“And you had another child—have you forgotten him?” her mother screamed back.

A pause, followed by some words Karina couldn’t make out, and her father’s booming voice again: “You have to find a way to move forward.”

“What does that mean, move forward? Go back to work? I’m home now, all the time. Nothing can go wrong. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Why would you think that?” her father said. “Jaya, you have to stop blaming yourself.”

“That’s what you think, isn’t it? It was my fault!”

Karina shut herself into the small bathroom under the staircase, the room where they were supposed to shelter in case of a natural disaster, the only room in the house with no windows. She switched on the fan and ran the faucet to shield herself from the sounds upstairs, then knelt to the floor and searched through the vanity cabinet, looking for something to take away her pain. She found a safety pin and used it to draw a thin line of blood on her inner thigh, relieved to feel the familiar sense of release. Karina sat on the cold tile floor, leaning against the wall as warm tears dripped down her face and the satisfying taste of salt reached her lips. This feeling, a reminder she was still alive.

Back in that basement office, the therapist had asked Karina about happy memories of her family, and she could recall many: riding bicycles together in Napa, where they’d traveled for a wedding; enduring a long layover at O’Hare airport with a marathon of Crazy Eights; padding around the house in fuzzy slippers on Sunday mornings as Dad kissed Mom on the back of the head and handed her a cup of tea. These fleeting images of contentment came to Karina in the weeks after Prem’s death, when it seemed as if happiness had been torn away from them as a family, as if it was something they had always possessed, their lives an uninterrupted tapestry of joy.

But that was not true, Karina began to see now that more time had passed. When her parents began fighting more, it wasn’t unfamiliar, just more exposed. Those little jabs had been there before. Karina remembered mornings in the kitchen when Mom and Dad avoided each other, clearly having fought the night before. She and Prem would try not to disturb the water, to keep their parents happy at those moments. At school, they heard kids of divorce talk about shuttling between two houses, the tense communication between their parents over swapping weekends. She and Prem agreed they had to do everything they could to avoid that fate, to prevent the dissolution of the family that was the only place the two of them belonged.

There was something Karina hadn’t told anyone, ever: in those moments that felt like hours, after she pulled Prem from the water and tried to breathe life back into him, she offered to make a silent deal with God. He could have her parents, if only Prem could live. She and her brother could survive their parents’ divorce, together. But without him, she couldn’t endure anything. Having not believed in prayer or faith or miracles before that moment, she wasn’t sure why she thought her wish would come true, the deal honored. Perhaps because it was her first show of faith, that she was willing to sacrifice something so important.