She’d remembered how the weight of his sorrow draped over her then. She’d assumed he was invincible, didn’t quite know how to comfort a man she had come into contact with only once a year since kindergarten.

This longing to know him, to understand him, had only intensified over the years. She often wondered, if he had lived, how his life would have shaped hers. When she was teased in school for her brown skin, would having her brown father there to console her have made her feel less alone than a white mother who simply told her to ignore it? Would Shan have placed so much importance on getting married and staying married? Would she have turned down the job offer at Walker & Associates and pursued more meaningful work? Her relationship with her father since his death consisted of a decades-long, one-way conversation from which she had no answers.

She sighed, picked up the maps, the guidebooks, the book of poetry, the slip of paper, and laid them back inside her father’s box. She squeezed the teddy bear once more, laid it inside, and as she did she pictured a world that would never exist, one where both her father and his grandson would know each other. The loss of her son now embodied the loss of a chance at redemption for her own fractured father—daughter story.

It came to her then, the name that she’d held so closely to her heart all of these years, the only name that could help her make sense out of her grief, that could ground her in both the past and her future, that could bring back a piece of her father.

Vijay, she said, closing her eyes.

My son’s name will be Vijay.

Part Three

CHAPTER TWELVE

London

September 9, 1954

The young woman forged ahead, a quick, purposeful march along Brower Street toward Wallace Hall. She had dark skin, shoulder-length wavy black hair, wore a wide-collared plaid dress, an ivory cardigan, hugged a stack of books in the crook of her left arm. Her long, slender legs took two steps at a time. She paused halfway up, visored her hand from the light cast by silver, low-lying clouds, surveyed the concrete stairs filled with dozens of students. Their knobby knees lined up like rows of apples, textbooks splayed open on their laps.

Gertrude caught a glimpse of the woman’s profile, her long, elegant nose, her short chin, lips pointed, pursed. The woman shifted her weight, scanned again. Dissatisfied with her view, she climbed higher. She tried and failed to button her cardigan with one hand, settled for pulling the wings of her sweater tighter around her chest. A book slid off her forearm. She caught it before it fell.