Night fell and, in the darkness, I finally dared bring the Manish Motilal lehenga up from the trunk of the car—I’d moved it there at a piss stop on the way north, the same place I did the last of the coke and tossed the baggie. I’d been afraid to carry the dress to my room in the daylight; I didn’t know what I might look like to the thin-lipped girl staffing the front desk. A runaway groom, having murdered his bride, on the lam, prepared to engage in some kind of necrophiliac ritual with her couture? I laid out the lehenga atop the faded floral duvet and observed it like it was in fact a body. What was my body count now? Just Shruti? Linda the liaison? One of the aunties cowering behind her car in the expo parking lot? Would they keep amassing over the years? I wondered not for the first time if one day Jay Bhatt or one of our other Hammond Creek victims would turn up dead and someone would mutter, in hushed gossip at the funeral, “It all started when he stopped excelling at math—what happened?” Or Prachi—if one day Prachi would suddenly weaken, and as she declined, confess that in the summer of 2006, she had been sapped of something unnamable yet essential, and had never quite recovered.

There was nothing to do but throw the skirts up and begin gnawing on the tight strings with my teeth. I loosened each secret pocket like this. The sexual tantrum of it all was not lost on me. Next door: an unarousing moan. Downstairs: one of the owners’ voices calling, Shubhaaaa!

I lined up the pieces on the peeling wooden desk and switched on the lamp. One mangalsutra. Three rings. Five bangles. A single jhumka earring. A tiny flower-shaped stud—for a nose? A rhomboid tikka. A few thousand dollars—grand theft—and yet only six or so months of lemonade. About the quantity I’d hoped to nab for myself, leaving the rest to Anjali Auntie.

I drank. The liquor stung. The warmth encircled my core.

The room, suddenly stifling. I jimmied the window, opened the drapes. That unpolluted night—not a lick of moon, no clouds within the gloaming, just an unmoving tarmac sky.

Everyone wants something from someone else. I paced and eyed the gold pieces and swigged again, stomach sloshing acidly. Did I owe Anjali Dayal anything? She, like her daughter, had left me alone with grief and guilt for ten years. I grunted massively and threw myself on the bed next to the rumpled Manish Motilal.