Amit kept his word for four days. He did not call. He did not send messages through Rishi or Boro Mashi the way I half-expected him to, testing the boundary of "a week that was genuinely mine" the way I imagined most men in his position might have. It was on the fifth evening, just as I was helping my mother fold laundry on the back veranda, that I looked up to find him standing hesitantly at our gate, dressed simply, no driver waiting behind him this time, holding what looked distinctly like a small paper bag of sweets from the shop near the station.
"I know I said I wouldn't call," he said quickly, before I could say anything, "and I haven't. I didn't call. I came instead, which I realize might be worse, and if you want me to leave right now, I will, I just — I needed to tell you something in person, not over a phone line."
My mother, standing beside me with a half-folded saree still in her hands, looked between the two of us with the particular alertness of a woman deciding whether to intervene, and then, wisely, decided against it, murmuring something about checking on the rice and disappearing back into the house with a speed that would have been comical under any other circumstances.
"You have five minutes," I said, though some part of me was, against my own better judgment, glad to see him.
He set the sweets down on the low wall by the gate, as if he needed his hands free for whatever he was about to say. "Ranjan Sen — Priya's father — came to see my father yesterday," he said. "Not about the wedding directly. About business. He's threatening to pull out of a joint supply contract he'd promised months ago, one my father was counting on to help stabilize things now that the bank has unfrozen the accounts. He's making it very clear, without saying it outright, that the contract stays intact only if certain... conditions are met."
"What conditions?"
Amit's jaw tightened. "That the marriage be quietly dissolved. That it be announced, publicly, that it was a mistake — a rushed arrangement corrected before any real harm was done. He wants the story rewritten so that Priya and I are, in his words, 'free to correct an unfortunate error,' and he's willing to use my father's business to make that happen."
I felt something cold settle in my stomach, and beneath the cold, a slow-building anger that had nothing to do with Amit at all. "So even after everything — Ghosh's confession, the bank, the whole hallway hearing the truth of it — Ranjan is still trying to force this exact outcome. He's just found a new lever to pull."
"Yes," Amit said quietly. "And I want you to know, before you decide anything this week, that my father is genuinely considering it. Not because he wants to force you out — he's ashamed enough of what already happened, I think that door is closed for him now — but because the factory, the jobs, everyone who depends on it, all of that is real, and Ranjan knows exactly how much leverage that gives him."
I stood there for a long moment, watching the evening light fade over the narrow lane behind him, and felt the last of my uncertainty about this whole situation begin, quietly, to burn away into something clearer and much harder.
"He's not doing this because he cares about business at all, is he," I said slowly. "This isn't about a supply contract. This is Ranjan punishing your family for ending Priya's engagement, using every tool he has left, one after another, until something finally forces you apart."
"I think so, yes," Amit admitted.
"Then here is what I want you to understand," I said, and something in my own voice surprised me — steady, deliberate, entirely unlike the shaking, wounded voice that had spoken from that hallway five days ago. "I am not going to let a man I've never met decide the shape of my marriage a second time, whether he's doing it through a lawyer's loophole or a business contract. If your father caves to this, that will be his decision, and I won't hold you responsible for it. But I am not leaving this marriage because Ranjan Sen wants a tidy story for his daughter's sake. If I leave, it will be because I chose to, on my own terms, for my own reasons — not because someone frightened your family into it a second time."
Something shifted in Amit's face as I spoke — surprise, and underneath it, unmistakably, something that looked very much like relief. "I came here half-expecting you to tell me this whole marriage should end quietly, before it costs either family anything else," he admitted. "I didn't expect you to be angrier about someone else deciding it for you than about the marriage itself."
"That," I said, "is exactly the problem with everyone in both our families. You keep expecting me to be relieved by an exit. What none of you have asked, not once since that box arrived at my door, is what I actually want."
He looked at me for a long moment in the fading light, and then, quietly, "Then I'm asking now. What do you want, Ishita?"
I didn't have a full answer for him yet — not one I trusted enough to say out loud. But for the first time since the wedding, standing there at my own family's gate with the smell of my mother's cooking drifting from the kitchen behind me, I realized that the question itself, finally asked directly, mattered more to me than any answer I could have given in that moment.
"I want the week I asked for," I said finally. "And I want you to make sure your father doesn't hand Ranjan a victory before I've had the chance to finish deciding anything at all."