Shan nodded. “The photo next to the link is the exact same photo from your pooja room. I watched the video. It’s his story. It was posted on February 4, 2015.”

Chandani sucked in her breath. Her elbows slipped off the edge of the table, knocked over her glass. Shan reached over quickly, righted the glass, and grabbed a few napkins to soak the spill up. She then reached across the table and took Chandani’s hand. “Chandani, are you okay?”

She nodded, cleared her throat. “Harjeet … he died on February 25, three weeks later,” she said. Her palms suddenly felt cold, clammy. Her chest felt tight, as if her ribs might crack.

He hadn’t left a note. There had been no final confirmation that he loved her, that she made him happy, that he was sorry for leaving her. No goodbye, after so many years together. She had deserved one.

She pushed her chair back, slung her purse over her shoulder. “I have to go, Shan. I … I need to see the video at home, for myself. Alone.”

Shan signaled the server for the check. “Let me just get this and I’ll drop you off at home,” she said.

Chandani left Shan at the curb and rushed inside. She didn’t look back, didn’t thank her for lunch. There was a burning in her to see her husband, to hear his voice. She had to get to him.

She sat down at her desk, opened her laptop. As Shan promised, an email with a link to his story was waiting in her inbox. She tapped the touchpad. A still frame of his image appeared before her. It took her breath away.

Her Harjeet. Her handsome, lovely husband. Oh, how she’d missed that sweet face, those eyes, a deep brown, so expressive, those eyebrows, dramatic, his perfectly manicured beard, and the feel of it between her fingertips.

He was sitting on some sort of a stool. She didn’t recognize the room. It looked like a classroom. She tried to think back to the day he recorded it, where she might have been, how he might have gotten away from the house without her knowing. He’d rarely left the house the last twenty years of his life.

She pressed play, leaned closer to the screen.

His low, husky voice resounded in the room. It was as if he was sitting right in front of her. She reached out, touched him. Her finger met only the hard surface of the screen. He was steady, calm, as if reading from a teleprompter. He talked briefly about the few memories he had of living in Rawalpindi, mentioned his mother’s death soon after his birth, and then began recounting the day they left their homeland.