The door clicks shut behind him and the room does not go quiet — it keeps the sound of him in it. His breathing, still thick, still slowing. The creak of the veranda boards as he walks away. The gate, somewhere out front, complaining on its hinge. Nisha stands where he left her, at the foot of the bed, and does not move until the gate has finished and the house has folded back into itself.

Then she looks at her hand. The notes are still in it, folded twice, warm and slightly damp from her palm. Eight thousand. She had counted them once, fast, while he was still doing up his trousers, and she counts them again now, slower, thumbing each note. Eight thousand rupees. Four more than the last man. Two more than the man before that. She lays them flat on the bedside table, one by one, smoothing the creases with her thumb, and the little stack sits there under the late sun like something that has nothing to do with her.

Her toes curl against the floorboards. Grit under the arches, warm wood, a splinter she finds and presses on and leaves. The sun comes in through the salt-filmed window and lies across the boards in a long orange bar, and the dust in it turns over and over, unhurried, like it has all the time in the world and knows she does not.

She lifts her hand to her own face. Two fingers, the backs of them, tracing from her cheekbone down to her jaw — the way you check a thing you are not sure is still there. Her skin is hot. Her jaw is hers. The nose ring is still in, the loop earrings still swinging from the movement of her own hand, and she hears them, a small bright chime, and she thinks: that is me. That sound is me.

The bangles come off first. She slides them down over her wrist, one, two, six, and sets them on the nightstand in a stack, and the clink of them against the wood is the loudest thing in the room. Then the anklets — she bends, and the bend goes through her lower back like a hand pressing down, and she makes a sound she does not mean to make, small and private, and stays bent a moment longer than she needs to, letting it pass.

Because it is all still in her. His weight, the whole of it, had pressed her down into the mattress until the springs had stopped and the wood had taken over, and there is a soreness low in her, deep, the kind that does not come from one place but from the whole of her being used and used well. She straightens and feels it, and something in her chest turns over — not pain exactly. Not shame exactly. Something with its own name that she has not bothered to learn.

The mirror on the far wall is dim with salt and age, and she walks to it because she always walks to it, because two years ago she learned that a mirror is not a vanity, it is a witness. Her reflection comes up out of the glass slowly, like something surfacing. Smudged mascara under one eye, a smear of it at the corner, from the crying she did not do — no, from the crying she did, just at the end, when he had her face down on the mattress with his hand flat between her shoulder blades and she had not been able to help it and had not wanted to.

Her cheeks are flushed. Her lipstick is gone, eaten off, and her mouth is swollen the way a mouth gets. Under the thin top, the push-up bra has done its work — her breasts sit high and full in it, the tops of them pale above the lace, and she looks at them a long moment, at the way they rise and fall, and she thinks, without heat, without pride, only as a fact: those are mine. I made those. Nobody gave them to me.

Her phone is on the nightstand, face-up. She picks it up. The screen glows and there is nothing — no messages, no missed calls, just the clock and the wallpaper and the cursor of a blank thread blinking at her, patient, indifferent. Her husband has not texted. Of course he has not. He thinks she is at the shop, weighing rice beside him, and he will come home at eight and find the dinner she left covered on the stove, and he will eat it, and he will not know.

She sits down on the edge of the bed. The mattress gives under her with a sound like a long exhale, and her body remembers the last hour all at once — the weight, the rhythm, the way he had said daughter and she had answered papa and the whole thing had been a lie and the truth at the same time, which is the only kind of thing that has ever worked on her.

She looks at the money again. Eight thousand. On the table, flat, patient, the color of old blood. And she thinks about what eight thousand buys, and the thinking is not romantic.

It buys the pills. Two months of them, maybe three if she is careful, and she is always careful. The estrogen, the anti-androgen, ordered online from a pharmacy that does not ask, paid for in cash at the courier office by a boy who does not look up. It buys the conditioner she likes, the one that costs more than the shampoo, and the shampoo too, and the hair oil, and the mascara she is going to have to replace because it is smeared across her face right now.

It buys nothing at all, in the end. That is the thing about eight thousand rupees. It is a great deal of money for one hour and it is nothing at all for a life, and she knows this because she has done the arithmetic before, in the dark, on paper, more than once, and the number at the bottom of the page is always the same: not enough. Never enough. The pills do not stop. The hair does not stop growing. The body does not stop wanting to be what it is, and none of it is free, and her husband weighs rice for twelve thousand a month and gives her most of it and thinks that is enough, and it is not, and she has never told him, and she is not going to.

"More," she says, out loud, to the room. Her voice comes out low and flat and not at all like the voice she uses for men. "I need more."

The room does not answer. The fan turns. The dust turns. The money sits there.

She stands, and her body complains again, and she lets it, and she goes to the small bag she left by the door and takes out her dupatta and her salwar and the plain kurta she wore here, because the jeans and the tight top were for the room and the room is finished and the lane outside is not. She dresses without hurrying. The jeans come off and her thighs are marked — faint red lines from his hands, from the grip, from the mattress edge — and she looks at them in the mirror and does not mind them. They will fade. They always fade. She has learned that a body is a thing that heals itself whether you want it to or not.

The salwar goes on. The kurta goes on. The dupatta goes around her shoulders and she pins it and she looks at the sindur line in the mirror, the red line she drew this morning before her husband woke, and she thinks about whether to wipe it and decides not to. Let the lane see it. Let the lane think what it thinks. A married woman walking home in the afternoon is not a thing anyone looks at twice, and that, she has come to understand, is the best disguise there ever was.

The phone is still in her hand. She looks at it a long moment. Then she opens the thread — the one with no name, the one that started with a woman's voice and an address and five thousand rupees — and she types, and deletes, and types again.

