I think of that word, ‘expired’. What does it mean? She ran out of steam? She stopped? She gave up? ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say.

‘How can we know what’s going on in their heads?’ Teacher goes on. ‘I feel so bad.’

‘You do what you can.’

‘You and I must always work together,’ she says, using the end of her sari to dab the corner of her eye.

I am unable to console her, unable to fill this gap with empathy. I want her to be quiet and take me to Lucia. I have waited long enough. I have done as she asked.

‘When I met you at your mother’s funeral I was happy because I thought Lucy has lost a mother, but will find a sister. I could see that you were weak. But still, I thought, Lucy will be saved. Are you ready now?’

I had sold all Ma’s jewels. There were boxes of the stuff in a bank safe. Treasures collected over decades. When I think of her earlier in her life, it’s as though she were a different woman. In the photographs she reclines on sofas, leans against balconies, wears filigreed gold chokers and emerald peacock earrings, hair swept into dark towering beehives. For a while, she wore only white with long strands of pearls. Her eyes rimmed with kohl, watery, disdainful. Papi is in some of these photographs too. All the wide space of his forehead exposed. The same dark-trim suit.

I kept a slim ruby necklace with uncut diamonds and Nonna Rosa’s ring, but the rest I sold. ‘Won’t you regret it?’ Rohini asked. ‘You don’t need the money, do you?’

It is a moment of death to understand you will not continue. Nothing in my life will pass on. I will not have daughters. I will not make Fisher-Price villages with them on bedroom floors or scoop them into the cave of my stomach when they are ill. I imagine these ghost children Blake and I could have had. Flaxen-haired girls with oblong jaws. They would not be weak. They would not be strong. They would not give birth to beautiful lonely creatures of their own.

There is a line that divides us. Rohini cannot understand what it means to travel lightly. She wants imprints, a kind of eternity. ‘You need it too,’ she says. ‘You’re fooling yourself if you think you’re not after the same thing.’

I want to tell her that a woman who moves from her parents’ house to her husband’s house is never uncertain. She has not walked through rooms searching for light switches. Someone is always showing her the way.