Mina Kaki is helping me. No matter how many times Shobi heard those words, they sliced through her heart. As though a knife had dropped from Ashi’s hands onto her chest.

Of course Shobi had watched the video. Flora hadn’t stopped talking about it since she’d seen it. Shobi had watched it a few times. All right, more than a few times. An embarrassing number of times. She had watched it on a loop for hours.

It had been far too long since she’d seen her baby. Missing Ashi was part of her life, a chronic pain she had learned to breathe through and manage. But seeing her like that, exposed to the world exactly the way she was, vulnerable, guileless, beautiful—it had shaken years of suppressed pain loose inside Shobi.

Turning to the ocean, she took in the orange arc of the sun as it emerged over waves fallen gray in its shadow. A moment that remained magnificent no matter how many times you witnessed it. A moment that was never the same unless it reflected off a human retina and not a lens, no matter how skilled the photographer. Much like life.

The moment when Ashi had let the knife go at the sight of Frederico Silva played in Shobi’s mind again. This was what the world had come to, recording everything in the constant search of an unscripted moment. A mass hysterical hunger for serendipity.

Now her child was a victim of it. The idea of Ashi in Bram’s restaurant had always made Shobi want to burn the damn place down. Ashi had avoided cooking at all costs growing up. The way Bram had shoved their daughter into that role, doing something she hated, made rage burn through Shobi. She picked up her pace, breaking into a jog.

Could there be a greater irony than the fact that Ashi had landed a football player as a partner? As a child, the thing Ashi had loved as much as she had hated cooking was football. When she’d moved to America she had lost her sport just the way she had lost her home. Or maybe she had willfully cast it off as a symbol of rebellion against Shobi. It had been Shobi’s dream that Ashi follow her footsteps to the cricket pitch, but Ashi had gravitated toward football. So Shobi had adjusted her dream to her daughter leading India into the international scene in that sport. Then Bram had ruined everything, as always.

Maybe Ashi still followed the sport. Was that why she had agreed to do the show? Because of Frederico Silva?