She was in a trance. Her body rocked back and forth, the barest motion. “I heard it. The gunshot. I found him. After I left you and went back to the restaurant to see him.” Her voice was the thinnest, strongest thread. “If I had been there one minute sooner, he’d still be alive.”

Rico slid closer to her. When she didn’t draw away from him, he placed a hand on her back, and when she didn’t shrink from that, he wrapped his arm around her, a horrible coldness engulfing him. “I’m so sorry.”

She said nothing; he wasn’t even sure she had heard him, but she let him hold her.

Losing her had felt like being on fire. His lungs blackened and useless, his skin singed off. Solid stabs of pain separating muscle from bone. Turned out his pain had been nothing. He had abandoned her when she had needed him most.

How would she ever forgive him? How would he ever forgive himself?

“I’m sorry,” he said again, then again. “I should have tried harder to reach you.” But he had believed that she had forsaken him and chosen to believe her father’s lies. “I should not have left.”

She touched his face, generosity that brought him to his knees. “You couldn’t have reached me. No one could. Not for a long time. He wasn’t the only person that bullet destroyed that day.”

They sat there like that. The immensity of what they had just learned hanging in the air between them.

“Rico,” she said suddenly, her voice oddly stronger. “When you went to see him. How did you know he was terrible to my mother? Is it because of what I told you earlier?”

“No. Because she walked in when he started yelling.” Rico remembered her father rummaging in the drawer. Was that where he kept the gun he used to kill himself? The maniacal rage in his eyes was something Rico would carry to his grave. There had been something unhinged about him, something about that moment that had always felt odd, but Rico had tried to bury the memory deep, like the rest of that meeting. Now he wondered if Ashna’s mother had saved his life that day.

“That can’t be right.” There was an odd confusion in her eyes when Ashna focused on him. “My mother wasn’t in America when it happened. She only arrived after his death.”

“I’m one hundred percent sure it was your mother.” Suddenly Rico remembered everything in stark detail. The ponderous gloominess of the room covered from floor to ceiling with books. The sharp scent of alcohol, sweat, and vomit in the overcooled air. The congested, raspy note in her father’s voice.

“I even remember that she was wearing a sari . . . it was blue . . . and she had a huge red bindi on her forehead.”