“You cannot sacrifice yourself for me or Appa or the kingdom or our people or anyone else, Jaya. No.”

Jaya opened her mouth to respond, but Isha spoke again.

“This is my problem. For far too long, you’ve taken on all my worries as your own, and it’s time to stop.”

Jaya pressed her hands into the cold, unyielding surface of the boulder underneath her. “Isha, you’re my little sister. I don’t know how to stop.”

“Try,” Isha said, fire in her eyes. “How do you think I’ll feel, seeing you in an unhappy marriage, knowing that it was because of me? Do you think I’ll be able to live a happy life, Jaya? I’ll feel so guilty, I’ll probably marry some rich, powerful asshat just to make myself feel better.”

“You wouldn’t,” Jaya said. “You shouldn’t feel guilty.”

Isha smiled a little. “You can’t tell me how to feel, Jaya.”

Jaya studied her sister’s expression, her heart pounding. If Isha would feel guilty all her life, if this decision would oblige her into an unhappy marriage of her own down the road… “But Appa,” Jaya said weakly. She ran a hand over her numb face. “I already promised him I’d do this.”

“If there’s one thing I know about our father,” Isha said, “it’s that nothing’s more important to him than the happiness of his girls.”

Jaya stared at her little sister in the blue light of near dawn, her thoughts whirling, tumbling in a dizzying dance through her mind. Was Isha…? Was Isha right?

“So, what are you thinking?” Isha asked, her eyes searching Jaya’s face after a long moment of silence. “What are you going to do?”

Jaya gazed upward, at the clouds scuttling across the slate-gray sky. “I think I need to make a phone call.”

Once Isha kissed her on the cheek and walked off back down the path, Jaya reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone, feeling a sudden surge of energy, of purpose, of fury.

She video-called Kiran and waited. When he answered, a haughty smile on his face, anger spiked in her blood, a potent elixir against the despair she felt.

“Don’t you cry now, Jaya,” he said. “I’ve cleaned up your mess for you.”

She stared at him. “Cleaned up my mess? Are you completely deluded?” The self-satisfied look fell off his face. She took a deep breath. “The engagement is off,” she said, with as much calm authority as she could gather. She felt a brief stab of guilt at doing this to her father, at taking away the one neat solution they’d arrived upon. But Isha’s words rang in her ear: If there’s one thing I know about our father, it’s that nothing’s more important to him than the happiness of his girls.