“Neither do I. I just want to talk to you.” She pauses. “I was so nervous to see your family for the first time since Sunil passed away. That would’ve been hard enough. But as it turned out, the hardest part wasn’t facing their questions, or even their awkwardness at not knowing what to say to me, which was what I was expecting. The harder part was having to pretend. Getting caught up in an awful secret. Being blindsided and silenced. Can you even imagine what that was like?” She waits for an answer, but nothing comes. “Do you even care, Niru? You’ve never asked.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“We both know you’re a bit off at the moment, don’t we? Remember how you scared off Chi?”

“What does Chi have to do with this?”

“You’re not seeing things straight.”

“I’m grieving, Nirav. I haven’t lost my mind. And I didn’t make this up. It happened.”

He stares at his lap.

“You obviously don’t think anything wrong happened.”

“I told you, I don’t know what happened.”

“What am I supposed to do now? Pretend that my brother’s still alive every time we visit London?” A rhetorical question. She knows she is never going back there.

“Well, it’s always something with your family, isn’t it?”

“Our family, Nirav.”

“No, not my family. Your family. We wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for your family.” His mouth screws with anger. “I hate being part of your family.”

She can tell by the guilty look on his face he has let something slip that he meant to harbour in silence. God only knows how long he has been harbouring it. “You what?”

“Never mind.”

“You hate my family?”

He shoots up from his stool, grabs his half-eaten plate, and lets it clatter in sink. “I didn’t say that,” he tells her.

“You said—”

“Just stop, all right? I haven’t the patience for this tonight.” He strides to the washroom and slams the door.

“You never have the patience,” she mutters to herself. “And I never have the nerve.”

Her cheeks burn. She crosses the room and steps onto the terrace in her slippers. The light evening wind carries with it the scent of snow, clean and metallic. She hugs the front panels of her cardigan close to her body, lifts her gaze, and stares fiercely at the pale grey sky.

“How can I speak up for you, Bear,” she says, “when I still haven’t figured out how to speak up for myself?” A braver, confident woman wouldn’t have let Nirav escape. A woman with more self-esteem wouldn’t have given up until she reached the resolution she knew she deserved. What kind of woman was she turning out to be? What kind of sister?