“It stayed that way for a little while.” Suhani takes a sip of her Cabernet. “But then it eventually got to a point where it was explosive more often than it wasn’t. So many things could set Roshan off: if I missed his calls, wore a skirt he thought was too short, or was hugging a guy friend too much. Sometimes he’d admit to being paranoid or jealous and then say it was because his mom left his dad. When he tied it to his childhood trauma, that made me feel awful. I told myself that I could love him out of it, fix that pain for him. I thought I was in so deep already and that we had already made it through so much, so I could continue to tough it out for the both of us. A twisted part of me took it as some sort of badge of honor.”

“Were you ever able to call him out about the way he was behaving?” Zack asks.

“Multiple times.” Suhani’s mind jumps back to the times she confronted Roshan in his dark, cramped apartment. “He’d tell me that no relationship was perfect, that we had so much between us that was worth fighting for, and then he’d always turn it back around to how I never wanted a relationship like my parents’ where one person had to give up their career, so this is a part of what comes with a more ‘equal’ one.”

“He used your parents’ marriage to justify what he did?” Zack’s face is full of disbelief. “That is so manipulative. What an asshole.”

“I know,” Suhani agrees. “And I believed him. His reasoning worked on me.”

“I bet it did. He sounds like he was really smart and knew exactly how to get to you.”

“He did,” Suhani agrees. “I fell for his explanations and promises to be better every single time. I somehow convinced myself that this was a challenge we had to make it through. Isn’t that so fucked up?”

That was the most pathetic part to her: she continued to love him. She treated his behavior as though it was some type of illness that just needed the right treatment. On the outside, she wore the mask of a strong, confident woman, the kind who was in a loving relationship and on the way to rising in her career.

“I didn’t realize until our family therapy session how big a role timing played in everything. Roshan and I met right when I started feeling a little jaded with medicine, with the power structure and discrimination. I was always so scared that I didn’t belong in that world. And then he came in the picture. Suddenly, people at UCLA revered us,” Suhani says. “When the aunties back home heard, I knew that this was the type of guy I was supposed to end up with.”