Synopsis

Two sisters face the real consequences of a fake marriage scheme in an emotional yet hilarious novel about immigration, healing, and family from USA Today bestselling author Sonali Dev.

Two sisters. One fake marriage. Zero chance of keeping the truth hidden.

The Naik sisters escaped their traumatic past in Mumbai to come to the States, but their journeys have been vastly different. Simi is working toward a bright future as a pediatric nurse in a small town in Kentucky when Rupi shows up at her door in distress, on the run, and as always, dragging trouble in her wake.

With Rupi’s safety in jeopardy, the sisters hatch a desperate plan to keep her in the Rupi must get married—and fast—even if it means Simi recruiting the man she’s been secretly dating as her sister’s groom. A perfect plan? Not quite. But there aren’t many alternatives.

As the big day inches closer, Simi and Rupi face a storm of wedding shenanigans and romantic surprises, not to mention sisterly jealousies. As the stakes and tensions rise, will their secrets tear them apart or will they find a way to risk everything for love?

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Excerpt

From Chapter 4

The bus jerks to a stop with a giant mechanical sigh of relief, and I jolt awake. The first thing that strikes me is the missing weight of my backpack on my chest. I sit up and search the seat next to me, then bend over and look under my seat.

No!

The world stops. Everything stops.

My heart hammers in my ears. This can’t be happening. The bus is completely, eerily empty. Not another soul on board, except for the driver. I jump up and grab the overhead luggage rack with both hands and pull myself up, getting a foothold on the seat. My eyes search up and down the empty racks. Rising panic makes it impossible to process what I’m seeing. Emptiness. Nothing but emptiness on either side.

Shit shit shit.

Over the past year, I’ve slept on a lot of public transport. After I left LA, I spent six months going from place to place on trains and buses before I found my way to Chicago. I also grew up in Mumbai. Clutching my belongings for dear life is coded into my DNA. My hyperawareness of my surroundings has always been at peak paranoia levels. I’ve always slept with my arms wrapped around my backpack, the straps clinging to my shoulders like an insecure baby. How did I let this happen?

I drop to my hands and knees and start crawling around the bus. There’s nothing under the seats, except bottles and cans and paper cups lying on their sides. Every last bit of my already paltry worldly possessions is gone. Gone.

Tina’s documents, my only leverage, gone.

“Hey lady. This is the last stop,” the driver yells back at me. “Time to get off.”

I ignore him and check every seat. More nothing. Without those documents, I have nothing.

I run to the front of the bus. “Someone took my backpack.” I sound like I’m in the throes of hysteria.

The man scratches his shoulder and looks bored. “Did you check around your seat?”

The urge to run at him and scratch out his eyes grips me, and I wrap my arms around myself. “It’s not on the bus. Please. Please. Did you see anyone walk out with a black backpack?”

“Sure,” he says. “Everyone. I’m sorry. Listen, I need to empty out the bus.” He doesn’t sound even a little sorry.

All I have left is the change I shoved into my jeans after buying that last bus ticket.

“You have to get off the bus,” the driver says again.

My legs shake as I make myself do as he says. It took me twenty hours to make my way from Chicago to Nashville. Then finding a bus from Nashville to Hochkinsville took almost as much time because I had to wait at the Nashville bus station for a good ten hours. It hadn’t helped that I started to feel queasy, achy, and feverish on the bus out of Chicago.

Through it all, I clung to my backpack like my life depended on it. Because it did. When I got on the bus, the exhaustion and the achiness was so bad, my body trembled with it. I had to fight to keep my eyes open. I laid the backpack on the seat next to me for just one second. One second while I settled into my seat.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up with the bag gone.

The driver says something. He’s trying to be sympathetic, but what does his sympathy matter now? It’s late in the evening, but there’s still some light left in the sky. My eyes search for a clock, but the terminal building is barely more than a shack. It’s like I took a bus out of Nashville and landed in a dystopian, barely inhabited version of America. I’m fully in character: penniless, my body starving and feverish, and I smell like I’ve survived an apocalyptic war, in the sewers.

I shake out my empty hands. Everything’s gone. All because I was stupid enough to let myself feel cornered by Tina. Why did I even come here? What is the guarantee that I’ll find Simi? How am I going to find her?

My lost backpack drags at my shoulders like a ghost. I make my way to the decrepit building. Sweat pours down my back. It’s like being back in Mumbai at the height of the post-monsoon heat. October heat is something every Mumbaikar is intimately familiar with. After months of being pummeled by the pouring rain, the earth releases all the pent-up fire in its belly, wrapping the city in a vice grip of steam. It’s inside me now, burning me down.

Simi hated the heat. How has she lived here for four years? Images of Simi as a baby, a toddler, a teenager tumble through me, arms and legs spread like a starfish on the mattress we shared, sheets thrown off, hair wet with sweat. I can smell the top of her head. My baby. How had she survived without me for four years? My heart squeezes with how much I miss her. Then anger drowns me.

Obviously, she’s survived much better than I have.

About the Author

Sonali Dev’s first literary work was a play about mistaken identities performed at her neighborhood Diwali extravaganza in Mumbai. She was eight years old. Despite this early success, Sonali spent the next few decades getting degrees in architecture and writing, migrating across the globe, and starting a family while writing for magazines and websites. With the advent of her first gray hair, her mad love for telling stories returned full force, and she now combines it with her insights into Indian culture to conjure up stories that make a mad tangle with her life as supermom, domestic goddess, and world traveler. She lives in Chicagoland with her husband, two visiting adult children, and the world’s most perfect dog.

Sonali Dev and her novels have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, NPR, Marie Claire, Bustle, Shondaland, Book Riot, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and more. She has won the American Library Association’s award for best romance, the RT Reviewer Choice Award for best contemporary romance, multiple RT Seals of Excellence, is a RITA® finalist, and has been listed for the Dublin Literary Award. Shelf Awareness calls her “Not only one of the best but one of the bravest romance novelists working today.”

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