Falguni Kothari - My Last Love Story

“Promise me you will laugh every day. Fight every day. Do you know how beautiful you look when you’re angry? Promise me you’ll learn to cuss, learn to love again. Live again. Promise me you won’t give up on each other.”

Simi Desai is thirty years old and her husband is dying of cancer. He has two last wishes in his final months: first, that she’ll have his baby so that a piece of him lives on, and second, that she’ll reconcile with her old flame, who just happens to be their mutual best friend. And so over the course of their last summer together, Simi’s husband plans a series of big and small adventures for this unlikely trio, designed to help them say goodbye to each other and prove to Simi that it’s okay to move on without him—and even find love again.

Beautiful and poignant, Falguni Kothari’s My Last Love Story, will pull your heartstrings as only unforgettable love stories can.

FALGUNI KOTHARI is the author of unconventional love stories and kick-ass fantasy tales. Her novels are all flavored by her South Asian heritage and expat experiences. An award-winning Indian classical, Latin and ballroom dancer, she currently spikes her endorphin levels with Zumba.

She resides in New York with her family and pooch. She can be found online at www.falgunikothari.comand you can get the latest updates at bit.ly/FKNewsletter.

My Last Love Story

Falguni Kothari

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Falguni Kothari 2016

Falguni Kothari asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9781474083621

Praise for Falguni Kothari’s

My Last Love Story

“A profound and deeply emotional twist on the classic love triangle, My Last Love Story is a provocative tale of lifelong friendship tested by fate. Poignant and satisfying, My Last Love Story is ultimately the type of celebration of love and life that reminds us why we read in the first place.”

—Jamie Brenner, USA TODAY bestselling author of The Forever Summer

“At once heartbreaking, delightful, and completely unexpected. A must-read!”

—Sonali Dev, award-winning author of The Bollywood Bride

“[A] love triangle that defies all expectations and crosses all boundaries...and

moved me to tears.”

—Julia Tagan, author of A Question of Class

“Kothari transcends the expected.... A deeply affecting story about what it means to love.”

—Kathryn Craft, award-winning author of The Far End of Happy

“Equally heartwarming and heartbreaking, My Last Love Story takes you on a complex emotional ride that will have you examining the heart’s capacity for love long after the book is done.”

—Farrah Rochon, USA TODAY bestselling author

“Ms. Kothari’s writing is beautiful, lyrical and full of surprises.”

—K.M. Jackson, author of Romancing the Fashionista

“Smart and moving.... Falguni Kothari has written a tender novel with a passionate heart.”

—Soniah Kamal, award-winning author of An Isolated Incident

“[G]et ready to fall in love.”

—Megan Hart, New York Times bestselling author

“Darkly poignant, beautifully written, and heartbreaking.... As emotionally raw and demanding as the characters that inhabit its pages.”

—Nalini Singh, New York Times bestselling author

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Life & Lemons...

Acknowledgments

Questions for Discussion

1

Love is a dish best served naked.

As a child, those oft-quoted words of my father would have me rolling my eyes and pretending to gag at what I’d imagined was my parents’ precursor to a certain physical act.

At thirty, I’d long ago realized that getting naked wasn’t a euphemism for sex.

Neither was love.

It wasn’t my father invoking the expression just now, though, but my husband. Nirvaan considered himself a great wit, a New Age philosopher. On the best of days, he was, much like Daddy had been. On the worst days, he was my tormentor.

“What do you think, Dr. Archer? Interesting enough tagline for a vlog? What about Baby in a Petri Dish?” Nirvaan persisted in eliciting a response from the doctor and/or me for his ad hoc comedy, which we’d been ignoring for several minutes now.

I wanted to glare at him, beg him to shut up, or demand that he wait in the doctor’s office like he should’ve done, like a normal husband would have. Khodai knows why he’d insisted on holding my hand through this preliminary checkup. Nothing of import would happen today—if it did at all. But I couldn’t perform any such communication, not with my eyes and mouth squeezed shut while I suffered through a series of uncomfortable twinges along my nether regions.

I lay flat on my back on a spongy clinic bed sheeted with paper already wrinkled and half-torn. Legs drawn up and spread apart, my heels dug punishingly into cold iron stirrups to allow the fertility specialist’s clever fingers to reach inside my womb and check if everything was A-OK in there. We’d already funneled through the Pap test and stomach and chest checks. Like them, this test, too, was going swell if Dr. Archer’s approving happy hums were anything to go by.

“Excellent, Mrs. Desai. All parts are where they should be,” he joked only as a doctor could.

I shuddered out the breath I’d been holding, as the feeling of being stretched left my body. Nirvaan squeezed my hand and planted a smacking kiss on my forehead. I opened my eyes and focused on his beaming upside-down ones. His eyelids barely grew lashes anymore—I’d counted twenty-seven in total just last week—the effect of years of chemotherapy. For a second, my gaze blurred, my heart wavered and I almost cried.

What are we doing, Nirvaan? What in Khodai’s name were we starting?

Nirvaan stroked my hair, his pitch-black pupils steady and knowing and oh so stubborn. Then his face rose to the stark white ceiling, and all I saw was the green-and-blue mesh of his gingham shirt—the overlapping threads, the crisscross weaves, a pattern without end.