this situation. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she was taking a chance on something amorphous. Everything that followed would be her choice, and she would accept the consequences.

Still, it seemed prudent to at least ask for a location. “Where are we going?” Dina asked.

Lucky seemed to exhale at her words, as if he had been contemplating similar thoughts. “You can’t come to Chicago and not visit Devon Avenue,” he said.

Dina felt both calmed by and disappointed by his words. What had she expected? That he would whisk her away somewhere more intimate and romantic? This was better, she told herself. They were friends, after all. Friends showed friends around their cities when they visited.

Chicago’s Little India was located on an east-west street and featured a variety of retail businesses and restaurants, many of them South Asian. Dina spotted several sari shops, followed by a pawnshop, a cash and loan, a chai shop, even a thrift store, and several desi restaurants. Finally, they came to a stop across the street from a small restaurant with red and yellow twinkle lights in the window, called “Hyderabad Mazaa—Authentic Hyderabadi Cuisine.” Lucky stared at the restaurant, which seemed to be moderately busy for late morning on a weekday.

“My father’s restaurant,” he said softly. “He always wanted to go into business with his brother. They cooked up the idea together.”

Dina smiled at the pun. “Technically, half of that restaurant belongs to your family,” she started, but Lucky shook his head.

“That’s not why I brought you here, Dina,” he said. “I know I never sat the bar, but I know my rights, and believe me, I spent plenty of time wondering if I should sue. In the end, there were more important things that needed my immediate attention. Like making sure we didn’t lose the house or that my brother didn’t drop out of school in some misguided attempt to save the family.”

“Because that was your job?” Dina said softly.

Lucky’s smile was humorless. “Elder son and all that,” he said.

“I get it. Elder daughter and all that,” she said.

Lucky’s lip quirked. “That was one thing we always had in common. Doing too much, worrying too much. Being too much.”

“You were never too much,” she said.

“Neither were you,” Lucky said, turning to her briefly. “To me, you were always enough.”

The words were a soft blanket around her shoulders, warm and comforting, and she didn’t know how to respond. Were they a compliment? Was he flirting with her? It was far too easy to talk to Lucky.

A man stepped out of the restaurant and leaned against the brick exterior. Even before she heard Lucky’s muttered curse or saw the way he gripped the steering wheel, she knew the man must be his uncle. Lucky’s taya, his father’s older brother, the one who had failed his family when it truly mattered. He had a long, skinny face, large eyes a bit too far apart, thinning hair he dyed an unrealistic black, large glasses on a chain around his neck. He was a skinny man, dressed in a T-shirt and dark pants rolled at the bottom to display two inches of white sports socks and worn sneakers. He looked like he could be related to Lucky, but also like so many older desi men Dina knew. Beside her, Lucky started the car just as the man looked across the road and caught sight of them, his eyes widening, mouth opening as if he were about to call out, and then Lucky put the car in gear and drove away.

“How did you do it?” Dina asked when the silence stretched between them.

Lucky was fiddling with the knob on the radio, switching between stations before turning it off. “You’ll have to be a bit more specific,” he said. He sounded tense, as if bracing for another interrogation, but she didn’t want to talk about his uncle or the restaurant anymore. What she was more curious about was another question entirely.

“How did you move on after you lost everything?” The question landed like a thunderclap in the cab of the truck, but Dina was determined to be honest, to articulate what she meant. Just this once, she would say what she meant and listen to the answer with her whole heart. “You were flung from your path because of your family and bad luck and disaster, but you kept going, you survived and built yourself back up into something even better. How did you do it, Lucky?”

They were driving at a leisurely pace. There wasn’t much traffic, and Dina peered out her window at the selection of stores: a Hakka Chinese restaurant, a tailor who could customize any desi outfit, a gold jewelry store with bars on the window. Lucky was quiet for a long time, so long that Dina wasn’t sure he would answer her.

“My dad was so happy when the restaurant first opened,” he said, musing. “They got a lot of foot traffic and plenty of return customers in the first few months. He had tried so many times to make a business work in Toronto, and for whatever reason—bad timing, poor cash flow, predatory business partners—he could never make anything work. Then he had this idea to open a restaurant, in another country of all things, and it was a hit. Except after a few months of running it, he was still working all the time and still tired, and then he was diagnosed with cancer, and things went from bad to worse.”

Lucky’s voice was soft, intimate, and Dina shivered. The stillness of the truck felt like a cocoon around the two of them. Just tell him, that same voice urged. Tell him why you’re here, why you asked that question. Tell him that you and Arshad aren’t together anymore and you’re not sure if you’ve ever made a good decision in your life, including the decision not to run after him in law school. She opened her mouth to speak, but he beat her to it.