Chapter 4 — What She Knows

AanyaShe had found out on a Tuesday.Not the kind of Tuesday that announces itself as significant — just a regular working Tuesday in July, which was four months after the night in February that had produced this fact, a night she had not fully anticipated and had not prevented and had not regretted in the way she probably should have.She had gone to the pharmacy during her lunch break for something entirely unrelated and left with three pregnancy tests, because the lunch break before that she had calculated dates and the calculation had produced an answer her body confirmed.She'd done all three tests in the office bathroom. Sat on the floor between the stall and the wall with the tiles cold under her and all three positive results lined up on the floor in front of her and her phone in her hand.She had opened Kabir's contact — she had found him, eventually, despite the pact, because she was a human being in the age of LinkedIn and he was an architect in Pune and she had told herself she wouldn't reach out, only knowing. Only knowing.She had looked at the contact for a long time.Then she had put the phone down.Because here was the thing, the thing she had turned over from every angle on the bathroom floor and afterward and for every day since: she had looked him up in January, two months before February, and the LinkedIn photo had showed him at what was clearly a professional event in the background, and in the foreground of his colleague's post, clearly visible, was Kabir Malhotra and a woman who had her head on his shoulder in the specific way of someone who had earned that familiarity.She had not known the woman was Priya then. She had not known the woman's name.She had known enough.And then February had happened — the conference in Pune, the same conference, the entirely unreasonable coincidence of the seating at the closing dinner, the five years of not looking at each other suddenly compressed into a single evening, the conversation that had lasted until two AM, the decision that was not entirely a decision, the morning after in which they had both understood what had happened and what it cost and had been — not cold, not cruel, but honest. They had been honest with each other. He had said: I am with someone. She had said: I know. I've known. He had said: Aanya. She had said: don't. Please. And he hadn't.She had left Pune on the six AM bus.She had not contacted him after.She had found out in July that the six AM bus had not, in fact, been a clean exit.And she had sat on the bathroom floor and looked at the three tests and thought about what it meant to call him. What it would cost him. The woman in the LinkedIn photo. The life he was clearly building. The choice he had made in February to say: I am with someone. Because even in the confusion of that evening — even in everything — he had said it. He had named it. He had chosen.She had put the phone down.She had called Devika — her best friend, her person — and started to speak and stopped and said "I'll call you tomorrow" and hung up.