“And now you just show up on the doorstep like nothing ever happened?” Nitya asked abruptly. “Why now? I mean, you let us believe you were dead.”

Tanvi started to answer, but Nitya didn’t let her. “I don’t know you anymore. The Tanvi I knew never would have let us suffer like that. Do you know we had a cremation for you?”

“I was in Nagalok!” Tanvi protested. “How was I supposed to know?”

Nitya watched while she stood and picked up a copper giraffe figurine from the glass-topped coffee table. Recognition jolted through the nerves in Tanvi’s arm, and she set the giraffe back down. Her hand knew the feel of it, like she’d picked it up a thousand times before.

She tore around the room, studying the framed pictures she’d avoided before. Mom, Dad, Nitya, and her, all posed in Indian clothes against a blue background. There were a couple of portraits like that.

Then they changed, only three faces where there had been four. And finally Nitya alone: Nitya at tennis camp, Nitya graduating middle school, Nitya in a group with friends. Tanvi recognized some of them, but there were new people, too. The timeline of snapshots took her from the past where she’d once belonged to the present, where she might as well be a phantom.

This had been her family. She knew that, but the images of the four of them together refused to gel into any kind of memory. Almost as if it was someone else’s life, and she was just peeking in.

Maybe, her heart accused, she didn’t know how to be human. Maybe she never had.

“How could you leave like that?” Nitya demanded. She’d been trailing Tanvi the whole time.

“I already told you,” Tanvi said, trying not to let her crabbiness show. There were other pictures she still had to look at, prints of roses and mushrooms in forests and carnival rides. One had a blue ribbon attached: First Place.

Nitya had been holding a camera when she’d answered the door. “Did you take these pictures?” Tanvi asked.

But Nitya wasn’t listening. “I’m honestly not even sure this isn’t a dream,” she said. “Is it?”

Dreams. Tanvi didn’t miss the irony. This entire trip felt like a dream.

“You know what I think?” Nitya didn’t wait for Tanvi to reply. “I think you ran away, and something bad happened to you, and the only way you can cope is by making up a story about nagas.”

Guilt, fuzzy and strange, spread over Tanvi. Nitya expected something from her—she could tell that much—but whatever it was, she doubted she could give it. Anyway, she was supposed to be the one getting answers.

She flashed back to the rangoli on the driveway. To her bracelet. “Daisies,” she blurted.

“What?” Nitya’s expression was one huge question mark. “What about them?”