“Your core is flopping.” She tapped me in the protruding belly with her big toe. “So,” she went on. “The lehenga’s down in L.A. with that tailor, and he’s not concerned why we might be tricking it out. People want weird shit on their wedding days. Little holders in dupattas and skirt hems to keep lucky charms, something borrowed and blue, blah, blah. But the point is, none of that matters unless you talk to your sister, you understand?”

She clasped her palms above her, and her stomach tautened. It was not as pillowy as it had been when we were younger. But what was I good for if not softening her?

“Mmhmm.” I reached for her hips, pulling her pelvis to my forehead.

“I’m putting on clothes.” She removed my hands from her flanks.

“No, keep talking,” I said. “Tell me more problems, I’ll fix them all.”

“You used to do this when we studied together. You’d be paying zero attention, and as soon as I said we had to stop, you’d snap to.” She was twirling an Expo marker as she examined the map of which shops and stalls would be located where, along with an estimate of the location of all the Santa Clara Convention Center’s security cameras. I was struck by the sense that she was getting off on the planning, that it wasn’t just her mother’s well-being motivating her. She’d been itching for a challenge. God, she really did need a new job.

The convention center, like many of the industrial buildings in the Bay Area, employed Anita’s father’s technology, meaning it was studded with hundreds of small, beady lenses, each one like a nerve ending connecting to the brain of the whole beast—a cloud server. Every image collected beamed back to it. What the eyes saw, the brain would record indelibly. We had a notion, formed based on Anita’s understanding, which I gathered she’d gathered from a flirtation with one of her father’s old interns: a Wi-Fi interferer could knock out the images streaming to the server, sweeping clean the record of all we would do. As long as Anita could draw the security attendant’s gaze away from the live feed for an hour or so, he’d never notice the signal had gone out. It was one of those oddities of life in the Valley—with so much technology at hand, people presumed its infallibility.

“You really don’t want to taste even a bit of it?” I said. I felt terribly sad, looking around at her life, the granite and the wineglasses and the eerie nothingness of Palo Alto outside. “You don’t miss it?” And didn’t she miss her old self? The one who would have demanded more?