He took her hand and started walking again, and the words spilled from her. Easy and difficult. Slow, then fast. The way her mother had told her stories. The way she’d seemed to give a rhythm to them.

She told him about her childhood in Sripore. About Baba Saheb and how Aji used to be before the accident. Esha before the accident. Aie. She told him about the flight. About how those flashlights had looked in the darkness and rain as she hung from that tree.

Finding words should have been harder. Or easier. Or something. But they came, and she gave them to him. He wasn’t the only one who needed to study unknowable things. She wanted to know too, and digging up buried things and speaking them seemed like a good first step. Essential.

She left out the part about Garuda. That seemed like a secret between her and those who were gone, and letting the secret go was too much like letting them go.

“Where does the Brahminy kite fit in?” He’d listened to all she’d had to say and then zeroed in on Garuda.

An icy wave rolled through her.

“When I tell you about him, will you leave?”

“Is that what you fear? That I’ve been coming to see you because I want a photograph?”

He’d told her how he’d sat on a rock for weeks, almost without moving, to photograph black-bellied sandgrouse that nested in the cliffs of Portugal.

Taking her hand, he pressed it to his heart. “I’m going to make you a promise.” His intense eyes were on fire, the blaze steady. “No matter what happens, no matter what this—us—turns out to be, I will never photograph your Garuda. Not if he sits on your shoulder and speaks to me and tells me to do it. Not for anything on earth.”

“Sid.” She stepped closer to him and wrapped her arms around him, hugging him for the first time.

His arms went around her, as though he’d been waiting, breath whooshing out of him and tickling the top of her head.

Her body softened, relaxed. She let her head press into his chest, where his heartbeat skittered beneath her ear.

His chin rested on her head. “There is only one thing I’m here for, and it’s not a bird.”

“When I told you about the accident, there was something I left out,” she said against his chest.

He made a hmm-ing sound.

Without meaning to, her arms tightened around him. His response was to stroke her back with his thumb. A lifetime of practicing grounding techniques, and just that tiny motion brought her back into herself and the remaining piece slipped from her lips.