"Bring them," Mr. Verma said, and Neha heard the zipper of his trousers close, the belt slide back through its loops with a soft leather rasp. He crossed to the sideboard, poured himself a finger of something amber, and drank it standing, his back to her, as though she were a piece of furniture he had finished using for the evening.

She stayed bent over the arm of the chair. Her breasts hung heavy beneath her, the torn blouse hanging open off one shoulder, the green silk pulled up over her hips. The room smelled of him — of whisky and sweat and the sharp mineral smell of what he had left inside her, starting to cool on her thigh. The ceiling fan turned. It turned. She watched its blade come around, and around, and thought of nothing, which was a discipline Arshad had taught her without ever saying the word.

Behind her, footsteps. Not Mr. Verma's — heavier through the heel, lighter through the toe. A folded towel pressed flat against her thigh, warm from the airing cupboard, and a second one laid over her back, covering her from the waist down like a shroud, and Arshad's hands did it without touching her once, without a single finger landing on her skin, and that was the most intimate thing that had happened to her all night.

"Clean her up," Mr. Verma said. "She's dripping on the carpet."

"Ji, sahab."

The towel moved between her legs. Clinical. Thorough. Arshad's wrist turned, and the cloth came away wet, and he folded the wet side inward and did it again, and Neha pressed her forehead to the velvet of the chair arm and did not make a sound, because if she made a sound she would make the wrong one, and she could not afford the wrong one, not in front of the old woman in the doorway with her phone still up.

"Enough." Auntie Shobha's voice from the doorway, sweet and worn as an old coin. "She's had enough for one night, Verma-ji. The girl has to be able to walk tomorrow."

"She'll walk." Mr. Verma set his glass down. "She'll walk, and she'll come when she's called, and she'll kneel when she's told. Won't you, beti."

It was not a question. Neha lifted her head off the chair arm and looked at him — the mountain of him, dark and enormous against the lamplight, his shirt still buttoned to the throat as though he had never touched her at all — and she said, "Ji," and the word came out steady, and she was proud of it, and she hated herself for being proud of it.

"Come." Arshad's hand at her elbow, lifting her. Not gentle. Not rough. The exact pressure a man uses to move livestock he intends to keep in good condition. She got her feet under her, and her knees complained, and the green silk slid down her legs to pool around her ankles, and she stepped out of it and let him drape it over his arm, folded once, the way he folded everything.

"Where are you taking her?" Auntie Shobha said.

"Her room, madam. She's finished."

"She's finished when I say she's finished."

"Ji." Arshad bowed his head, and Neha watched the bow happen — watched the exact degree of it, the way it stopped just short of mockery, a bow calibrated to a hair — and felt something in her chest turn over and lie down. "Then shall I wait, madam?"

The old woman looked at him for a long moment. Then at Neha — barefoot on the carpet, one shoulder bare, her hair stuck to her cheek, her mouth still swollen. Then at Mr. Verma, who had picked up his glass again and was watching the three of them over the rim with the mild interest of a man at a zoo.

"Take her," Auntie Shobha said at last. "She's no use to me broken."

*

Her bedroom was the same as she had left it — the same dim lamp, the same rumpled sheets, the same stale perfume and warm cotton, the same ceiling fan creaking its slow circle overhead. Arshad steered her through the door and closed it behind them with his heel, and then he did not let go of her arm for three full seconds, and in those three seconds he held her the way a man holds a rope he has just pulled out of deep water.

Then he let go, and he was a servant again.

"Sit," he said. Quiet. His servant's voice, pitched for the walls. "Sit down before you fall down."

She sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets were cold. She had not slept in this bed in three nights; she had been sleeping in his room, on the narrow cot, or not sleeping at all. He crossed to the washstand, wrung out a cloth, and came back and knelt in front of her — a servant kneeling to a lady, in case anyone was listening at the door — and began to clean her face. Her cheeks. Her chin. The corner of her mouth. The cloth was cool and he was not.

