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Roman looked up from his plate. “What do you think, Ash? Is Sunnyvale a princess or a temple?”
“Neither,” she said. “It’s just Sunnyvale.”
“I think Sunnyvale is the castle,” Roman said to Prachi and Arvind. “Ashley is riding out on horseback to rally her troops so she can prevent the foreign hordes from razing it to the ground.”
“The foreign hordes do have a tendency to rape and pillage,” Ashley pointed out.
A frown puckered Prachi’s forehead. “Who are the hordes in this scenario?”
Roman lifted his fork and ducked his head modestly. “That would be me, ma’am.”
“I never called you a horde,” Ashley protested.
“You just implied that he’s a rapist,” Prachi scolded.
“I did not! All I was trying to say was—”
“It’s all right,” Roman interrupted with another one of his awful smiles. “It’s just perspective anyway. To you, I’m the barbarian who’s busted his way into your keep. From my perspective, you’re the backward one, clinging to the old ways while I bring advanced technologies and other gifts of civilization.”
“Starbucks coffee is not a gift of civilization.”
“I beg to differ,” Arvind said. “Starbucks would be a distinct improvement over the coffee at the grocery store on Little Torch.”
“Tell us more about these advanced technologies, Roman,” Prachi said smoothly. “Do they include Wi-Fi?”
Ashley inhaled deeply, reminding herself that it wouldn’t help to give in and argue with Roman at the dinner table. She was supposed to be showing him what she loved about Sunnyvale. To get her friends reminiscing, to demonstrate the strength of their bond.
“Of course,” Roman was saying. “We’ll have free Wi-Fi in every room at the hotel, as well as in the shopping area. It will be similar to the one you have here at Chatham—in fact, the development will be like this one in a lot of ways. Mixed residential and rental properties, a hotel, common areas that all the guests can enjoy.”
“That sounds quite nice, actually.”
Ashley wanted to reply that it sounded like plastic soul-death, but she couldn’t say that without insulting the completely soul-dead community where Prachi and Arvind had chosen to live, or the plastic-wrapped home around her, with its Corian countertops and floral-patterned valences, its piano room and polished wood floors.
There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in the living room that was comfortable to sit on. She’d tried them all.
“I’d be happy to show you the website,” Roman said. “We’re in the earliest phase right now, but in a few years I hope to be offering a conversion program for home owners—something like a trade-in. Say the two of you wanted to move to Little Torch Key, for example. You could sell your home here in North Carolina to my development group, and we’d give you title to a property on Little Torch in exchange. We would make sure what you got in the Keys was at least equivalent in value to what you’d be leaving behind, if not better. Then our real estate office would manage the sale of this property, and the burden would be entirely off your shoulders.”
Arvind gave Prachi a meaningful look. She cleared her throat and glanced guiltily at Ashley before turning her attention back to Roman. “What about … say the owner had a property to sell in a market where housing prices were depressed,” she asked. “How would you establish equivalent value?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Roman said. “A situation like that is difficult for the individual home owner, but it’s actually a tax advantage for the development group to carry those properties on the books. We’re happy to wait for the right moment to sell the home for what it’s really worth. And if we need to pay for certain improvements to make a home more attractive for sale, we have deep enough coffers to do that.” His gaze swept over the kitchen and into the living room. “Of course, no improvements would be necessary with a place like this. You have a beautiful home, Mr. and Mrs. Kapoor.”
Prachi smiled. “Thank you.”
Ashley’s armpits felt damp, her cheeks hot despite the cold. “I thought you guys would—I thought—you love Sunnyvale. Five years in a row, you’ve come back, and Prachi, you learned to knit from Esther. Arvind has the fishing boat. You said you’d always wanted a fishing boat. You spent hours out on the water.”
Arvind shoved a crab rangoon in his mouth.
“We do like Sunnyvale,” Prachi said soothingly. “We wouldn’t have visited so many times if we didn’t like it. But—”
“But what? There’s no but!”
“But,” Prachi continued evenly, “this new place Roman is planning sounds good, too.”
Ashley couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even sputter. She hurt too much.
“Will it have a gym?” Arvind spoke with his mouth full.
“Yes, a full gym,” Roman said. “Weight room, treadmills, ellipticals, studio space for classes in yoga, Pilates, the works.”
