Every night, he laid out takeout food on the kitchen table. When Jaya came down, wet hair combed back into a loose ponytail, she looked at the food with disinterest but always thanked him for bringing it. As she ate, she asked him about his day, listening to his answers with a glazed look in her eyes. When Keith asked her what she had done, she shrugged and her eyes grew sad. She shook her head and smiled apologetically, as if she had disappointed him. When Karina was home for dinner, they let her carry much of the conversation, telling them about her new high school classes, cross-country practices and band rehearsals. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he heard Jaya downstairs on the phone, talking to her brother, Dev, in London in a low murmur he couldn’t decipher. He was grateful she was talking to someone, yet felt hurt that it wasn’t him. He was right here with her in the same house every day, wrestling with the same grief.

Keith tried again to get Jaya to see the grief counselor, but his efforts failed, so after a few more visits, he stopped going too. He knew they each had to mourn in their individual ways. Jaya was taking solace in prayer, and she often spent time in Prem’s room. Karina carried around her brother’s pocketknife and slept with it on her nightstand. Keith still couldn’t bring himself to be in Prem’s space, around his stuff. Who was to say therapy was the right way to process grief after all? Maybe they were all on their own parallel paths of mourning and would meet on the other side, intact or even stronger.

The only place Keith truly felt better was at the office. At work, he understood the rules and knew how to succeed. His colleagues treated him as they always had. Keith was surprised by how grateful he felt for the career he’d built. In college, he’d assembled a list of the highest-paid professions: cardiac surgeon, actuary, investment banker. He wasn’t very good at science and only moderately so at math, so that ruled out the first two options. By the time he was a senior, Keith had narrowed his sights on Wall Street. He managed to collect three of those coveted offers, to the annoyance of peers who were struggling to find jobs in an economy still jittery from the 1987 stock market crash.

Keith had the grades, but what those white-shoe investment bankers really loved to hear was how he’d worked his way through college by holding down two part-time jobs during the school year and working with his father’s enterprise in the summers. He left out the detail that his father had lost his college fund savings in the 1982 recession, forcing Keith to scramble for tuition money. He omitted the financial truth of his father’s ventures, simply referring to him as a serial entrepreneur, which was technically true.

At Morgan Stanley, he worked day and night, crashing at the office as often as at home. In what little free time he had, he enjoyed the food and restaurant scene in New York in a way he hadn’t been able to as a student. He realized his goal of becoming a top-ranked M&A analyst in his first two years, giving him his pick of where to spend his optional third year. By the time Keith was headed to London, the hub of M&A activity in Europe and a food capital of the world, he had already surpassed his parents in terms of professional achievement.