Chapter 4 — What She Knows

She had not called Devika tomorrow. Or any of the days since.She was going to have this child. This was the decision she had made so early that it had barely felt like a decision — it had simply been true, the way some things were true before you had words for them. She was going to have this child and she was going to do it as she had done most significant things in her life: in the full knowledge that it was hard and without waiting for conditions to be better.She was not going to tell Kabir.This was also a decision she had made. She had made it carefully, with the specific care she gave to decisions that would be permanent. She had considered every version. She had sat with the version in which she told him and what that meant for him — the engagement, the woman, the life — and she had sat with the version in which she didn't and what that meant for the child, and she had reached a conclusion that she knew was not uncomplicated and that she was going to hold anyway.He had chosen. In February, in the full confusion of that evening, he had named what he had. He had said: I am with someone. That was not the statement of a man who was uncertain.She was not going to be the thing that undid his choosing.And so she had come to Rishikesh on October fourteenth, at twenty-seven years old, four months pregnant, to honor a pact that was now a very different thing than it had been at twenty-two, and to see him, and to give them both the completion of showing up, and then to say goodbye properly.That was the plan.The plan had not included Priya.The plan had not included how good Priya was, how warmly real, how the goodness of her made everything more rather than less complicated.Aanya sat in Shiv Café with her empty cup and the October light doing the thing it did and thought: I need to leave by tomorrow morning. I need to say what needs to be said and I need to leave before I do something like tell him the truth.