The day Keith returned to the office, he sat at his desk, surrounded by the Lucite mementos the bank produced to commemorate each completed deal. He had a bookshelf full of them, dozens and dozens of shapes that signified the work he’d done, valuable work. A career to be proud of. Keith flipped through the presentations prepared for his review and wrote notes in the margins, making useful suggestions about new ways of looking at the numbers. He even caught a couple of errors. He went out to lunch with Matt and Greg, guys he’d known since they were all new associates together after business school. They were awkward around Keith until he told them the best thing they could do was not treat him any differently than before. They both seemed visibly relieved and, from there, they quickly descended into familiar talk of clients who were assholes, who was hot in the new crop of summer associates, and which assistant Murphy was banging. By the end of the day, Keith felt better than he had in weeks. He continued working into the early evening, reviewing documents that could have waited until the next day. As he pulled into the driveway that night, Keith felt more hopeful than he’d been since Prem’s death. He was back to work, where he felt competent again. He could return to normal. That’s what he wanted.

And that’s what he began to strive for, with what was left of his family. He still had a beautiful, intelligent wife in Jaya. He still had a smart and healthy daughter. They could still be a family. They still were a family. He had more than the department head, Bill Jeffs, and his high-powered wife in another executive suite, who collected expensive motorcycles instead of having kids. He had more than Chris Murphy, with his string of girlfriends but no one he deemed worthy of settling down with. Keith had a wife, a daughter, a home and a career. He had a family and a life worth preserving, and he was going to fight for them.

After several visits to the grief counselor, Karina said she didn’t want to go back anymore. She was spending a lot of time at her friend Isabelle’s house, which he understood to be a good thing. The counselor said that Karina reconnecting with her support network was important to her healing process. He didn’t see much point in forcing her to continue seeing the counselor when she seemed to be doing fine on her own. Karina had always been tough. When she’d slammed her finger in the car door at the age of six, she wailed loudly, but by the time he’d run back outside with an ice pack, her tears had dried and she was ready to go to gymnastics class. Some kids were just built strong like that; they could withstand more than others.

* * *

His mother-in-law had been with them for eight weeks when she took Keith aside in the kitchen one morning and told him it was time for her to return to India.