He said it, and the word sat in the kitchen like a third person, and Kamala's fingers were still closed on the bones of his wrist, and Sandip felt the pressure of them go up through his arm and into his chest and settle there, and he understood that he had not said the sale and he had not said the keeping, he had said something he had not known was in him until the breath went out of his mouth carrying it.

"What would you do," he said, and his voice came out lower than he had ever heard it, "if I took the knife and put it in your hand and told you to choose?"

The tap dripped. He counted it the way she did, without meaning to, one, and the second one came before he had finished the first, and somewhere between them her face changed — not the way it changed when he disappointed her, not the flat way it had gone when she named what he was, but still, and stiller, the way water goes still when the wind drops off it.

Her hand came off his wrist. He felt the place where it had been, the warmth leaving it, the small cold that came after. She stepped back — out of the circle of his two hands, his left one still open in the air where her heart had been, his right one falling to his side because there was nothing left to hold. She walked the length of the counter, and he watched her back, the sari blouse cut low, the white skin of her shoulders, the henna-red tips of her hair moving against her neck as she turned her head just enough to find the drawer handle with her eyes before her hand found it.

She picked up the knife by the handle. His mother's knife, the heavy one, the one that had come out of the old kitchen when they set up this flat seven years ago, and she lifted it off the steel and turned with it hanging down at her side, the blade toward the floor, and the light from the window went along it and did not stay.

"You want to know what I'd do," she said.

Her voice was flat. It was the voice she used for the accounts, the voice she used when she told him what the milk cost and what the electric had come to and what the shop had taken in that day, and hearing it come out of her mouth now, with the knife in her hand, made the back of his neck go cold.

"I'd put it in the drawer," she said. "And I'd wait for nine o'clock. And I'd see if you open the door."

She turned back to the counter. She opened the drawer — the same drawer she had opened the night before, the one that held the second key and the twine and the old bills — and she laid the knife down in it, blade flat, handle toward the front, and she closed it, and the sound the drawer made going in was a small sound, an ordinary sound, the sound of a kitchen being a kitchen.

Her hand stayed on the pull.

The tap dripped. Sandip stood where he was, at the other end of the counter, and he did not move, and she did not move, and the clock on the wall above the fridge ticked its way along the minute they were in, and he looked at her hand on the drawer pull and saw the knuckles go pale, the way they did when she was lifting something heavy, the way they did when she had decided something and was holding the decision down with her body until it stopped moving.

He felt her fingers still. On the inside of his wrist, where they had been. The pressure of them, the exact shape of it, the four points and the thumb, and the pulse that had jumped under her thumb and gone on jumping for a few seconds after she let go, as if it had not been told yet.

He had never asked her for anything in seven years. He had said that to himself before, in the dark, in the bed, with her breathing turned away from him on the floor, and it had been true then and it was true now and it did not help. What he had done instead of asking was reach across a table on a Tuesday and put his hand on a ledger, and what he had done instead of asking was open his mouth just now and say the one thing he had never heard a man say, and now the knife was in the drawer and her hand was on the pull and he still did not know what he wanted.

"Kamala," he said.

She did not turn. "Don't."

"I'm not—"

"Don't." The same word, the same flatness. Her hand stayed on the pull. Above the fridge the clock went on. He looked at the clock: the minute hand was past the eight and climbing, and the hour hand was not yet at the nine, and there was a whole hour in the space between them, an hour he had to fill with something that was not the question he had just asked and not the answer she had just given.

He smelled her hair. Henna and oil, the smell that was in the pillow when she had been in the bed and was in the flat when she had not, and it was in the kitchen now, across the counter, and it made the room smaller than it was. He put his hand on the edge of the counter, on the steel, and felt how cold it was, and left it there.

"You're breathing through your mouth," she said.

He had not known he was. He closed it, and the breath went in through his nose and came out through his nose, and she was still not looking at him, and he understood that she had heard it, the way she heard everything in this flat, the tap and the fridge and the neighbour's radio and the exact sound of him lying awake.

"How long have you known," he said. "About the cousin."

"Months."

"Since the spring." Her hand did not move off the pull. "He came to the shop in the spring and asked for you and you were out, and he told me he was Abdul's cousin, and he told me what you owed, and he told me he would wait. He was very polite about it. He drank the tea I made him."

Sandip felt the floor of the kitchen go a little further down than it had been. "You never said."

"I was waiting for you to."

The tap dripped. He counted a few of them, one, two, three, and the clock moved, and she stood with her back to him and her hand on the drawer pull, and he thought about the spring, about the tea she would have made the man, about the way she would have stood at this counter with the tea and her face doing nothing while a stranger told her what her husband owed and what it would cost.

