Finally, he tilted his head. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. He turned back to the dough and started rolling another ball. “I knew your mother was rough on you back then. But I…I didn’t know how to support you.”

“Rohan, you were a kid. There was nothing you could have done.” She grabbed her own ball of dough and rolled it out into a warped amoeba shape. “I’m okay. I’ve accepted my mother wasn’t good at being a mom, and it wasn’t my fault. That one statement is worth thousands of dollars of therapy, by the way. Anyway, I had your mom and Rashida Aunty. They were great. Dad was always there for me, too. He protected me from so much…” Dad shouldn’t have had to, though. Trying to keep Kamila safe had taken such a toll on him.

Rohan touched her arm for a second. “I know I’m hard on you, too, Kam. Maybe I’m too critical. Tell me if I go too far, okay?”

Kamila nodded, biting her lip. She didn’t want things to change between them. That was the whole point of keeping Jana away from him. “I like how things are with us.” She smiled. “I can take it, old man. Anything you throw at me. That’s why we’re great friends.”

He chuckled as he filled his perfectly rolled circle with filling and pleated the edges, creating something so much nicer than her wet-tissue momos. “My mom only insisted my brother and I learn to cook so we’d find better wives. She claimed her mother taught her to make round rotlis to snag a husband, and it was her duty to do the same for us, even if we were boys. I think it was really because she was afraid she’d be making our rotlis for the rest of our lives.”

Kamila watched as his strong, firm arms rolled another perfect circle of dough. She’d never seen a man roll rotlis before. Rohan and Zayan’s mother had clearly been on to something. She made a mental note to ask her sister if her husband’s rotli-rolling skills had anything to do with their relationship.

“Did Lisa appreciate your cooking skills?” Kamila couldn’t believe she asked that. He rarely talked about his marriage, and she never asked him about it. She didn’t even know why they’d split. Rohan had a wall—a boundary he didn’t cross with Kamila. As close as they had become lately, and as much as Kamila detailed her sex life to him all the time, he didn’t talk about his own relationships. He wasn’t a kiss-and-tell kind of guy.

“Lisa didn’t care. I don’t mean that in a bad way.” He shrugged. “I didn’t really cook much when we were together. We rarely ate at home. I think that was the main problem in our marriage.”