Reena couldn’t remember cooking with her sister, not since they were knee-high arguing about who got to stick her thumb in food coloring to decorate nan khatai cookies with Mum. But inexplicably, they spent the rest of the afternoon tweaking Saira’s recipes for crackers. Toasting the spices in oil jacked up the flavor in both cracker recipes, and Reena’s suggestion of adding fresh curry leaves to the mustard seeds while they fried in the grape-seed oil brought a new aroma that made the crackers sing.

Reena had ideas for the dips, too. Adding mint to barely blanched frozen peas before pureeing them in the food processor resulted in a fresher dip, both in color and in complexity. And adding pomegranate molasses to the hummus created the perfect balance of sweet, savory, and acidic. She left the lemongrass white bean dip alone—it tasted so good she found herself in the unlikely position of asking her sister for a recipe.

“This is good. I’m impressed,” Reena said, dipping a spelt cracker into the creamy white dip again.

Saira smiled widely, taking a hot cracker off the tray. “See! Healthy food is tasty!” She crunched loudly on the cracker. “Mum says I have to stop with this diet food or Ashraf is never going to propose. But he loves my bird food, as Mum calls it.”

“You think Ashraf will propose?”

Saira shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably. Neither of us are getting any younger. It’s about time to settle down if we want a family.”

Reena cringed. Saira was two years younger than her, and if she recalled correctly, Ashraf was a year younger than that. Any other day, Reena would have immediately chalked that comment up to another dose of passive aggression—an offhand quip about being thirty-one with no husband on the horizon? Textbook Saira. But Saira looked so focused on cutting out crackers with a pizza wheel, Reena doubted insults were anywhere near the front of her mind. Reena bit her lip. Had she misinterpreted her sister?

Maybe Saira was just selfishly clueless and not actually evil?

“Is that what you want?” Reena asked. “After everything that happened with Joran, is it wise to dive in again?” Despite everything, Reena’s big-sister protectiveness was still on high alert.

Saira sighed as put the cut crackers on the tray. “Yeah, it is what I want. At first it was about proving to myself that I could get a man who would treat me better.” She laughed sadly. “Janeya, my therapist, helped me figure that out. She’s like you and thinks I should stay single for a while. But Ashraf is not Joran. Joran and I … we were never good for each other. He brought out the worst in me. My relationship with Ashraf is not the same. He would never do what Joran did.”

This conversation felt so strange. Reena couldn’t remember talking to her sister before. Really talking, without Mum or Dad butting in with their own two hundred cents.