“Shall we go in?” Nirav asks. He tucks a few strands behind her ear. “You’re knackered, love. Going over it won’t change anything. You’re going to drive yourself mad if you carry on like this.”

“Going over it is all I can do now,” she says, staring at the pavement. He is still dressed in his office clothes. He had left work as soon as she called him that afternoon. He had rushed to be with her. Yet, somehow, she can’t help but feel insulted by his proper appearance, the even tone of his voice, his dry eyes.

“Come, my love. Let’s go inside and I’ll make you some tea.”

“I can’t.” She turns away from him. “I can’t breathe in there.”

Inside the house, her parents have retreated into the solitudes of their grief and separate bedrooms. She had fixed each of them a toddy before helping them to bed, where they had withered into their mattresses, drained by weeping and a week of erratic sleep.

Afterwards, she had poured the rest of the brandy typically reserved for company down the kitchen sink without letting a drop touch her lips. The contents of her parents’ modest liquor cabinet went the way of the brandy. A diminutive yet self-preserving voice inside her head made a salient point: any substances that might be overconsumed as a remedy against the pain of bereavement had to be removed immediately. That same voice knew if she started down the path of forgetting—of numbing—then she would not stop until she reached oblivion.

Earlier, while administering the toddies, she had detected a similar precarious wish for oblivion in her parents’ deadened eyes. These ripples of Sunil’s suicide threatened to overwhelm them all. No matter how much she craved an end to the hurt, the survivor in her whispered with a meditative calm unique to the shock of trauma, reminding her of her duty to care for her parents; she was their death doula now. You’re all they have left, the voice told her.

“You can’t stay out here all night.” Nirav rubs circles on her back, a conciliatory gesture. The warmth of his broad palm soaks through the knit of her tank top. Rolling her shoulders back, she shrugs him off, rejecting his sympathy. She knows she doesn’t deserve any. He lifts his hand away as though in slow motion. Resting his forearms over his knees, he sighs.