And then, unbidden, came a memory. A field trip in middle school. We were on a school bus going somewhere—up into the North Georgia mountains. It might have been to Helen or Dahlonega, one of those boomtowns shaped by the twenty-niners’ rush, the one that followed the Carolinas’ and preceded California’s. What I remembered was Shruti sitting alone at the far front of the bus. And I remembered Manu, my seatmate, looking at her the way he often did, with fellow-outsider sympathy, and saying, I’m going over there. I remembered shaking my head vigorously and saying, She likes to sit alone. But Manu stood and made his way up to her, and because we were jerking up a hill full of switchbacks, it meant the whole bus saw him wobbling to reach Shruti Patel. That was a naked risk, seeking her so publicly. The teacher didn’t even yell at him to sit down when she saw that he was coming to Shruti. I remember them sharing silence as we wound higher. She likes to sit alone, I kept thinking, even as I bristled at Manu for having left me all by myself.

To: Shruti Patel, 2004. (I could write, in Wang’s fashion.) When, exactly, was the beginning of your end? Is suicide a complex concatenation of chemistry, culture, and cruelty? Or was yours never suicide, only a theft and murder? When someone says you took your own life, should I be stopping them to shout, no, I did? I study causality, Shruti. I try to understand how economies grow and collapse, and how one zeitgeist blows into another. When I’m doing my job well, I can see truths that politicians and financiers of their days missed. But I have never come close to grasping such patterns on the level of the personal.

“No, no, no.” And then I was saying it over and over—I did it—almost becoming addicted to the sound of the sentence, but then I stopped, lest it become itself a kind of absolution, like the rhythm of a bodily penance. “I did it, and I just live with that. Always.”

Chidi bowed his head. He waited for me to catch my breath.

“If you insist on carrying that around,” he said, “find a way to make it make you better.”

We talked still later into the night, and eventually reached the matter of the bridal jewelry and Anita’s mother, the suspected affair, and Lakshmi Joshi’s inkling that wedding gold could contain the particular energy Anjali Auntie needed to get back on her feet.

“It sounds risky,” he said. He was rubbing his palms together with glee. Chidi considered himself antiestablishment. He was all free information this and end copyrights that; during his youth he’d even once tried to release monkeys from a Berkeley primate lab. He was better suited for outlaw life than I. “Is it all planned out?”