Page 22 of The Matchmaker

“Did you see anyone acting strange around this area? In the hallways? Someone who seemed out of place?”

“I hardly have time to observe every stranger passing by.”

Except, for someone to have done this, they couldn’t have been a stranger. Before I can press further, the bridal suite door bursts open. Avani’s in an orange-and-green ghagra, her neck layered with ancestral gold. Angry rivers of mascara trail her cheeks.

“He’s denying it!” she shouts. “He had the nerve to get mad atme. I told him if you can’t be honest now—then what are weeven doing?” She sees me and lets out a shriek. “Nura. What the hell?”

“The papers aren’t real,” I tell her. “Let’s get Dev in here, and I’ll call my team over. We can resolve this right now.”

“Resolve this?” She collapses onto the sofa. “There’s no resolving this.”

“How did you come across the note?”

“It was on my makeup table when I arrived to get ready. I thought Dev had left me a present.” She lets out a trembly laugh. “I was hoping maybe he’d snuck in plane tickets for our honeymoon. He’s been keeping it a surprise and knew it was driving me nuts.”

“And when you confronted him with these papers, he denied it?”

“Of course he denied it,” her father scoffs.

“He’s a scammer,” the bride whimpers. “Who knows how many people he’s done this to? He acted all insulted when I showed him the proof. Stormed out like I was the crazy one. Classic gaslighting. Likehehas anything to be upset about.”

Avani’s mother slides next to her daughter on the couch and puts an arm around her.

The father glances at the two of them and then me. “I was against this from the start,” he says in a low voice. “When she told me about this ridiculous idea to work with you, I told her it would be more trouble than it was worth. I had said to both of them that we were better off seeking matches within our own class.”

“This has nothing to do with class.” Heat floods my cheeks. Dev is a Cornell grad and a software engineer at a successful startup, yet he’d barely passed muster for her father.

“Of course not. How dare I not be politically correct? Afterall this work. All this effort—” He breaks off. I know what he’s thinking. They paid me to avoid problems. What bigger problem could there be than this?

I hurry out of the suite. Down the hall. Azar catches up to me. He matches my stride. “What happened?”

“It’s a mess.” I fill him in on the pertinent details.

“Nura, that’s awful.”

He frowns in the way he always does when he’s at a loss for words, his eyes full of concern that doesn’t need to be expressed verbally to be felt. Not between the two of us. He gives me a hug instead, and for only a moment, it feels like everything will be all right.

—

By one o’clock in the morning at our emergency meeting in Borzu’s fourth-story walk-up in Midtown, it’s confirmed—as I knew it would be—that the documents are fake.

“Check out these details.” Borzu leans back in his chair. The light flickers above, reflecting against his newly green hair. He stabs a finger at the mug shot. “This is total amateur hour. They superimposed his driver’s license over a mug shot backdrop, see?” He pulls up Dev’s driver’s license. The photos are an identical match. The same deer-in-headlights expression. “The cut-and-paste job is so basic it hurts my eyes.”

“Whoever did this was counting on them to freak out first and ask questions later.” Genevieve yawns.

She’s right. Back in the bridal suite, though I had known the mug shot couldn’t be real, with my pulse beating so loudly in my head, I couldn’t prove it as easily as I can now, clear-eyed, in the still of night.

“It’s the same with this court document.” Borzu nods at thepaper. “Someone switched out the names. You can see where they cut and pasted his information onto the document from someone else’s trial.”

“Whoever did it wanted to call off the wedding,” Genevieve says.

“Well, they succeeded,” I say.

Genevieve pulls out her laptop, encrypted in ten different ways. She types furiously, then—“It looks like Avani only had one boyfriend before Dev.”

“Sunil Gupta.” Borzu squints at his own screen. “I’ll see what he’s up to.”

“They’d broken up years before we signed her,” I say. “She said the relationship had no spark—it dissolved into a friendship. I’m pretty sure she invited him to the wedding.”

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