“I did not. I’m as surprised as you are to see me.”

“Why?” he asked. “This is my house.”

“Your house? It’s Sushmita’s.”

He scoffed at me, though it seemed an effort for him. Just as quickly, his saddened, troubled expression returned. “In name, yes, it is her house. But only because foreigners cannot easily purchase property in this country.”

“This was her childhood home,” I said. “She told me so herself.”

Willy leaned in closer, almost tenderly. I thought I could discern pity in his eyes.

“Mita never lived in this house,” he said. “Not until I bought it three years ago. She lied to you.”

I felt the breath knocked out of me. That couldn’t be. She’d lain there—naked on the bed with me—tears in her eyes, as she told me it was her childhood home. How could she lie so effortlessly? So convincingly? In that moment, I forgot about Willy. He dissipated like a cloud into the vague blackness around me, replaced by a swirling wind of doubts, shock, and emptiness. How could this be?

“Danny,” came Willy’s voice, calling me back to the present. “Danny Boy, did you hear what I said? She lied to you about this place.”

I shook the cobwebs from my head and, mouth agape, looked at my former friend. My former rival. My enemy.

“What about the flat in Bombay?” I asked, my voice raw. “And the bungalow in Poona?”

Willy sat back in his chair. “The same. Mine. Yes, registered in her name, of course. That was the only choice we had. But these are my properties. I paid for them.”

I digested this further blow to my understanding of the woman I loved. Thought I loved. Did I still love her? I knew nothing in that moment besides the certainty that I knew nothing.

“But her parents? Her father? He was a scientist. He taught at the Naval College …”

Now Willy appeared genuinely mortified. He shook his head slowly.

“He wasn’t a scientist?” I asked. I begged.

“Her father? No, Danny Boy. She never knew her father.”

“But—”

He put his hands on my shoulders as if he intended to shake me. “Danny, she was a beggar child in the streets when I found her. An eight-year-old street oyster.”

Jesus Christ. Did I really have to correct his English at this horrible moment of comprehension and disillusionment?

“Urchin,” I said. “Street urchin, not oyster.”

He released me from his hold, and, though he didn’t seem sure it was appropriate to do so, he thanked me. Then he tore open the wound in my soul and told me more.

“God knows where that poor child had come from, but she was a filthy beggar, sitting in the dirt on Pedder Road. When the traffic stopped, she would tap on the car windows, asking for money. She held her hand out so.”