"You swallowed," he said, very low. "In front of him. In front of the old woman."

"You told me to be scared and broken."

"I told you to be scared and broken." His jaw worked. "I did not tell you to be *good* at it."

She almost laughed. It came up her throat like a bubble and she swallowed it back down. "He asked who taught me. I said my husband."

"He didn't believe you."

"No."

"Good." Arshad sat back on his heels. His vest was dark under the arms. His hands hung loose between his knees and she looked at them — the knuckles, the flat shine of the nails — and remembered them folded around the green silk, and her cunt clenched around nothing, and she pressed her thighs together on the edge of her own marriage bed and hated the small sound that got out of her.

He heard it. Of course he heard it. He looked up at her, and for one second the servant's face came off him like a wet cloth, and underneath it was the man who had whispered *she is mine* into her hair with Auntie Shobha three feet away, and then it was gone again.

"Not tonight," he said. "You're torn. I saw the towel."

"I don't care."

"I care." He stood up. "Sleep. Tomorrow the old woman goes to the bank in the morning — she has to, the pension comes through on the fifteenth and she won't trust the boy with it. Verma sleeps till ten. We'll have the front room to ourselves for two hours."

"For what?"

He looked at her a long time. "For the box," he said. "The one under the third floorboard of her room. I found it last week. It has your husband's letters in it. And the memory cards. And a photograph of a man I don't know."

"Arshad—"

"Sleep," he said again, and went to the door, and stopped with his hand on the latch. "Neha."

"Hm."

"When he comes back — Verma — he'll want you again. He'll want you in front of me, because that's what he wants to watch. He wants to see if I break." Arshad's thumb moved on the latch. "I won't break. And neither will you. Understand?"

"Understand," she said, and her voice did something at the end of the word, and he left before she could fix it.

*

She did not sleep. She lay on her side in the dark with the lamp off and the fan turning and the whole house ticking and settling around her — Auntie Shobha's door, down the hall, closing at eleven. Mr. Verma's radio, off at half past. The pipe in the wall that ran cold and then hot and then cold again. She catalogued all of it the way she used to catalogue her husband's match schedule on the fridge calendar, and she thought about the box under the third floorboard and what a photograph of a stranger might be doing in it, and she thought about Arshad's hands on the towel, and she slid her own hand down under the sheet and pressed two fingers flat against herself, still sore, still swollen, and did not move them, just pressed, the way you press a bruise to remember you have one.

*

The taxi came at nine the next morning, which meant it was Vikram, because Vikram never took the team bus home from the airport; he took a taxi and paid it with cash from a roll in his sock, and he always rang the bell twice, and the bell rang twice, and Neha was standing at the top of the stairs with a cup of tea in her hand when she heard it, and the cup went over in her grip and scalded the web of her thumb and she did not feel it.

"I'll get it," she called down, too loud, to nobody — to the house, to the walls, to Arshad, who was somewhere in the back with a bucket, and to Auntie Shobha, who was in her room with the door shut, and to Mr. Verma, who was asleep in the guest room with his boots by the bed.

Vikram's suitcases were already in the hallway by the time she got down. Two of them, one hard-shell and one soft, and the soft one had a tear along the seam that she had promised to mend in April, and had not. He was standing in the door with his back to her, paying the driver, and his shoulders were broader than she remembered, or maybe she had simply stopped remembering them.

"Vikram."

He turned. Two months of sun had darkened him two shades, and he had a new beard, and a small cut healing over his eyebrow, and he looked at her and his whole face opened like a door.

"Nehu."

He caught her up off the last step and she was in his arms before her feet touched the floor, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her face into his shoulder, and there it was — the smell of him, the cricket turf and the airplane air and the cheap hotel soap and the sweat dried into the collar of his shirt, the smell of every homecoming she had ever stood in this hallway for, and something in her chest reached for it the way a hand reaches for a light switch in a room it knows by heart.

