She never believed his flu story. She figured he was grieving his father’s death.

But her Harjeet never got better. He slowly shed his business clients, told them he was semi-retiring. He quit coming to the phone when Kush called from college. He was no longer interested in their after-dinner walks to the local park. They used to take breadcrumbs to feed the ducks at the pond, would sit together on the bench and watch the sunset before heading back home. He quit wanting to host dinner parties and stopped cooking altogether.

She could never have imagined that the man she dropped off at the Newark airport for a trip to Amritsar would return to her such a different man. That he would spend the last third of his life battling such demons.

Three weeks after the time stamp on the video, she went shopping with her girlfriends to Manhattan. When she returned, she found him lying in bed next to three empty pill bottles.

She stepped away from the computer, curled up on the sofa. Goosebumps budded along her skin despite the warm air. For twenty years, she blamed the wrong ghost for her husband’s depression. It wasn’t Simran who haunted him all these years. It was his father.

Guilt and grief had not killed her Harjeet. The revelation of a horrific truth had.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Amsterdam

April 3, 2017

The sky was gray but bright, as if at any moment a slice of light would cut through its opaque layer. A gust of wind ruffled Shan’s hair, chilled her neck. She pulled her collar up around her ears, regretted leaving her scarf behind at the hotel. Jetlag had turned her thirty-minute catnap into three hours of deep, dreamless slumber. She was running late.

This plan of hers was absurd. So absurd, she didn’t tell anyone beside Chandani about the trip. What was the point? She would be gone for four days. If Deepa refused her, she’d just take in the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank House and call the trip a post-divorce vacation.

A young woman wearing a knit cap passed by her.

“Excuse me,” Shan said. “Where can I find Andersen Hall?”

“In the languages building around the corner, first one on the left,” she said. “Can’t miss it.”

“Thank you,” Shan said. She plunged her hands into her pockets, scooted down the pathway.

Her life in Atlanta felt so distant, and not just in miles. One year ago, she was married and pregnant, working in a competitive, prestigious career, living in a beautiful, single-family home she owned. Now she was a single, childless, unemployed renter chasing a virtual stranger on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.