Not a day went by when Esha Raje didn’t have to let the accident that changed her life go. Every single day. The airplane shaking around her. The screams that sounded so far away she wasn’t sure if she was straining to hear them or blocking them out, because even at eight she knew they were different. Wild. Final. Dying screams.

What Esha hadn’t known then was that she’d hear them for the rest of her life. Clear as the day it happened.

Over thirty years now.

Every day she sorted through the wreckage.

Every day she sorted the good from the bad and held on. To Aie and Baba Saheb, her parents.

Her aie, who had been filled with stories, the starched folds of her saris wrapping up an endless supply. Yarns she spun and wove all through the day into Esha’s ears.

“You really should write that book,” Baba Saheb had said over and over.

After Aie was gone, her stories had been lost, mangled in the metal of the wreckage.

Every day Esha dug through the debris and shook out the stories. Picked out the shrapnel from the detritus.

The press of her parents’ arms around her. It’s okay, Eshu. It’s okay, beta. It’s okay. We’re here . . . , an echo in two voices, one in each ear. Arms wrapped around her, tight, so tight that for those last minutes they’d left no breath inside her.

Just bruises from their grip on her arms, their names on her tongue, their voices deep inside her ears.

Every day she tried to remember. Every day she tried to forget.

“I’m bored, Aie.” They’d barely been in the air for an hour, but plane rides were the most boring things on earth.

Aie threw a glance around their private jet. A few friends had joined them on the trip. They were stretched out on the plush brocade seats, reading, listening to music, watching movies on giant personal screens. Brightly colored drinks sat in glasses next to them, with those sweet pink cherries Esha’s nanny always let her have in her lemonade when the adults had drinks. The staff traveling with them were in the back.

“Aie, I’m bored,” Esha repeated.

“Aie Saheb,” her mother corrected gently. “Remember what your aji says. In public we say Aie Saheb. Protocol is important to your grandmother. Tradition is how we hold on to our ancestors.”

“Leave her be,” Baba Saheb said. “She’s on holiday. I’m already taking this holiday because Ma Saheb has been on my case. Now let the child do as she pleases while she’s away from the palace.”

“As if you don’t let her do as she pleases when she’s in the palace.” Esha loved to hear her parents bicker. Scolding and teasing, with that sparkle in their eyes that Esha only ever saw them get when they talked to each other.