Deepa pursed her lips, blinked her eyes several times. The full understanding of how Shan found her seemed to dawn on her. “Laila isn’t in there, either. I had searched for her too.”

“What was he like?” Shan asked.

“Who? Vijay?”

“My grandfather, Amir,” Shan said. “What was he like?”

Deepa paused. “Handsome. Kind. He used to write me these little notes. He folded them into shapes. Origami. He made them for Laila, and then for me too.” Her eyes shone in the moonlight. There was a glimmer of something in them, a hint of what kind of life she had before Partition, a childhood of innocence, of laughter. Love. It had been many years, perhaps decades since she had known that kind of joy.

Deepa glanced away. “So many people died during Partition. Over a million,” she said. “Amir and Laila probably died too.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know some things. I lost my parents, my adoptive parents, Amir, Vijay. When my son died, I knew I couldn’t blame Partition for everything. I’m tainted. Her head dropped to her chest. “That’s why, after Vijay died, I stayed away from you too.”

Shan’s mouth fell open.

In the days after the miscarriage, Shan wondered whether her son could know what she had felt, worried he might have sensed, during those first few weeks, that she hadn’t wanted him at first, that she had scheduled an abortion. She feared this rejection of him might have seeped into him somehow, and ended his brief life. A part of her still believed this to be true. She still carried around the guilt of not being a good enough mother to him, a good enough person.

Guilt seemed to burden generations of Khannas.

Shan opened her purse, rummaged through it. She found an old receipt, wrote down the name of her hotel, her room number. “My flight leaves tomorrow evening,” she said. “If you want to meet for coffee or lunch beforehand, please let me know. And here’s my email address and phone number, in case you want to get in touch after I’ve returned home.”

She handed it to her grandmother, stood.

Deepa closed her fingers around it, stared at her fist.

“Deepa,” Shan said. “I’m so sorry about what you have gone through. I wish I could have been in your life to help you. None of it was your fault. I hope you understand that. And even if you didn’t need me, I needed you. I still do.” She didn’t wait for her grandmother to respond. She turned away, headed down a cobblestone sidewalk, through the courtyard, the light from the moon guiding her path.

Deepa called first thing the next morning and asked to meet. “I have something I want to give you,” she said.