From her mailbox, Chandani Singh watched Max load his last few boxes into the back of a U-Haul. He pulled the door shut, wiped his hands in his pants. When he came around to the driver’s side door, he spotted her, waved. She wanted to run over to give him a piece of her mind, but she didn’t want to make things any harder on Shan than they already were. Chandani had always considered herself a good judge of character, her friends had always consulted her to help find their children matches in marriage. She hadn’t gotten to know Max that well over the past year but had deemed him a decent, patient, and kind human being.

She’d been flat-out wrong.

All marriages, she supposed, looked one way on the outside, another way on the inside. Just like her own.

She headed up the walkway, tapped Shan’s name on her cell phone. “He’s pulling away. You can come home now,” she said. “Why don’t you stop in for chai?”

“Sounds good,” Shan said. “I’m running an errand. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Shan had worn a brave face over the last two months, told Chandani she was excited to start a new journey, to look for a job that meshed better with her interests, perhaps do a little traveling. She was even considering moving back to Seattle but would have to hang around until the divorce was final, until she and Max completed the division of their assets, sold the house.

Chandani had once known that same kind of forced, fake bravery she now saw in Shan. She projected it, too, during the long years of Harjeet’s depression, his darkness, his days spent alone in the bedroom. Ever since he returned from his father’s deathbed in Amritsar, her formerly funny, exuberant, gregarious Harjeet had been like a spirit haunting their house, inhabiting an alternate world, parallel to hers, one she could see but not reach. She was forced to feign normalcy when she ran into friends who casually asked what Harjeet had been up to lately. The flu! Second time this winter! Or, Busy with consulting work! Business has taken off!

When he died by suicide, Chandani felt as if the earth had split open. She’d roll over to his side of the bed, and when she didn’t feel his arm wrap around her waist, his hot morning breath tickling her cheek, when she awoke enough to realize that her fingertips were running along the pills of cotton on his pillowcase, not the locks of his hair, she found herself freefalling into the abyss all over again, with nowhere to plant her feet.