And then his hand slid down her back and settled in the small of it, and his palm landed exactly — exactly — where Arshad's fingers had dug in and left their marks, four blooms of purple and one smear of green-yellow beneath, and Neha's breath went out of her in a sharp little *ah* that she could not swallow fast enough.

Vikram pulled back. His hands came up to her shoulders. His face was all concern, the way it was when a batsman took one on the helmet and the physio ran out — that exact face, professional and kind.

"Are you okay? Did I—" He looked at his own hand, then at her. "Did I hurt you?"

"No." She smiled. It slid on like she had never taken it off, like it had been hanging in the wardrobe the whole two months, pressed and ready. "I just missed you. I'm being silly."

"You're not silly." He kissed her forehead, and then her mouth, and his mouth was gentler than she remembered, or she had forgotten the scale of it — he kissed like a man who had thought about it on a plane for four hours and had decided to be careful. "God, I missed you. The food out there was criminal. I lost four kilos."

"You look good."

"I look like a stray dog." He laughed, and picked up both suitcases, and carried them past her into the house — past the guest-room door, where Mr. Verma slept, and past Auntie Shobha's door, where Auntie Shobha was very carefully not coming out, and Neha stood in the hallway with her scalded thumb and her smile and thought, with a clarity that frightened her, *he does not know there are four people in this house.*

"Amma's here?" he said, over his shoulder, setting the cases down outside their bedroom. "I saw a sari on the line I didn't recognize."

"Your aunt. Shobha Devi." She heard her own voice do it — go small and warm and slightly apologetic, the voice of a woman reporting a minor domestic inconvenience. "She came four days after you left. She had nowhere to go, Vikram. She said she'd been ill. I couldn't turn her out."

Vikram stopped in the doorway of the bedroom, his back to her, and did not move for a second and a half. She watched the second and a half happen. She watched his shoulders come up and settle.

"She's not my aunt," he said. "She's my father's cousin's wife, and she's been trying to get into this house for fifteen years. She came the day after I left?"

"Four days after."

"Four days after." He turned around. His face had gone still, which was worse than angry. "And you let her in."

"She's *family*, Vikram. She was crying on the step."

"She's been crying on people's steps for thirty years." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Okay. Okay. She's here, it's done. Where's she sleeping?"

"The back room."

"And who else is in my house."

Neha opened her mouth and the whole hallway went very quiet, and somewhere at the back of the house a bucket clanked against a tap, and she said, "She brought a servant. To help with the heavy things. With the water."

"A servant." Vikram looked at her for a long moment — a long, level, tired look, the look of a man who has been on a plane for nine hours and wants a shower and a plate of dal and his wife, not a house full of strangers — and then he shook his head and went into the bedroom and began to unbutton his shirt.

"Fine," he said. "Tomorrow I'll sort it. All of it."

"Vikram—"

"Come here," he said. Not a command. A request. He held out his hand, and his hand was broad and square and clean, the hand of a man who had never once in his life had to take anything by force, and Neha looked at it and thought of Arshad's hand on the latch, and she walked into the room and took it.

*

That night he made love to her.

He turned the lamp down to its lowest and he undressed her slowly, button by button, and the carefulness of it — the way he waited after each button, the way his fingers remembered the shape of the hooks — undid her more than any roughness had in three weeks. He laid her back on the bed and kissed her neck, and her collarbone, and each breast, and his beard was new and it scratched, and she lay with her hands in his hair and looked up at the ceiling fan going around, and thought about the fan in Arshad's room, which did not turn, which was broken, which they had lain under in the dark and listened to the mosquitoes.

"You're tense," Vikram said against her ribs.

"I'm fine."

He moved down her body. He kissed the inside of her thigh, and then higher, and then his mouth was on her, and Neha closed her eyes and put her hand on the back of his head, and for a moment — for one long moment — it was almost good, because his mouth was warm and he knew her, he had known her for six years, he knew the angle and the pressure and he did it with a kind of patient, marital thoroughness, and she felt her hips lift once, and then the feeling went thin, and then it went away entirely, and she was lying on her own bed with her husband's mouth between her legs and she was as dry as a stone in the sun.

