“I’m still not old enough to buy anything here.” He glanced around the room as if it might contain what he sought, looking at her closet and her chest of drawers, at the bed that was covered with wrapping paper and a box from Filene’s containing a nightgown for her mother.

“Trip to the liquor store?” he suggested, sitting on top of the bed, crushing some wrapping paper she’d unrolled. His hand sifted through the gift tags, the tape, picking up each item and then dropping it again.

“Now?” she asked.

“Do you have any other plans for the evening?”

“Well, no. But Ma and Baba are going to think it’s weird if we go out all of a sudden.”

He rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Didi. You’re almost twenty-four. Do you really still care what they think?”

“I was about to get into my pajamas.”

He picked up the scissors, his eyes focused on the slow opening and closing of the blades, as if discovering their function for the first time. “Since when did you get so boring?”

She knew he was joking, but the remark hurt her nevertheless. “Tomorrow, I promise.”

He stood up, distant again as he had been at dinner, and she felt herself faltering. “I guess it’s still open,” she said, looking at her watch. And so she’d gone, lying to her parents that she needed to get something last minute at the mall, Rahul saying he’d drive her there.

“You’re the best,” Rahul told her as they headed into town. He rolled down the window on his side, filling the car with freezing air, and fished in his coat pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He pushed in the lighter on the dashboard and offered her one, but she shook her head, turning up the heat. She told him that she’d applied to go to London the following year, to do a second master’s at the London School of Economics.

“You’re going to London for a whole year?”

“You can visit me.”

“Why do you need another master’s degree?” He sounded distressed, and also disapproving. It was the sort of reaction she expected from her parents. Her parents hadn’t allowed her to do a junior year abroad at Oxford, telling her then that she was too young to live in a foreign county alone. But now they were excited by the prospect of Sudha going to London, where they’d first lived after getting married and where Sudha had been born, talking about visiting and reconnecting with old friends.

She explained that LSE had one of the best programs in development economics, that she was thinking of doing NGO work, eventually. But Rahul didn’t seem to be listening, and she was annoyed with him, with herself, really, for agreeing to go out so late at night. “You want a six-pack?” she asked when they got to the liquor store.

“I’d prefer a case.”

In the past she had paid for things without a second thought, but she was aware, now, that he did not reach for his wallet.