Need more work. More clients. Can you arrange.

She sends it before she can think about it, and then she stands there with the phone in her hand and her heart doing something quick and stupid in her chest, waiting, and the reply comes back so fast that the woman must have been holding the phone the whole time, waiting too, or waiting for exactly this.

Come by the house. I have a list. There is a man tonight — older, pays well, likes them young. Eight thousand. He asks for something particular. Come and I will tell you.

Nisha reads it twice. Likes them young. Something particular. She knows what that means, or she thinks she does, and either way the number is eight and the number is what matters. She types back one word — coming — and pockets the phone, and picks up the money, and folds it into her waistband the way she always does, against the skin, where it is warm and where she can feel it with every step.

She takes one last look around the room. The bed with its sheets pulled half off. The salt-filmed window. The bedside table where the money was sitting a minute ago, empty now except for a small bottle of coconut oil she had not noticed before — somebody's, the house's, half-used, the cap gone soft with handling. She looks at it a moment. Then she picks it up and puts it in her bag, because oil is oil, and because there is no reason not to, and because she has learned that a woman who is going to keep doing this keeps what is useful and leaves what is not.

The veranda is hot and bright after the dim room. The sea is somewhere past the trees, more smell than sound, and the light off the sand is the kind of white that makes you squint. She walks down the steps and out through the gate, and the gate complains on its hinge the way it did for the old man, and then she is on the road, and the road is ordinary, and nobody looks at her.

The bus stop is a hundred metres on. She waits under the tin roof with two women and a boy with a schoolbag, and the boy stares at her nose ring for a while and then loses interest, and the bus comes and she gets on and pays and sits by the window, and the money in her waistband presses against her stomach with every bump, and she counts the stops in her head, and she thinks about the list.

The woman's house is the same as before — the same gate, the same courtyard, the same smell of incense and old paper. Nisha pushes the gate open and crosses the courtyard and the woman is already at the door, and she smiles the way she smiled the very first time, at the very beginning, when Nisha was still not sure she was going to do any of this.

"Early," the woman says. "Good. I like a girl who is early."

"I need money," Nisha says. "And more clients. That is all."

The woman laughs, a short dry sound, and steps aside to let her in. "Then you have come to the right house. Sit. Tea?"

"No tea."

"Sit anyway."

Nisha sits. The room is the same as the last time — the low table, the fan, the photographs of people who are probably not relatives, the smell of the incense burning down to nothing in the corner. The woman goes to a drawer and takes out a small notebook, the kind a schoolchild uses, and opens it, and runs her finger down a page.

"There is a man," she says. "Sixty, maybe more. Retired. Money from somewhere — I do not ask. He came to me two days ago with a request." She looks up. "He wants a girl who will play his daughter."

Nisha does not move. Something in her chest, low, goes very still, the way it goes still when the thing being discussed is exactly the thing she has already been doing, alone, in her own head, for two years.

"A daughter," she says.

"A daughter. He will be the father. You will be the daughter. He wants—" the woman turns a page, reads, "—he wants it spoken. The words. He is very clear about the words." She looks up again, and her eyes are not unkind, and they are not kind either. They are the eyes of a woman who has arranged many things and judged none of them. "He will pay eight thousand. Up front. Tonight."

Eight thousand. The same as the old man. The number settles into Nisha like a coin into a slot, and she thinks about the pills, and the conditioner, and the arithmetic at the bottom of the page, and she thinks about the words, and how she knows the words already, how she has known them since the first night her husband put his hand on her and she called him what he was and he called her what she was, and how the words are the easy part. The words are the only part that has ever been easy.

"Yes," she says. "When?"

"Nine. I will send you the address." The woman closes the notebook. "You will go as you are. No sindur — he does not want a married woman. He wants a daughter. You understand."

Nisha understands. She understands perfectly. She understands that there is a man in this city who will pay eight thousand rupees to say a word to her and have her say it back, and that she will say it, and that it will cost her nothing she has not already given away, and that at the end of it there will be eight thousand rupees and she will be closer — one night closer — to the thing she is actually doing all of this for. She does not name the thing, even in her own head. She has never named it. But she knows where it is, and she knows the direction, and every night like this is one step toward it.

She stands. "Nine," she says. "I will be there."

"Good girl," the woman says, and the phrase lands somewhere in Nisha's chest and stays there, and she does not examine it, and she walks out through the courtyard and the gate, and the afternoon has gone long and gold, and the money in her waistband is warm against her skin, and there is a man waiting at nine o'clock who will call her daughter, and there is a man at home at eight o'clock who will eat the dinner she left on the stove and not know anything at all.

She walks to the bus stop. She waits. The bus comes. She gets on and sits by the window and watches the streets go by, the shops closing, the lights coming on, the ordinary evening of an ordinary town, and she thinks about the pills, and the arithmetic, and the words, and the eight thousand rupees, and she does not think about the old man, and she does not think about the coconut oil in her bag, and she does not think about the tear that was on her cheek an hour ago and that she never did wipe away.

The bus stops at her corner. She gets off. The lane is dark and smells of cooking and the shop at the corner is still open, and she stops there and buys her husband's tea the way she always does, the same brand, the same blue packet, and the shopkeeper does not look at her twice.

She walks the last stretch to her own gate with the tea in one hand and the money in her waistband and the address of a man who wants a daughter already glowing on her phone, and somewhere behind her, three lanes back, the beach house is dark and empty, and the man on the green sofa is not the man she is thinking about anymore, and the man who will call her daughter at nine o'clock is already waiting, and she is already, in the only way that has ever mattered to her, on her way.