The ledger lies open on the bed between them, and the red ink of Sandip's losses bleeds into the white sheets like something spilled and left to stain. He has been staring at the column for an hour without seeing it. The numbers have stopped meaning money. They mean Abdul's voice on the phone that afternoon, low and patient, explaining the terms as though Sandip were a child who needed the arithmetic walked through slowly.

Kamala is at the dressing table with her back to him, working the brush through her hair. The henna in it catches the lamplight — that reddish burn along the black, the way it has always looked to him like something lit from inside. She has not noticed the ledger. She thinks he is reading.

"The loan is mine," he says, and his own voice startles him. "But the price is her."

The brush stops. In the mirror, her eyes come up and find his reflection instead of his face, which is somehow worse.

"What did you say?"

Sandip closes the ledger. The cover thumps soft against the mattress, and his fingers stay on it, pressing, as though the book might otherwise open itself and speak the rest. He had rehearsed this in the bathroom with the tap running. He had rehearsed it in the car. Every version had him calm and reasonable, a man explaining a business decision to his wife over tea.

"Abdul has agreed to clear the debt. All of it. The shop, the two loans against the flat—"

"Sandip."

"—everything. On one condition."

She turns on the stool. The sari blouse is the green one, cut low, and the lamplight lies along the top of her breasts and the pale shelf of her collarbone. Seven years, and he still cannot look at her without the small catch somewhere under his ribs. Tonight the catch is different. Tonight it feels like something being pulled tight.

"Say it," she says.

"He's coming tomorrow night."

For a moment she does not move at all. Then her face does something he has not seen it do in seven years — the fair skin going blotchy along the jaw, the lush mouth pulling back from the teeth. She stands so fast the stool scrapes the floor.

"You sold me." Her voice is low, which is worse than shouting. "You sold me to that black Muslim pig."

"Kamala—"

"That's what you did." She is backing toward the door, one hand out behind her like a woman feeling for a wall in the dark. "That's what this is. You sat with him and you sold your wife."

He is up before he has decided to move. His hand catches her wrist — the soft inner wrist, where the skin is thin and blue-veined and he has kissed it a hundred times — and he feels the trembling start there, running up under his fingers like something electrical. She jerks. He does not let go.

"He's coming tomorrow night," he says again, and hears the steadiness in it, hears it and does not recognize himself. "And you will be ready."

Her free hand comes up and cracks across his face. The sound is flat and enormous in the small room. His cheek blooms hot. He holds the wrist.

"You're hurting me."

He is. He can see the white of his knuckles against her brown skin, the small bunching of flesh where his grip has gone past firm. He does not loosen. Some part of him — the part that has spent seven years being reasonable, being the man who yields, the man who apologizes first — watches from somewhere near the ceiling and does not understand what the body below it is doing.

"The shop closes in eleven days," he says. "You know what happens then. You know what we lose."

"Let it close."

"And then what? Your mother's medicines. The flat. You want to go back to your father's house with your hands empty and explain to him that his daughter's husband couldn't keep a business running?"

Something moves behind her eyes. He has found the place, and he hates himself for finding it, and he presses anyway.

"He wants to marry you," Sandip says. "That's the whole of it. He wants to marry you and put a child in you. That's what he told me. He wants your hand and your womb, Kamala, and he'll pay for both."

The trembling in her wrist changes. It goes still, and the stillness is worse — the way a river goes still just before it drops.

"Let go of me."

He doesn't.

She looks at him then, really looks, and he sees her take his measure the way she never has before — the soft belly under his shirt, the thin hair, the soft uncallused hands that have never done a day's labor. Whatever she finds there, her face closes over it.

"So this is what you are," she says quietly. "Seven years and I find out what you are."

He pulls her. She is small and he is not strong but she is not braced, and the two of them go down onto the bed together, the ledger sliding off and hitting the floor with a slap of paper. She lands half under him, one arm trapped, and the breath goes out of her in a grunt. The lamp throws their shadows up the wall, huge and struggling.

