Gertrude sucked in her breath, read the words aloud to fully take them in. Thirty years ago, Vijay would have been so young, not even forty. He would have hardly had a chance to live, to father this woman writing to her now. What a cruel God, to snuff out the lives of so many so young—her parents, her brother Gerald, Vijay—while she sat here with over eight decades under her belt.

I was wondering if you had any contact with him during the last years of his life. If you were still in touch with him while he was living in Delhi. If you knew why he moved there.

Delhi. So Vijay made it to the subcontinent, after all.

She slid her legs to the side of her bed to begin a slow motion dismount. Her socked feet stretched toward the vinyl floors until they made contact. She shuffled to her rocking chair by the window, the only piece of furniture she’d been allowed to bring with her here, to this place, with its thousands of “safety” regulations. She bent her body in half, walked her bottom backward until it connected to the seat cushion. The runners crackled under her weight, as if they might snap, squeaked as she rocked back.

She knew Vijay as well as if he’d sprung from her own womb. In the hours he spent in her apartment working on his homework, the afternoons he napped on her couch, in the meals he consumed right across from her, in their walks to and from his school, she came to know what he was thinking before he said it. In four years, she taught him enough German they could converse in her mother tongue.

It was in this language that he finally opened up to her about his mother, how she moved through her life as if the past never existed, refused to talk about the deaths of his Granny Nora from cancer, and Granddad John, just two years later, from a stroke, refused to answer questions about his first set of grandparents, who died years earlier in Delhi. He begged Gertrude to tell him if she knew anything about his father, who he was, his name, where he lived, why he never made contact with them.

At the time, she had only recently come into this information herself. Despite her promise to Deepa, when Vijay crumpled at her feet, cried into her trousers, she had to tell him something.

Gertrude stopped the movement of her rocking chair, closed her eyes. She’d hoped, when Vijay was older, he might search for her. She envisioned a teary-eyed reunion, one where she finally got to apologize to him, tell him how much she loved and missed him. No call or letter ever came.

After a few years, she did what she could to push the Khannas out of her mind.