Deepa shifted her weight, slid her heels along the floor to ease the soreness in her seat. She refolded her legs, welcomed back the ache. She feared losing it, no longer knowing it, no longer having something of Amir. The bloodstained underwear from that night, the burning when she relieved herself in the toilet, reassured her, somehow, of his eventual return. At school, Deepa had learned about purgatory, the limbo after death, before redemption and renewal, the last stop on the journey toward heaven. Even though she believed, at least somewhat, in reincarnation, there was something about the idea of purgatory that appealed to her. These tortuous days between her parents’ deaths and Amir’s return were her purgatory. This is how she would survive her separation from him. Each minute that passed was one less minute she had to endure alone.

She crawled to the couch, curled up on her side, where he had laid her down, peeled off her clothes, touched her until she felt she no longer knew who she was, where she was, whether the life she was living was real or imagined, whether her parents were dead or alive. That was the best part, the part when her mind transported itself elsewhere, so that she was no longer an orphan, no longer alone. She belonged again, in those few minutes, to someone and something.

In the two days he’d been gone, she brought the feeling back. When she thought she might die in his absence, she slid her desk chair against the door of her bedroom, untied her salwar, let it drop to her ankles, and stood, one hand on her desk, the other between her legs, brushing lightly back and forth, waiting, as the folds of her skin grew wet, swelled, as her breath turned to a light pant, as her knees buckled, as her body, for a few, blissful seconds, released a tiny bit of its anguish into the hot, humid Delhi air.

“Deepa,” Nora said. Her voice was raspy and thin. She approached the sofa, perched on its edge, gripped it so tightly it drained her fingers of color. She had spent all day yesterday, all evening, all night, shushing John as he sobbed in the living room. “Why? Why did this happen?” he had cried. “Why not me?”

“Deepa, John and I need to talk to you about something.” She clasped her hands over her knees, released them, fiddled with the cuffs on her blouse, smoothed out her starched skirt. “As soon as we heard what happened, John and I made a plan.” She looked at John, tapped her foot, waited for him to finish her train of thought, to join in the discussion.

John sensed his wife’s watchful eye, paused. He raked his unclipped nails through his beard stubble. His hand wandered to his shirt pocket, patted something that wasn’t there. His squint produced deep crevices in his face.