Abdul pulled out of her slowly, and the wet sound of it filled the room like something spoken. Kamala felt the cool air touch the slick between her thighs, felt his weight shift off her, and then his hands were on her hips, turning her, rolling her onto her back with a strength that did not ask her permission and did not need to.

The lamp on the side table burned steady. It had burned through all of it — through the first time and the second, through the breaking of the mangalsutra and the scattering of the beads across the floor, through the red saree coming off her body in a heap of silk she had not looked at since. The wick was low now, the flame sitting deep in its pool of oil, and the light it threw was the colour of old brass. Their shadows climbed the wall behind the almirah and moved when they moved, and did not move when they did not.

She lay on the clean white sheet with her arms above her head, wrists still remembering the sari that had bound them earlier, though the cloth was gone now and the marks were only in her mind. Her hair was loose and damp at the temples. Her breasts had fallen to either side of her chest, heavy, the nipples still swollen and dark from his mouth. She watched the ceiling fan turn. One blade. Then the next. Then the next.

Abdul rose on his elbows above her. His beard was wet. His chest rose and fell hard, and the sweat on his shoulders caught the lamplight and made him look carved out of something darker than skin. He looked down at her — not at her face first, but at her body, the way a man looks at land he has walked and now owns.

Then he lowered his head and put his mouth on her throat.

She felt his lips first, soft for a man that size, then the scratch of the beard under his jaw as he dragged his mouth down the tendon of her neck. He did not kiss her the way Sandip had kissed her — quick, apologetic, a man checking whether he was still allowed. Abdul kissed her like he was reading her, line by line, and had all night.

"You taste like salt," he said against her skin. "Like you've been working."

"I have been," she said. Her voice came out lower than she expected. She had not spoken in a while. The last thing she had said aloud was his name, and before that, the thing she had said to the ceiling when he had turned away from her and she had thought he was asleep — Sandip will come back — and she did not know if he had heard it, and she had not asked.

He moved lower. His mouth crossed her collarbone, and then the soft shelf of her upper chest, and then he was at the rise of her left breast, and he took the nipple into his mouth and pulled at it, hard, and she made a sound she did not plan to make. Her hands came down off the mattress and into his hair before she had decided to move them. He let her hold him there while he worked her, and then he lifted his head and moved on, down, leaving the nipple wet and cold in the moving air of the fan.

"Where are you going," she said. It was not a question. It was the beginning of one.

"Down," he said. "To the part of you that matters."

He kissed the fold on her left side, the little roll of flesh above her hip, and then the one on the right, and he did not hurry past them the way she had always hurried past them herself, in the mirror, in the bath, in the years of dressing in the dark. He put his mouth on them. He put his tongue in the crease of them. He made a low sound against her skin, and the sound went through her belly like a hand.

"You think I don't see this," he said. "I see all of it. I've been seeing it since the first time I sat at your table."

She did not answer. Her breath had gone shallow. The lamp flickered once, and steadied.

Then he reached the rise of her belly.

He stopped there. He put both hands flat on her, one on either side of her navel, and held her the way a man holds a bowl he is about to drink from. The fan turned. Somewhere in the flat, in the front room, the ledger sat open on the table where he had left it, and Sandip's shirt still hung on the back of the chair, and his razor still sat on the bathroom shelf, and his mother's photograph still stood on the sideboard with its corner chipped — all of it exactly where he had left it when he had walked out with nothing but his slippers. She could not see any of it from here. She knew it was there the way she knew her own name.

Abdul lowered his mouth to her belly.

He kissed it. Not the way he had kissed her throat — this was slower. This was something else. He kissed the skin above her navel, and then the hollow of the navel itself, and then the soft slope below it where her belly curved down toward the dark hair between her legs, and he licked the hollow, and then he did it again, and then he spoke into her skin with his mouth still on her.

"You might be carrying my child now," he said.

The words went into her belly through his lips, and she felt them arrive somewhere below her navel, below the skin, in the place she had been counting for three days before he ever touched her.

"You might be carrying my son," he said. He lifted his head just enough to look at her over the curve of her own body. "Or my daughter. I don't know which. But I know one of them is in there, and I know I put it there, and I know what that makes you."

"What does it make me," she said. Her voice was barely a voice.

"Mine," he said. "All of it. Every part."