"I would have told you," he said.

"You did tell me," she said. "Tuesday. You told me with a ledger."

He had nothing to put against that. He stood at the counter with his hand on the cold steel and she stood at the drawer with her hand on the pull and the hour hand crawled, and it was not yet eight-forty and nine was a country he could see the shore of and not the land.

"What did he look like," he said. He did not know why he asked it. He heard himself ask it and heard how it sounded, a small man's question, and he did not take it back.

"Like a man who has waited before," she said. "And will again. He was not in a hurry. That's what I remember. He was not in a hurry at all."

Sandip looked at the drawer. The knife was in it, flat, handle toward the front, and he could see it in his mind the way he could see the ledger on the bed on Tuesday, and he understood that she had put it there on purpose, in the drawer, where it would be within reach of whoever was standing at the counter when the door opened, and that she had told him so, out loud, in the flattest voice she owned.

"If I open the door," he said.

"You know what happens if you open the door."

"Say it."

"No."

"Say it, Kamala."

She turned then. Not all the way — her shoulder came round, her face came round, her hand stayed on the pull, and she looked at him down the length of the counter with the window behind her and the morning on her, and her eyes were the same eyes they had been for seven years and there was nothing in them he could name.

"You want me to say it so you can hear yourself not do it," she said. "So you can stand there with your hand on the counter and hear the words and tell yourself you're a man who was told. I'm not going to give you that. You know the words. You've known them since Tuesday."

He took his hand off the counter. He did not know where to put it. He put it in his pocket and took it out again and let it hang, and she watched him do it, all of it, the whole small ceremony of a man who did not know what to do with his hands, and she did not help him.

"What would you do," he said. "If I took it out of the drawer."

"I told you what I'd do."

"If I took it out and put it in your hand."

"Then it would be in my hand," she said. "And you'd be standing where you're standing. And it would still be eight-forty."

The clock said eight-forty-one. He looked at it and looked away. The tap dripped. Outside, in the lane, someone went past on a bicycle with a bell that did not ring, the chain ticking, and the sound went by the window and was gone, and the kitchen was the kitchen again, the fridge humming, the light coming in flat and grey off the wall opposite.

She let go of the drawer pull. She did it slowly, the fingers coming off one at a time, and when the last of them was off she put her hand on the counter beside the drawer, palm down, and left it there, and he saw the pale marks the pull had left in her fingers and watched them fill back in.

"I made tea last night," she said. "You didn't drink it."

"No."

"It's still on the stove."

He looked. It was. The small pot, the lid on it, cold now, the tea gone to the colour of old wood. He had walked past it twice in the dark and had not seen it.

"Do you want it," he said.

"No."

She took her hand off the counter and went to the stove and picked up the pot and poured the tea down the sink, and the sound of it going down was the only sound in the kitchen for a while, and he watched the back of her neck, the small hairs at the nape, the henna-red ends of her hair, and he thought about the man in the spring drinking the tea she had made him, and about his own tea going cold on the stove all night while he lay in the bed listening to her breathe on the floor.

She rinsed the pot and set it upside down on the board. She did not dry her hands. She stood at the sink with her hands wet, and the tap dripped into the steel beside her, and the clock said eight-forty-four.

"Sandip," she said.

"Yes."

"Whatever you're going to do, do it before nine. I don't want to be standing in this kitchen when he knocks and find out what you are with the door already open."

She turned the tap off. The drip stopped. The silence that came in behind it was so much bigger than the drip had been that he felt it press on the inside of his ears, and the fridge took over, humming, and the clock, ticking, and he stood at the counter in the new quiet and looked at the drawer where the knife was and at the woman at the sink with her wet hands and the hour hand climbing toward the nine.

He thought about the shop. Eleven days, and the shutters down, and the man in the spring with the tea in his hand, not in a hurry. He thought about the bed on Tuesday and the ledger open on it and his own hand on the page. He thought about the word he had just said, out loud, in this kitchen, that no man he had ever known had said — and he could not remember now why he had said it, or what he had thought it would do.

"You said I never asked you for anything," he said.

"You never did."

"I'm asking you now."

She looked at him. Her hands were still wet. She did not wipe them. "Ask me what."

And he stood there with his mouth open and the clock at eight-forty-seven and the drawer closed between them and the whole hour narrowing down to the one word he still did not have, and the tap did not drip, and the silence where the drip had been was the loudest thing in the flat.

She waited.

She did not move from the sink and she did not look away and she did not help him, and the minute hand went on climbing, past the eight, past the nine, and somewhere below in the lane a dog barked once and stopped, and the flat held its breath around the two of them and the closed drawer and the knife inside it.