Shobi had never needed any of the things from Omar that her family had expected from a husband for her. When you decided on your future so young, pragmatism had no place in it. Even so, those words had been everything: Our house has been waiting for you, jaan. Only you can make it a home. Not once had he asked her to leave her marriage. Not once had he questioned her when she had decided to.

“She’s your daughter, how can she not be strong?” Omar took a sip from his stoneware cup. He refused to drink his black chai with lemon and honey out of Shobi’s hand-crafted Wedgwood china.

After getting his law degree, Omar had ended up making his fortune writing for Indian TV and film. But his heart was that of a poet, incapable of the violence of unkindness, forever searching for the truth. How had he lived with her, a liar, for so long?

“When has telling the truth ever helped me?” Shobi poured herself another glass of wine and took a slow sip. The rich, full-bodied liquid warmed her despite the chill of Bram’s kitchen.

“All your life. It has helped you all your life. Don’t you see, Shoban, you are truth. The pain in your life comes when you’re separated from your truth.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because now you have the time to hear it.”

He put down his cup and leaned in toward the computer screen. “I miss breathing the scent of your hair.” It was something he had done for as long as she could remember, press his face into her hair and fill his lungs as though she were air.

When he’d done it that first time after she found her way back to him, he hadn’t hesitated even for a moment. No one other than Shobi had believed she would be with him again. Except him.

“You are my breath,” he mumbled in Urdu. “Follow the truth, jaan. Don’t be afraid of it.”

Shobi ached to hold him, to press against the starched hand-spun cotton of his kurta draped around his spare, tall body. Like his poetry, there wasn’t an inch of excess in his form.

He held up the computer, giving her a view of her beloved ocean before letting her go with his “Khuda hafiz.”

She watched the computer blink off.

“You are the ocean,” Omar loved to say to her. She had never lived far from an ocean. Not in Jaigaon, her family’s home just south of Goa; not in Sripore, the Rajes’ royal seat just north of Goa; and not here in Palo Alto. Although she could never think of this as home.