At Agra Fort, a flag waved from one of the towers. The Indian flag, she imagined. The flag of her father’s new country, the country where he felt he belonged, instead of the one where she, his only child, lived.

She rested her chin on her forearms, squinted her eyes until the color of the Fort blurred into a burnt sienna sunset.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Atlanta

June 8, 2016

The radiology tech leaned closer to the screen. Her mouth contorted. Her lower lip swallowed her chin dimple. It continued its downward curl and suddenly, as if tasting something bitter, twisted to one side. She pushed the probe deeper into Shan’s gel-slicked belly.

“I’ve been doing better lately,” Shan said. Her mouth felt dry. She swallowed, cleared her throat. “I’m feeling great, for the most part.”

The clock on the wall was the kind she hadn’t seen in ages, a full moon, two big arrow-hands, a third hand ticking with each incremental step. She couldn’t remember the last time she used anything other than a smart phone to tell time. “I guess that’s what happens once you end the first trimester,” she added, not knowing why she felt the need to keep talking.

Max laid his hand over hers. “She’s even able to eat chocolate again.”

“Uh huh,” the tech said. Her blue eyes remained fixed on the image. Her black nails tapped a few keys on the keyboard, paused.

Shan flexed and curled her toes, fingered the hemline of her pilled cotton shirt, peered at her glistening belly. The nausea, the burning in her esophagus, the clenching and releasing of her stomach, had lasted the first few weeks. At her law firm, Walker & Associates, she’d tear down the stairwell to the bathroom on the third floor so her colleagues wouldn’t hear her hacking into the toilet. She called out sick for a few days here and there (stomach virus, migraine), her excuses running thinner with each passing week. But she wanted to wait to tell her colleagues until her second trimester, once she knew the chance of miscarriage was small, and most importantly, after she was offered partnership at her law firm.

Just two weeks earlier, week ten of her pregnancy, on her seventh work anniversary, she patiently awaited the champagne toast offered to all new partners (she would only pretend to take a sip), the round of congratulations, the white, fluffy cake with the custard filling from the corner bakery, Shan’s name scrawled across in blue icing script. It never came. Instead, Robert, the managing partner, slipped into her office at the end of the day and told her they couldn’t make her a partner. The firm was still recovering from the last economic downturn. She needed to wait another year, possibly two, when the numbers were more in her favor.