“I found Laila, Amir’s sister. She’s alive and well and an artist. She’s been living in Lahore this whole time! Can you believe it?”

Deepa closed her eyes. Laila, sweet Laila, skipping through the marketplace with a basket of flowers, her arms encircling Amir’s shoulders, her sticky, jalebi fingers.

“I can’t believe it,” Deepa finally said.

“I have very sad news too. Amir died only three weeks after you last saw him. He was on a train bound for Delhi. It was ambushed. Everyone on board died, including Amir. But he was on his way back to you.”

Deepa dropped the phone. It smacked the floor like a brick hitting concrete, shot across the room. She lowered herself slowly to the ground to search for it.

In the seventy years since he last held her, since he departed from her parents’ flat, she considered the possibilities: His parents discovered his plan, forbade him to return to Delhi; he couldn’t find it in his heart to leave Laila; he didn’t have enough money for a return ticket; his father was too sick for him to leave Lahore; he returned to Delhi and when he couldn’t find Deepa, went back to Pakistan, and the saddest possibility she could imagine—his family never made it out of India alive, that they died, as so many other Muslims did, before reaching Pakistan safely.

She’d not considered this. That he boarded a train in Lahore and died on his way back to Delhi. Back to her.

She rolled to her knees, crawled across the floor. She found her phone under her kitchen table. She brought it to her ear again.

“Deepa? Are you there? Deepa?”

“Yes,” Deepa said, breathlessly. “I’m still here.”

Shan revealed the notes Amir left to his family upon departing Lahore and the last origami note he left for her, which Laila kept all these years. “It says, ‘Forgive me, my wife.’ He wanted you to know that if he didn’t make it, he was sorry.”

It was almost too much for Deepa to take in.

When Amir had not returned, she deprived her son of the few truths she knew about his family, abandoned her granddaughter, cut off Gertrude. She buried herself in her career, forged an existence in isolation, where she didn’t have to rely on anyone to survive.

For so long she had felt nothing. She had buried her emotions so deep within herself, she wasn’t sure she could feel anything again. Except for her poetry. She had allowed herself the luxury of honest expression through her words, as Madam Grover once advised her to do. But once she penned those feelings on the page, she left them there. She forbade herself from carrying those emotions around.