Prologue

Shiv Café, Rishikesh. October 14th. 11:47 AM.

The café had not changed.

That was the first thing Aanya noticed when she pushed open the wooden door — the same hand-painted sign above the counter, the same wobbly table near the window, the same smell of filter coffee and old wood and something the mountains did to air at this altitude that she had never been able to name but had never been able to forget.

Five years. And Shiv Café sat here like it had been holding its breath.

She was early. She was always early when she was nervous, as if arriving first gave her some territorial claim over whatever was about to happen. She chose the window table — their table, though she hadn't allowed herself to call it that even in her own head — and sat down and put her bag on the chair beside her and looked at the door.

She had been looking at this door in her head for five years.

She was four months pregnant and she had told no one. Not her mother, not her best friend Devika, not the father, who was going to walk through that door in approximately thirteen minutes if the 11:47 AM bus from Haridwar was on time, which it never was, which meant she might have longer, which was both a relief and not.

She looked at the door.

She ordered chai.

She thought about all the ways she had imagined this day going, across five years of imagining it.

This version — this specific version, with the thing she was carrying that no one knew and the thing he didn't know he would bring with him — this version she had not imagined.

The door opened at 11:54.

Kabir walked in.

He looked exactly the same. He looked completely different. He was taller somehow — she knew he wasn't taller, that wasn't possible, but he occupied his height differently, with the settled confidence of someone who had grown into himself. His hair was cut close on the sides now. He had a line in his jaw that hadn't been there at twenty-two, the first mark of a man instead of a boy. He was wearing a blue kurta and carrying a jacket over his arm and he was looking at the room the way people looked for specific things in rooms.

He found her.

His face did something complicated and fast — surprise, recognition, something underneath both of those that she had no name for but recognized immediately because she was doing the same thing.

He smiled.

She smiled.

And then the door opened again, because he had held it, because he had held it for someone behind him, and a woman walked in.

She was beautiful — that was the first thing, before anything else was available. Tall, dark-haired, wearing a green kurta with a delicate gold chain that caught the window light. She walked in with the ease of someone who had been walking beside this man for a long time. She put her hand on his arm with the specific naturalness of a gesture done ten thousand times.

She looked at Aanya with a warm, open smile.

"Hi," she said. "You must be Aanya. I'm Priya." A pause that was not a pause. "His fiancée."

Aanya sat at the window table of Shiv Café with her chai going cold in front of her and thought: there it is. There is the version I didn't imagine.

She thought: now what.

She thought: I am going to have to be very, very good at this.

She smiled at Priya.

"Hi," she said. "It's so lovely to meet you."