Rage roiled in her chest, pressing out against her ribs, a continuous state for her now. It had been three months since Bram had shoved himself into his room, into his marital bed, and into his wife’s body.

Thinking about it like that, from a distance, was the only way Shoban could bear to live in her skin, and to not put a bullet through Bram’s brain.

I was drunk. I don’t remember anything. She’s lying.

His excuses had been endless.

But she’s my wife.

Finally, that last one, his truth.

Shoban had screamed but he had slapped a hand across her mouth, the pads of his fingers pushing up against her nose, cutting off her breath, and torn through her underwear and her flesh.

Jumping off the couch, Shoban paced the clinic’s waiting room as Mina watched her, eyes filled with the wretched guilt that had become permanently lodged there.

Shoban would not have made it through these three months without Mina.

Mina had found her on the palace cliffs. She’d been sitting on the rocks and staring at the ocean the morning after, bruised everywhere, but with only the bruise that split her lip visible to the world.

Shoban had pushed herself out from under Bram after he passed out on top of her. She’d taken herself to the shower and washed off the blood but hadn’t been able to wash off the violation, no matter how scalding the water. Pulling on a white kurta over jeans, she had walked out of the palace and to the cliffs as the sun started to break the horizon.

She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there when Mina found her on her morning run. On the night of the wedding, sometime after Shobi had left Mina outside the balcony, Mina and Shree had put a heavily drunk Bram in one of the rooms in their suite, where they had believed he had fallen into an inebriated stupor. How Bram had let himself out of there and made it into Shoban’s room, no one seemed to know.

Mina had apologized and apologized, but it wasn’t her fault.

When Mina and Ma-saheb asked Shobi what she wanted to do, all she could think was I want to put a bullet in his head.

She couldn’t remember if she had said the words out loud, but the intense full-bodied numbness that she couldn’t shake off had been both a blessing and a curse.

Pressing charges wasn’t an option. Shoban had no witnesses, and no judge would hear a marital rape case. Bram had been sent off to a rehab facility in Switzerland. A banishment, a peace offering, a cover-up, Shoban wasn’t sure which.