They met in the back room of the dressmaking shop where Adela worked. Mrs. Belvidere had trusted Adela and given her a key. Adela attended the early morning mass on Sundays and joined Ram afterward. Ram did not know if she felt guilty about this. Weekly, when the Anglos were at church and there were few eyes to spy him coming and going, he and Adela would spread a blanket on the floor in the little-used storage room.

She did not ask about his life before California, although he knew that Rosa would have told her of it. She did not ask him why his first hours in the Valley had been in the doctor’s shack. Although she might have known that too. He did not ask her about the man whom she had threatened at gunpoint, who had dared to approach her after her husband’s death. She never told what she did to him.

They were surrounded by scraps of cloth, reams of material, spools of thread, the extra sewing machine. Mrs. Belvidere had been a child in Georgia during the Civil War. She did not discard things. They felt protected by her collections, by the trust that the imposing woman had placed in Adela.

They lay among the unmade clothes and the striped sunlight that shone through the blinds. The fabric was witness to their communion, a life outside society. It was witness to everything. His blood would quicken at the thought of that room; it would race if he walked past the street with Karak on a weekday errand.

Did Adela think of it in the same way? He did not know. She had purchased a sheath so that a baby would not come; he imagined that was her concession to his life in India. She neatly folded the blanket when they left. She locked the door so they would not be discovered and showed him the hidden exit from the back. How was it that she was not ashamed? It was the looser morals of western women, he concluded. In America, so much freedom and power was given to them.

He had always thought himself an honorable man. He had spent years condemning Karak’s visits to the brothels, how free he was with women. The simplicity of his condemnation had been a luxury. He had never before felt temptation. Now pieces of himself were scattered everywhere, and he could not gather himself up and make himself whole.