She eased the door shut behind her with two fingers on the edge, lifting the latch so it wouldn't click. The lamp was still on. She had left it on when she'd slipped out, thinking she'd be back before he stirred, and now it sat there throwing its soft yellow ring across the bed, and Rohan was sitting up against the headboard with the red scarf in his hands.

Not folded. Not draped around his shoulders. Held. Both fists closed on the cloth, knuckles gone pale, the fringe crushed between his fingers the way a man holds a rope he's thinking about pulling.

His eyes came up to her. Dark, and not sleepy. Whatever he'd been doing with the scarf, he'd been doing it a while.

"Where were you."

Not a question with a lift at the end. Flat, like a man reading a meter.

Maya crossed to the almirah and set her mother's dupatta down on top of it, smoothing it once with her palm. The bangles on her wrist made their small sound and then stopped. "Call center," she said. "Night shift. They took on new girls for the festival rush."

"Call center."

"In the market, above the photo studio. They keep the lights on all night." She turned. Her saree pleats had come loose on the ride home and she tucked them back in at her waist, unhurried, watching him watch her do it. "I'll be doing it again tomorrow."

"Which one."

"The one with the blue shutter."

"There's no call center above the photo studio." He said it quietly. He didn't raise his voice, he never did, but the scarf twisted in his hands and the fringe pulled straight. "I walked past it tonight. Looking for you. There's a tailor up there. He was closing at ten."

The lamp hummed. Somewhere down the lane a dog was working through something it had found, and a scooter went by with a bad silencer, and the gauzy curtain breathed once at the window and went still.

Maya stood with her hand still on her waistband. Three thousand rupees folded there, damp from her own skin. She thought about the lie the way you think about a step you've already taken off the edge of.

"Then I was somewhere else," she said.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he set the scarf down on the sheet beside him, flat, and opened his hand over it, and she understood that he had been sitting here holding it since before midnight and had run out of anything to do with his hands.

"Come here."

"Papa—"

"Come here."

She went. Not because he'd told her to — she told herself that, walking the four steps from the almirah to the bed, the anklets ticking at her ankles, the sindur line still red in her parting, the jhumkas swinging their little gold arcs against her neck. She went because if she stood there one more second with the money against her hip he was going to see it, and because the lamp was warm, and because she had spent the last hour being a wife for a stranger who paid for it, and the man who had not paid for anything was sitting in her bed holding her mother's scarf.

She put one knee on the mattress. He caught her wrist — hard, the way he'd caught it in the market road, the way he caught it when he wanted her to know his hand was there — and pulled, and she came down across the bed with a small cry and her bangles rang out, all of them at once, that bright glassy clatter that was the sound of her mother's wedding set and now the sound of her being pulled into bed.

His mouth was at her throat before she'd found the sheet with her hands.

Not kissing. Breathing. He put his face into the side of her neck and pulled the air in through his nose, slow, and then again, and Maya lay still under him with her heart going and her wrist still caught in his fist and knew, with the flat certainty of a woman who has just watched a glass leave the edge of a table, what was about to happen.

"You smell like a stranger," he said into her skin.

She said nothing.

"You smell like somebody else's soap. Somebody else's room." His hand came off her wrist and went to her saree, and he shoved the silk up her leg, up her thigh, past her knee, the pleats tearing loose with a sound like paper. "Somebody else's bed."

"Papa—"

His palm came down flat over her mouth.

Not gentle. Flat and wide and hot, the heel of it jammed up under her nose, his fingers spread across her cheek, and she tasted the salt of his hand and the ghost of the scarf and something under that, engine oil, the Activa, the lane. His other hand was already between her legs.

She was wet. She had been wet since the corner of the market road, since the last stretch of the ride with the wind coming under her saree, and she had told herself it was the motion of the Activa, and it had not been the motion of the Activa. His fingers found it and he made a sound low in his chest, not quite a word, and pushed two of them into her, and her hips came up off the sheet before she could stop them.

"Don't," he said. "Don't say anything. I don't want to hear it."

His hand stayed over her mouth. He shifted his weight, and she felt him against her thigh, hard through his shorts, and then he had them down and he was between her legs with his knees shoving hers apart, the inside of her thighs slick already with what he'd done with his fingers, and she looked up past his shoulder at the ceiling and the one lamp and the fan that had stopped turning hours ago, and she thought, clearly, he knows, he doesn't know everything, but he knows enough, and then he pushed into her.

One thrust. All of it. Her whole body came up off the bed, her back bowing, her heels finding the sheet and sliding, and every bangle on both wrists rang together, and the jhumkas swung forward and struck her jaw and swung back, and the sound she made against his palm was nothing like a word.

