But with Devesh it was different. With Devesh, she felt simultaneously idolized and truly seen. It was as if he could look inside her and see the mess she had made of herself and love her more dearly for it. He told her to crawl to the bedroom, and she knew he understood how much she needed to feel both deeply wanted and nearly insignificant. Every day she felt like getting down on her knees and thanking him, but the most she could manage was to entangle her fingers in his dark hair and cling to him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, to grab him by the shoulders and insist on it, but the hugeness of the feeling was suffocating. And behind it was something else—the shame of deception, as if she was hiding something more than her money and background, as if her tightly wound past could unfurl like a roll of butcher paper to reveal something darker than what he already saw.

One night, grocery shopping, they walked around the store going over Hindi words: banana: kela; apple: sev; milk: doodh. She pointed to things and then repeated the word, and he laughed.

“Your pronunciation is horrible,” he said. “Maybe you’ll do better with Tamil. You can practice on the kind South Indians if you come with me to Chennai in November.”

She was surprised. He hadn’t mentioned this before, and the thought of him sweeping her off to a world she knew only through him both scared and excited her.

“You’re going?” she asked.

“Yes; for a month, for my cousin’s wedding.”

“Oh.” She looked at the boxes of cereal lining the shelves.

“I’m not going to leave you,” he said, and pulled her to him. “We can go to Delhi for the wedding, and then they’ve asked me to help with an emergency medical center at a hospital in Tamil Nadu. We can stay a whole month.”

He bent down and kissed her forehead.

“Oh.” She wasn’t sure what to say or even what she felt. “But what about work?”

“You haven’t had a holiday in a year now.”

She looked at the bunch of bananas in the cart, the bag of deep red apples. Kela, she said to herself. Sev.

“My brother has a huge house overlooking the water in Chennai—we’ll stay there.”

“That’s an awful long time to stay with someone.”

He laughed. “You obviously don’t know the ways and workings of Indian families.”

She nodded, but what she had meant was that a month was a long time for them to be gone, to be away from this cocoon they had somehow managed to spin into being.

“Maybe we’ll go to Goa for the weekend,” he said. “Or would you rather see the Taj Mahal?” He smiled, and her heart stumbled. If she went, she would be surrendering herself to his care completely.