He seemed surprised at himself for having told her, then even more surprised when he kept going. “I was left at an orphanage in Goa in India when I was a baby. They weren’t exactly sure how old I was. The orphanage doctor guessed I was between nine months and eighteen months.” A sheen of sweat had broken out across his forehead as he spoke, and he wiped it on his shoulder. She thought he might stop, but he went on. “The headmistress put a random date on my birth certificate.” His finger pressed against his upper lip, where the scar left a wide gap in his stubble and lifted his lip up. India Dashwood had the scar too, but hers was more subtle than Sid’s.

“India has it too,” she said. “The scar.”

He made a grunting sound. “My sister China does too. Our mother adopted all three of us and we were all born with cleft lips. India and China were babies and their surgeries happened when they were young. I’d had basic surgery as a baby, but Mom brought me here when I was six and then we had to redo some of the surgeries. They did a lot of grafts.” This time when he looked up it was like he’d forgotten she was there.

She leaned into the railing next to him. “How did you know about the birth date?”

For a moment he seemed to have no idea what she was talking about, so lost was he in the pain of the memories, in the pain of his surgeries.

Esha had the urge to touch him, but he already looked like his space had been violated. Something about how he was holding himself, how he was looking at her, pricked at her. She couldn’t quite put a finger on what about it bothered her.

“You said no one knows that you don’t know your birth date,” she explained, “and that the headmistress made one up. Did she tell you that?”

“No.” A whisper. He looked so lost she almost told him it was okay to not answer. Then he cleared his throat and spoke again, his voice stronger. “I overheard the headmistress telling a teacher that she thought she might have picked a date that was unlucky for me.”

Esha’s confusion must have shown, because he explained himself. “Apparently, Mother Superior had a secret. She believed in numerology and tried to come up with birth dates for her orphans that gave them the luckiest chance at adoption. I wasn’t adopted until I was six.” He smiled as though the ugliness in the world was amusing. “She attributed it to bad luck. But with my face, her numerology had to have been magic, because Tara Dashwood was traveling through India in search of something and she found me.”