Turning to look at the empty space beside her, she wonders where her husband is. Last night, she dropped into such a sleep, such a coma of exhaustion, she had not felt him leave the bed that morning.

Just then, she hears noise coming from the kitchen, the distant sound of muffled voices. She wants to stay in bed. Close her eyes and sleep, maybe forever. But there’s work to do.

She finds her parents and Nirav sitting around the table in silence. Cups of ginger tea and barely nibbled toast in front of them. Balls of crumpled tissues scattered beside their plates like sad paper flowers.

“Morning,” she says as she takes a seat beside Nirav. She stares at Sunil’s empty chair across from her, the titanic vacancy in their lives now. Her breath hitches for a moment. She tries to untangle her expression.

“Fancy a brew, love?” asks Nirav.

“Please.”

While he busies himself with the tea, she inspects her parents’ faces. Have they lost weight while sleeping?

“Here we are.” Nirav places a steaming cup in front of her. “A cuppa me best brew, strong and sweet, just the way you likes it, love,” he says in the Cockney accent he uses when trying to coax a laugh out of her.

For his sake, she forces a smile, then wraps her hands around her sunflower-yellow mug Sunil gave her for her twenty-fifth birthday last year. In her mind, she hears his deep voice: I saw the colour and thought of you. Yellow like sunshine. Suddenly she has no taste for tea.

Although no one has voiced it yet, she knows they must be thinking it.

“We need to tell people,” she says. “While we wait for the death certificate, we need to start making plans.”

“I still can’t believe it,” her father says. “How can we tell people what doesn’t seem real?”

“I don’t know.” A beat. “But we have to.”

“He was supposed to scatter my ashes, not the other way around,” says her mother. “What parent ever thinks about planning their child’s funeral?”

“I know, Mom. I’m sorry. I can make the calls. Should I start with the temple?”

Her mother stares at the table, blank.

“Mom?”

“Back in India, a pandit once told me that people who take their lives are sent to the lowest level of hell. In their next lives, they have a lowly birth.”

“It isn’t true, Mom. You can’t think of that now. It doesn’t help.”

“No pandit,” her mother mutters. “And if we have to tell them something, we will say that he died in a car accident.”

“But that isn’t what happened.”

“It’s what we will tell them.”

“But Mom—”

“It’s nobody’s business.”

“If Sunil died of cancer we wouldn’t be hiding it.”

“No one judges people who die of cancer.”

“People will understand.”

“How do you know?”