Naina refused to wrap her arms around herself. She refused to let him see what his words did.

“The only thing women like you want is someone to control.”

“No, that’s what men like you want. All I want is a relationship that is not about control.”

He spat out another one of those laughs, lighter on the precision this time and heavier on the cruelty. “Doesn’t the fact that you can only have that with a man who is twelve years younger than you tell you something?”

Naina’s arms went around her.

“Doesn’t it tell you that you’re fighting nature? All the things you want, how you want to live. It’s against nature, against God, against our culture, against any civilized culture. Even though people like you keep trying to bastardize it under the guise of progress.” His voice was filled with righteous indignation. The voice of a man who knew everything.

She looked him square in the eye. “Is it not against nature to hate your own child?”

He stepped back, surprised that she’d dared to contradict him. “What reason have you ever given me to love you? I always knew your mother had lost control of you. But this? You’ve seen the boy in diapers, Knightlina! Who doesn’t think that’s disgusting?”

The ugly coldness that had been the most pervasive memory of her childhood wrapped back around Naina. The armor she’d let slip crawled back into place, pressing tight against her skin.

“Well, you wasted your time coming out here, because you have it wrong. There is nothing between Vansh and me that anyone needs to worry about. We’re colleagues. You’re going to have to go back to being disappointed in me simply because I’m a girl and because you can’t control me.”

When she turned away from him, the rage was back inside her full force, an inferno. The sniveling sadness inside her was gone. The vulnerability she’d stupidly succumbed to, letting herself feel things she had no business feeling. All of it was burnt to ashes and scattered into the wind. The last thing that caught her eye was the satisfied sneer that distorted his face.

SOMETIMES ALL NAINA wanted was to be like the women in romantic comedies. She wanted to cry into her wine. She wanted to eat ice cream straight out of a tub in her pajamas while friends told her it was going to be okay. Instead she felt parched, desert sand where her feelings needed to be. Arid heat where her tears should have been.