She washed her face.

The ceremony was three hours.

She remembered it in segments — the fire, the seven circles, the specific, formal weight of her hand in a stranger’s hand, the sound of the priest’s Sanskrit arriving at her from a distance — and the whole of it passed through her with the flat, underwater quality of an experience she was not inside.

Suresh.

His name was Suresh.

She had known his name for six weeks — had met him twice for chaperoned lunches at her parents’ house, had exchanged forty-three WhatsApp messages with the specific, careful quality of two people building a bridge across a gap neither of them had measured — and he had been kind.

That was the honest assessment.

Kind. Steady. The brown-skinned, close-cropped, slightly-built man who had looked at her across the lunch table with the expression of someone who was trying very hard and knew it and was not embarrassed to know it.

She had not been unkind to him.

But she had been somewhere else.

The seven circles done. The ceremony done. The photographs. The dinner. The relatives arriving in waves — the aunties and uncles and cousins and family friends and the specific, comprehensive, warm-handed invasion of people who had opinions about her appearance and expressed them directly.

"Sister-in-law! How are you? Are you happy? You look so happy."

She looked happy.

She looked the way a woman looks when she has been doing the thing expected of her for six hours and is very, very good at doing the things expected of her.

"Red suits you."

"Look at this blouse."

"Such a good family."

The red dress.

The blouse tight across her chest — the full, heavy weight of her pressing against the silk from the inside, the fabric straining in the specific way that good fabric strains when the body wearing it was not the body it had been measured for, because the body had changed in the last eighteen months in ways the tailor had not accounted for.

The island had done something to her body.

She did not think about what had done it.

She thought about the window.

She stood at the window of the reception hall during the photographing session and looked at the courtyard and thought about the cove and the sound of the water and the purple eyes and the laugh.

Then she thought about the fact that he had not called.

Had not messaged.

Had not appeared.

Had simply been the specific, devastating kind of person who exists fully in one window of time and not at all outside it, and she had known, had always known, had been told by every part of herself that knew things clearly, that this was what he was — and she had gone to the island anyway and made the decisions she had made anyway.

And now she was standing at a window in a red wedding dress with bangles up both arms thinking about it.

She turned away from the window.

’Stop.’

The bridal room.

The flowers had been arranged by women who took this seriously — jasmine and roses, the petals scattered across the white sheets of the decorated bed, the mosquito net pulled back at the head, the small brass lamp burning on the nightstand, the glass of milk on the tray that tradition demanded and which sat on the dresser with the patient inevitability of a scheduled event.

She sat on the bed.

Her hands in her lap.

The bangles pressing against each other with the small, musical sound of metal on metal.

The door opened.

Suresh.

He was still in his sherwani — the cream and gold of it, slightly wrinkled from the ceremony, his collar loosened two buttons — and he closed the door behind him and stood for a moment in the specific, careful posture of a man who is managing something.

The sound of everyone outside, laughing.

Someone’s uncle saying something.

Laughter.

The door insulating it.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

"Breathe," he said.

She blinked.

"You’re not breathing," he said. Gently. The specific gentleness of a kind man being careful with someone who has not asked to be handled carefully but clearly needs it. "Take a breath."

She breathed.

"You know," he said, moving toward her, taking the milk glass from the tray, turning it in his hands, "how long I waited for this. For a woman like—"

"Whoa."

A third voice.

Both of them went still.

"Flowers."

The voice came from the corner.

The corner of the room that had contained, three seconds ago, nothing except a wedding decoration and a brass lamp. The corner that now contained a man.

Naked.

Standing in the decorated bridal room of a traditional Indian wedding night with the casual, entirely unself-conscious posture of someone who had walked into a room they owned and was surveying it with mild interest.

Purple eyes.

Scanning the flower petals. The dressed bed. The brass lamp. The mosquito net.

"Bed decorated with flowers," he said. "What do they call this."

"WHAT—"

Suresh.

The milk glass in his hand.

His eyes going from the corner to the man in it — the full, comprehensive, impossible visual of a naked man in his bridal suite — and his face producing the specific, frozen expression of a person whose reality has just added a variable it does not have a category for.

"Who are you. How did you—the door was—"

He moved.

The instinctive, physical, forward-moving response of a man who has been trained by twenty-eight years of living to believe that moving toward threats is the correct response to threats — and Raven’s finger snapped.

The sound of stone.

A crack.

Suresh’s wrists pulled together.

His ankles.

The specific, magical compression of the stone floor rising around his feet in smooth, rapid manacles, the wrists binding together in front of him — one motion, clean, efficient, the work of someone who had done this enough times to have made it fast — and he went forward, the momentum of his own charge carrying him to his knees, the milk glass flying from his hand.

The milk.

Arcing.

Raven’s hand reaching out.

Catching the glass.

Without looking.

He looked at it for a moment. The glass in his hand. The milk inside it, undisturbed.

Then he looked at Preet.

She was standing.

She had stood when she heard the third voice and she was still standing, the bangles pressed together on her wrists, the red silk pulled tight across her chest, the blouse straining, the full weight of her in the dress that had been constructed for a woman who was going to be seen by one specific person tonight and was now being seen by the wrong one.

"Raven."

Her voice.

His name in her voice — the first time she had said it to his face in over two weeks — arriving with the specific texture of a word that had been said privately many times in the dark and was now being said out loud for the first time.

He looked at her.

The warm, direct look.

Then he looked at her ’body.’

The full, unhurried look of a man taking inventory of something he had been away from and is assessing the current state of.

"A gift," he said.

She blinked.

"Are you a gift." His voice warm. Considering. "Because I want to unwrap you." His eyes on the red silk, on the blouse, on the full, straining curve of her. "And bang you very hard like a bull seeing that vibrant red dress."