In a matter of minutes, the only thing left on Mira’s plate was a single rogue blueberry she would save for the end of her meal. In the meantime, she sipped her coffee and watched as the occasional chic Parisian woman passed by. Second by second, her petit dejeuner faded into her mind, replaced with the playback of Indian dress fittings, cake tastings, exorbitant expenses, the deepening dread with each turn of the calendar . . . it was all coming back to the surface. She wondered what it would take to stop being hit with these emotional waves. Would there be no relief until she faced her problems? If so, that was bullshit—especially because she’d already dealt with her biggest problem of all.

Only weeks ago, she’d helplessly watched as her entire future hurdled toward a marriage with a good-on-paper guy whom she wasn’t truly in love with. But then, she’d stopped it, like a driver slamming the brakes mere seconds before a head-on collision.

Most people in Mira’s situation would’ve simply kept on hurdling, opting for a comfortable risk-averse future—before eventually convincing themselves it was everything they’d wanted all along. A part of Mira liked the sound of a risk-averse future, but ultimately, she’d been incapable of taking that path. She wanted something more, even if she didn’t quite know what that something was. And now, after having blown up her entire life, she was perfectly free to go find it.

The only flaw in the plan was that so far, freedom felt like shit. She’d risked everything, but inner peace eluded her. She’d shown courage, but there didn’t seem to be a reward. It didn’t help that courage wasn’t a word ever used in conversations with her Indian family. Even as a child while watching Wizard of Oz with her parents, they’d never understood what the Cowardly Lion was missing. No heart, no brain, now these were life-altering problems. But no courage? That didn’t seem like a problem at all.

So here was Mira, with a pocketful of courage that was not only irrelevant to her family, but worse than that, was viewed as selfishness. She was selfish because her parents had already sent out the invitations, she was selfish for putting them through the nightmare of all this stress, and she was selfish for not letting them marry off their daughter within the pre-spinster timeline laid out by the Indian community.

Mira popped the last blueberry into her mouth, watching as a mother pushing a bassinet stroller passed by. “Could’ve been me by next year,” she whispered, before glancing at her unadorned ring finger. “Back to square one.”

Whether or not Mira’s choices were selfish, she’d truly done her best to call off the wedding within a reasonable time frame. In fact, she’d given nearly two months’ notice to everyone involved, in a sequence of awkward and hellish conversations she hoped to never live through again. Through it all, she hadn’t even missed a single day of work. It should’ve been a badge of honor, but she was learning the hard way that meeting every deadline and kicking ass in branding wasn’t quite the tonic for filling the void.