He didn't seem to notice. Or he noticed and was kind about it, which was worse. He came up over her and braced himself on his elbows and said, "Okay?" and she said, "Okay," and he pushed into her.

It did not hurt. That was the strange part. There was no stretch, no fullness, no ache — just a warm, mild pressure, like a hand laid flat on her chest. He was not small; she knew he was not small; but she had spent three weeks being split open on a man who filled her to the back of her throat, and her body had been rebuilt around a different shape, and now it did not know what to do with this one.

Her pussy stayed closed and dry around him. She felt it — the drag, the friction that was not pleasure, the way he had to work a little to move — and she felt him not say anything about it, and she felt the small, generous lie of his silence, and she put her arms around his neck and pulled him down so he couldn't see her face.

"I missed you," he said into her hair. "Every night. I'd lie in the hotel and think about this."

"I know."

"Did you think about me?"

"Every night," she said, and it was true, and it was a lie, and she did not know any longer which half of it was which. She had thought about him. She had thought about him every night, in the abstract, the way you think about a light left on in a room you are not in. And she had thought about Arshad every night in the way you think about a hand closing on your throat. Both things had been true at once. She had stopped trying to make them fit.

Vikram moved inside her with the rhythm of a man who has been married six years and knows the pace that works. She moved with him. She made the sounds she had always made — small, breathy, the ones he liked — and she heard them come out of her mouth and they sounded like a language she had learned as a girl and had not spoken in years, fluent still, but with no meaning left in it. She raked her nails lightly down his back. He groaned. She felt nothing.

And behind her closed eyelids, unbidden, Arshad's fist came up around a length of green silk, and twisted once, and pulled.

Her whole body flinched into it — her back arched, her cunt clenched hard around Vikram, her breath caught — and Vikram felt it and made a low, pleased sound and drove in harder, thinking it was for him, thinking his wife was coming apart under him after two months, and Neha let him think it. She let him have it. She closed her eyes tighter and gave him the arch and the clench and the catch of breath, and she gave them to the man in the back room, and Vikram took them and was grateful, and it was the kindest thing she had done for her husband in three weeks.

He came a few minutes later with his face pressed into her neck, saying her name, saying *Nehu, Nehu*, and she held the back of his head with both hands and stared at the ceiling fan and counted its rotations — eleven, twelve, thirteen — until he went still and heavy on top of her, and then he kissed her forehead and rolled off and lay on his back beside her, breathing hard, one arm flung over his eyes.

"God," he said. "I needed that."

"You should sleep."

"Mm." He reached for her hand and found it and laced his fingers through hers, and his palm was warm and dry and there was no callus on it anywhere. "I'm sorry about the aunt thing. I'll deal with it tomorrow. I'll deal with all of it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," she said.

His breathing slowed. It slowed the way a train slows coming into a station — long, gradual, unhurried, and then stopped. His fingers loosened in hers. His mouth came open a little. He slept the clean sleep of a man who has done nothing wrong, and Neha lay beside him in the dark with the sheet pulled up to her chin and listened to the house.

The fan. The pipe in the wall. A floorboard settling. And then, very faint, from the back of the house, the sound of a door.

She turned her head on the pillow. Vikram's face was slack, his beard dark against the pillowcase, a small crease still between his brows as though he were solving a field placement in his sleep. She looked at him for a long time. She had loved him. She was almost certain she had loved him. She could still find the shape of it, the way you find the shape of a tooth with your tongue after it is gone.

Then she slid her hand down under the sheet, past her belly, between her legs, and pressed two fingers flat against her own cunt — still wet from her husband, and under that, still sore, still swollen, still stretched, still marked, still *his* — and she did not move them. She just pressed. She lay in her marriage bed with her husband asleep an arm's length away and her hand between her own legs, holding the ache like a coin in her fist, and stared at the dark ceiling, and waited.