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.