He held there. Buried to the root, his hips flush against her, his breath coming out of him in one long shudder against the side of her neck, and his hand pressed harder over her mouth, mashing her lips against her own teeth.

"Quiet," he said. "The lane hears everything."

She nodded against his palm. She couldn't have made a sound if she'd wanted to. He had filled her so completely that there was no room left in her for air, and she lay pinned under his weight with the silk bunched at her waist and her mother's gold shaking on her arms, and she felt the wet of herself around him, the grip of her own body on him, the small involuntary clench that came and went and came again, and she hated it and it did not stop.

Then he moved.

He fucked her like a man trying to dig something out. No rhythm at first, nothing measured — long hard pulls back until she thought he'd leave her empty and then a slam home that shoved her up the bed an inch at a time, so that by the fifth stroke her head was off the pillow and by the tenth her shoulder blades were grinding into the headboard and she had to get a hand up behind her to brace. The bangles on that wrist rang against the wood. He didn't tell her to stop. He put his forehead down against her shoulder and drove, and the whole bed complained, the old frame ticking and creaking, and the sheet had come untucked on her side and was dragging under her hip.

She got her other hand into his hair. Salt-and-pepper, coarse, damp at the roots. She held his head against her shoulder while he took her, and she turned her face as far as she could under his palm and looked at the wall, at the almirah, at her mother's dupatta folded on top of it, and the sindur line in her hair was coming loose above her ear and she could feel it, one thin red thread of it stuck to her temple.

He said her mother's name.

Not Maya. Sunita.

He said it into her shoulder, muffled, like a man talking in his sleep, and his hips never broke stride, and Maya shut her eyes and tightened her legs around his back and did not correct him.

"Say it," she whispered against his palm. Barely anything. The shape of the words against his skin.

He lifted his hand off her mouth an inch. "What."

"Say it again."

He raised his head and looked down at her. His eyes in the lamplight were wet at the corners, which she had never seen, not once in two years, and he was still moving inside her, slower now, watching her face the way he'd watched her in the mirror the morning she'd drawn the sindur, and he said, "Sunita," and she came.

It took her without warning, from somewhere under her ribs, and she clamped down on him hard enough that he grunted, one long clench that rolled through her and kept rolling, her heels drumming on the sheet, her nails digging into the back of his neck, the bangles knocking, the jhumkas swinging hard enough to slap her jaw twice, and a sound came out of her that she could not have stopped with both his hands over her mouth.

He put his mouth on hers to swallow it.

And then he was gone too — she felt it start, the first thick pulse of him inside her, and he broke the kiss and dropped his face into the side of her neck and groaned there, low and long and awful, a sound like something being pulled out of a wall, and his hips stuttered and shoved and stuttered again, and he emptied into her in long pulses she could count, one, two, three, each one pushing a little further up into her, and his hand came down and gripped her hip so hard she knew there would be marks, and she lay under him and took all of it with her eyes open on the ceiling.

The lamp hummed. The lane was quiet. Somewhere below in the house, the fridge clicked on.

He stayed inside her a long time. His weight came down and she took it, both of them breathing, the sweat going cold on his back under her hands. She could feel the pulse in him still going, faint, like a second heartbeat she'd been given to hold. Her own body had gone loose and strange, and there was a wetness spreading under her hip into the sheet, and she did not know yet whose it was.

Then he pulled out.

She felt the drag of it, every inch, and the sudden hollow cold, and the gush that followed — his seed coming out of her, thick and warm, running down between her legs onto the sheet, and she lay still and let it, because there was no point moving yet, and because some part of her wanted to feel exactly how much of him there was to lose.

Rohan got up on one elbow and looked down at her.

He looked at the silk bunched above her hips. He looked at her thighs, open, wet, shining in the lamplight. He looked at the white of him leaking out of her and pooling in the crease of the sheet, and he did not say anything for so long that Maya began to hear her own breathing.

Then he put two fingers down and caught a run of it at the top of her thigh and pushed it back into her.

Slow. Deliberate. All the way to the knuckles, and then he drew his fingers out and wiped them dry on the inside of her leg, and he lay back down beside her, and the bed took his weight.

"Wife," he said.

Maya turned her head on the pillow to look at him. The sindur thread had come loose and lay across her cheekbone. Her lips were swollen from his hand. The money was still folded in her waistband, pressed into her hip, and he had not found it, and he had not asked again, and she understood that he had decided not to ask, which was a different thing from not knowing.

Her mother's dupatta sat on the almirah with the pleats she'd smoothed into it.

"Yes," she said.