He put his mouth back down and kissed her belly again, and this time he kept kissing it, and licking it, and murmuring against it, and she lay with her hands flat on the mattress on either side of her, fingers spread, not gripping, and felt the pressure build in her — not the pressure she had imagined when she had counted the days and felt the weight in her belly in the first place, that small private certainty she had carried alone for three days, but a different pressure, a knowing. A second knowing. As if his tongue had gone through her skin and confirmed something her body had already decided without asking her.

"Sandip is gone," Abdul said into her skin. "He took his slippers and the ledger and he walked out that door, and he has not come back, and he is not going to come back."

She did not say anything. Her fingers spread wider on the sheet, until the skin between them pulled tight.

"He left his shirt," Abdul said. "He left his razor. He left his mother's photograph. A man does not come back for a shirt."

"He left the ledger," she said. It came out before she could stop it. She did not know why she said it. She knew exactly why she said it.

Abdul lifted his head. He looked at her. His eyes were black in the lamplight, and there was nothing in them she could read, and she had spent seven years learning to read men's eyes in this flat, and this one gave her nothing back.

"The ledger is mine," he said. "It was always mine. He signed it. You read it. You put your finger on the number."

"I remember."

"Then remember the rest of it too." He came up her body, slow, his mouth dragging up over her belly, over the fold of her waist, over the underside of her breast, until his face was above hers and his weight was on his hands on either side of her head and the fan was turning behind him like a wheel that had been turning all night. "You are the most beautiful woman in this country," he said. "I have thought so since the first evening I ate at your table. I have thought so every night since. And tonight I put a child in you, and now you are mine, and there is not a man in Bengal who would not trade his whole life for the thing I am doing to you right now."

She looked up at him. The lamp was behind his shoulder, and the light came around the edge of him and made a line down the side of his face. His beard was wet from her. His chest was wet from her. He was the biggest man she had ever been under, and she had been under him three times tonight, and her body had opened for him each time like a lock that had already been turned with that key and would keep turning.

"Mine now," he said. "All of it."

He reached down between them and took himself in his hand, and she felt the head of him press against her, wet, sliding along her, finding the place, and then he pushed in.

Slow. Slower than the first time. Slower than the second. He pushed in until she felt the full length of him inside her, the stretch of it, the heat of it, and then he stopped, all the way in, and stayed there, and watched her face.

She did not close her eyes. She did not look away. She lay under him with her hands flat on the mattress and her hair spread on the pillow and the lamp burning low beside them, and she let him watch her, and she watched him back.

"Say it," he said.

"Say what."

"Say you're mine."

She felt him move, just slightly, a small shift of his hips, and a sound came up out of her throat that she had not permitted. Her cunt clenched around him, hard, without her asking it to, and he felt it, and his jaw tightened, and he smiled with one side of his mouth.

"Say it," he said again.

"I'm yours," she said.

He began to move. Slow, deep strokes, pulling almost all the way out and pushing all the way back in, and every stroke pushed a sound out of her that she did not recognize as her own voice. The bed creaked under them. The sheet had come loose from the corner and was bunched under her hips, and she could feel the wet of it against her back, the wet from before, from the first time and the second, and she did not care, and she did not move to fix it.

"You counted wrong," she said. She did not know she was going to say it until it was out of her mouth. The words came up out of her between two of his strokes, quiet, almost to herself, and then they were in the room, and there was no taking them back.

Abdul's hips slowed. He looked down at her. His weight shifted onto one elbow, and his other hand came up and took her jaw, not hard, but with the whole of his palm, and turned her face up to his.

"What did you say."

"I counted wrong," she said. "By three days."

He was still inside her. She could feel him, hard, full, waiting, and she could feel the pulse of him against her walls, and she could feel the wet of him and the wet of her mixed together and sliding down between them. She did not move. She did not look away.

"The child is already there," she said. "It was there before tonight. I counted wrong. I counted wrong by three days, and I knew it before you came in the door, and I chose this anyway, with my eyes open, and I am not sorry."

Abdul did not move for a long moment. The fan turned. The lamp burned. Somewhere out in the street, the dog that had lain down in the dark got up again, and shook itself, and lay back down.

Then his hand tightened on her jaw, just slightly, and he pulled back until only the head of him was still inside her, and he pushed back in, all the way, slow, and held himself there, and looked down at her face and did not say a word.