He’d kept this trip a secret. Late last night, they climbed into the back of an Ambassador, bumped along a dirt road for six hours. She woke at dawn with an imprint of the leather seat on her cheek. She’d been enjoying Delhi, begrudged their short stay, her father’s relentless itinerary.

He offered his hand, a hand that suddenly seemed small to her, as if in the year since their last reunion, it shrunk. She let it hang in the air for a moment, to see if he might catch on, if he might realize she was too old to hold hands, that if she could walk five blocks to her elementary school all by herself, she could navigate herself here too. He probably didn’t know any better. What he’d known of her childhood derived from static-filled phone calls, postcard summaries of her grades, Polaroids of her at bat at softball games. He still saw her as the chubby five-year-old who sucked her thumb, peed her pants when she got scared.

The same age as when he left her.

His smile was a dip that was wide and bright, gap-toothed, with eggplant purple gums. A silver filling peeked out of one side. The glint jarred something loose in her, the memory of him leaning over her bed, kissing her forehead, tucking the comforter tightly under her armpits, the click as he flicked off her unicorn lamp, the glow of the television screen lighting up his face. The memory quelled her quiet rage over the injustice of being dragged halfway around the world just to spend time with him.

His hand continued to linger midair, biding its time, begging for a reunion with hers. She let it be for another moment, long enough for him to understand her delay was a negotiation, that it had meaning, that he would have to earn her trust again.

Finally, she clasped it.

They followed streams of tourists down the walkway. Their shadows elongated, conjoined. When he squeezed her hand, she felt a tremble in his fingers. “I’ve really missed you, Shanti,” he said.

She hadn’t heard her birth name in a long time. Even on the plane ride over, during their one-night stopover in London, their connection to Delhi, he’d addressed her by her nickname, Shan. She’d adopted it at the beginning of the first grade, not long after he left them. She wanted something easier to pronounce, something that other kids wouldn’t make fun of that sounded more in tune with her last name, her mother’s name, Johnson. Shan could be short for Shauna. No one needed to know the truth. But she liked how he said Shanti right now, how it rolled off his tongue. How the th sound became something harder, sharper, something so different than the way her mother used to say it.