On the ride home, Sunil began to withdraw. Kavita had never seen him retreat so deeply inside himself. The look of preoccupation on his face was startling, impenetrable. The hopefulness she had felt as they left the doctor’s office vanished. Terror took its place. Her gut told her in hammer-like knocks that something was very wrong.

When they got home, Kavita knew she had to do something. Sunil went down to his bedroom without a word. She watched him go and waited for the click of his door. Then she unpocketed her cell phone, sickened by what she was about to do. One day she hoped he would understand. But her cell was dead. She had forgotten to charge it the night before. She hated to take her eyes off the front door, ordered herself to be quick, as she rushed to the kitchen for the cordless, but it wasn’t in its dock, nor was it in her father’s room, or her mother’s, or the dining room. At last, she found it tucked into one corner of the couch. All of her searching had amounted to half a minute. As she dialled 9-1-1, she slipped out the front door so no one would hear her talk to the police. The operator had just come on the line, when Kavita noticed the empty space in the driveway, where Sunil’s car was usually parked. For a moment, she stood motionless, her mind slow to absorb the immensity of the situation, a computer unable to process an overwhelming amount of data.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, chilled.

She felt kneeless.

“I took my eyes off of him for less than a minute and he slipped away.” Even as she hears herself mutter these words, they don’t seem real. But they are. She sees herself running to the corner of their street, then the next, her eyes desperately reaching along the cracked pavement, in search of Sunil’s sky-blue sedan, and not finding it. In an instant, the geography of their small world mushroomed to an ungraspable size. Where did he go? How was she ever going to find him?

“You couldn’t have known he would take off,” Nirav says.

“I should have taken his car keys.” Why hadn’t she thought to take his car keys? Stupid. Stupid. Careless.

“His appointments had been arranged, for goodness sake. Anyone would’ve let their guard down a little.”

Yes, that was it. She had let her guard down. Because they had left the doctor’s office on the same page, but then something changed, only she hadn’t known how hazardous the change would turn out to be. “I think it must’ve been the doctor’s note.”

“What about it?”

“Sunil mentioned it when we were at the marina. He was trying to put on a brave face, but I could tell he was devastated by what the doctor had written.”

“What did the note say?”