"Sandip—"

His hand is on her sari before he knows what he intends. The fabric is thin, the good silk, the one she wears for festivals, and it has come loose at the waist in the fall. He gets his fingers under the fall of it and drags it aside — up over the swell of her hip, the fold of soft fat at her waist, the pale stretch of belly below the navel he has traced with his tongue a thousand nights.

"Stop." Her voice has gone thin. "Stop, you're—"

He puts his hand between her thighs.

She is dry. He knows it the instant his fingers find her — the closed heat of her, the lips of her cunt pressed shut and dry as the palm of a hand, no give, no welcome. Seven years of marriage and he has never touched her like this, has never found her like this, and the wrongness of it goes through him like a shock of cold water. His fingers work against her anyway, pushing, parting, finding the hood of her clit and pressing down, and she makes a sound he has never heard her make — not pain exactly, not fear, something further down than either, a long low note like an animal in a trap.

Her hips jerk. Not toward him. Away, into the mattress, and then — because there is nowhere to go — back, a short involuntary rock against his hand that she catches immediately and kills, going rigid, every muscle in her body locking at once. Her thighs clamp around his wrist. Her hands come up and grip his forearm, nails digging in, and she does not push him away. She holds him there. She holds his hand against her cunt and looks up at him with her teeth bared.

"Is this what he paid for?" she says. "Is this the sample?"

His fingers move. He cannot seem to stop them. There is a wetness starting now, small and traitorous, slicking the tips of his fingers where they work against her, and he can feel her body answering him even as her face stays locked in its hatred — the tiny involuntary swell, the catch in her breath that she swallows before it can become a sound. Her nipples have gone hard under the thin blouse. He can see them through the fabric, dark and standing, and he knows she knows he can see.

"You're wet," he says, and his voice cracks on it.

She spits in his face.

He does not wipe it. He leaves it there, running down his cheek, and he keeps his hand between her thighs, feeling her clench around nothing, feeling the small pulse that betrays her, feeling her hatred and her body pulling in two different directions under his palm. The lamp buzzes. Somewhere down the street a dog is barking at nothing. The room smells of her — that faint sour-sweet smell he has only ever known in the dark with the lights off, and now it is in the air of the room he has to sleep in.

He takes his hand away.

She does not move. She lies there with her sari rucked up to her waist and her thighs still open where he left them, and she does not cover herself, and she does not look away from him. Her chest is going up and down too fast. There is a wet shine on the inside of her thigh where his fingers have been.

"Tomorrow night," he says. "Nine o'clock. Wash and wear the red one."

Her eyes are black in the lamplight. She looks at him the way she might look at something she has found in her food.

"If he touches me," she says, and her voice has gone flat and level, all the fury burned out of it and something colder underneath, "I will kill him."

She lets the silence sit.

"And then I will leave you both."

He waits for the rest of it — the threat, the plea, the bargain, the tears. He has known her seven years. He knows how she argues, how she circles, how she comes back an hour later with a different angle and softer hands. He is braced for it. He has his answers ready.

It does not come.

She sits up. She pulls the sari down over her knees, slow, deliberate, smoothing the silk with the flat of her hand, and she does not look at him while she does it. Then she stands, and she walks to the door, and she stops there with her back to him — the wide hips, the sway of her, the low blouse showing the long pale line of her spine.

She does not say anything else. She does not ask him to explain. She does not ask him to stop it. She opens the door and goes out into the dark of the flat, and she leaves it open behind her, and he hears her bare feet on the tile, going away, and then the click of the kitchen light, and then nothing.

Sandip sits down on the edge of the bed. The ledger is on the floor, open, the red numbers face-up. His hand is still wet. He looks at it for a long time — the shine of her on his fingers, the smell of her rising off his skin — and then he closes his fist around it, tight, and holds it there against his own palm like he is trying to keep something from getting out.

The lamp hums. Down the hall, a tap is running.