“I’m sorry.” She was. She was so deeply, deeply sorry for having hurt this woman. In ways that reached far beyond this conversation. “But I think that poor general surgeon deserves someone who knows how to do this.” How to be you. “I know only one way to be happy, and that is by being alone and focusing on my work. I will never ever get married. Not if every surgeon in the world is widowed without children and not one of them will move on unless I agree to marry him.” She met the abject disappointment in her mother’s beautiful, tired eyes. “Never, Mummy, ever.”

A sob escaped her mother, because sobs lived at her command. “What if Yash sees error of ways and takes you back?”

Naina had to laugh at that. Suddenly she saw how her mother had stayed with her father for forty years. It was this hope. This insatiable, entirely delusional ability to cheat herself into believing that the impossible could happen. That people could change how they saw things. That tomorrow was another day and all that crap.

She tried to enunciate the words without being rude, because Mummy had to understand this. “Yash is not going to do that. We never loved each other that way. We lied because my father wouldn’t let me go to Nepal unless I got married. And pretending to be with Yash was the only way to change his mind. Yash was just helping me get around Dr. Kohli’s ridiculous objections.”

This wasn’t the first time Naina was saying these words to her mother. She’d lost track of how many times she’d repeated them. Over and over and over. But there was that horrid hope that cut off her mother’s hearing, willfully, stubbornly. Hope that had made her mother unable to hear Naina or to see Naina her entire life.

Which is why Naina couldn’t say the other part. If you had ever stood up for me, I wouldn’t have had to turn to Yash.

The parts Naina could say, she would say a hundred times if she had to. “I don’t want to get married. To anyone. Not even if your Shivji himself came down from Mount Kailash. I am not made for marriage. I’m just not.” And she wasn’t going to apologize for it ever again.

With a shudder, her mother recoiled from her. “That is unnatural, beta. How you can say something so against nature, and society, and God? Your father is right. You are not normal.” She looked like the very sight of Naina made her queasy with the enormity of her own failings. “What did I do to deserve child so abnormal?”

With not a word more, she unlocked the door and left, but not before she had peeked out to make sure she wasn’t being watched.