Keith had never witnessed his own father cry, not once. He had grown up in a distant suburb of Philadelphia, in a Scandinavian Lutheran family that seesawed between newly prosperous and the verge of bankruptcy. His father was a serial entrepreneur, though not often a successful one. He always proclaimed to be on to the next big thing and started a series of businesses selling products, like car shammies and hand-crank flashlights, through late-night TV and mailbox flyers.

When a business did well (hand-crank flashlights took off during the cold war, as neighbors outfitted their basements for impending nuclear disaster), Keith’s father took the family to fancy steak houses for dinner. He bought his dream car, a red convertible Thunderbird, and spent freely until another business (portable jump-starters to store in car trunks) went bust, as most of them did. Threatening red-lettered envelopes arrived in the mail and persistent phone calls from debt collectors rang in on call waiting while Keith talked with his buddies or tried to convince a girl to go out with him. By the time Keith left for college, the boxes of costly but useless inventory still lined one side of the garage, up to the ceiling.

Even at the lowest times, Keith’s father never cried. Not when his businesses failed, not when the bank repossessed the Thunderbird (which by then had been sitting in the garage for six months, awaiting unaffordable repairs), not even when his own father died.

Keith had no sense of how to handle the grief he suffered in the wake of Prem’s death. In the hospital, the social worker had given him the name of a grief counselor. “I think we should make an appointment,” he said, sitting on the edge of their bed, next to Jaya, one evening.

She shook her head, a small but firm movement. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to talk to strangers. I don’t want to talk to anybody, Keith. I just can’t . . .” She bit down on her lip.

“Honey, the social worker said it’s a good idea for the whole family to go. You know, to help Karina too,” he said to appeal to her abiding maternal impulse.

“How is a complete stranger going to help our daughter? Help anything? Please, Keith, just let me be.” She slid her body down under the bedcovers, reaching for the pillow behind her head. It was 7:40 p.m. “Can I just get some rest?” She began to cry, then turned away when he tried to comfort her.

Keith tried to broach the subject again the next day, and even called Jaya’s mother to help convince her, but apparently, opening one’s heart and soul to a professional was not part of the Indian culture, so he didn’t garner much support. Jaya was strong, her mother reminded him. He remembered back to 9/11, when she’d been in her most vulnerable and emotional state, just a few days from delivering Prem. She had implored him to see what a dangerous place the world was, but Keith had seen it the opposite way: fate had given him a renewed lease on life. Losing friends in the World Trade Center that day made him want to go out into the world and not lose a single minute, not waste a bit of it. To go hang-gliding over the ocean, to run that marathon, to travel to beautiful cities like Istanbul and Beirut, even if they were dangerous. Yes, the world was unpredictable and wild, and also full of possibility and beauty he hadn’t even begun to see. Outside of the year he’d spent in London, the city in which their divergent and unlikely orbits collided, he had seen so little of the world. He couldn’t imagine doing what Jaya had in those dark September days, shrinking back into herself and making her world smaller, as if she could somehow keep them safe that way.