My father listened without interrupting, exactly as I'd asked, though I could hear him breathing hard through the receiver every time I described some new piece of the last twenty-four hours — the stolen dress, the side room, the contract, Priya standing in that sitting room doorway like a verdict none of us had been warned about. When I finally finished, there was a long silence on the line, long enough that I thought the call might have dropped.
"I did not know about Priya," he said finally, quietly. "I want you to believe that, beta. Bimal told me there had been 'a prior understanding' with another family, nothing formalized, nothing binding. If I had known there was an actual engagement broken for this—"
"I believe you, Baba," I said, and found that I meant it. My father's failures over the last day had been failures of desperation and fear, not of cruelty. That didn't erase what they'd cost me, but it made it possible, somehow, to still love him through the wreckage of it. "I need the week. I need you to let me have it without calling every hour, without sending Boro Mashi to talk sense into me, without deciding anything more on my behalf. Can you do that?"
"I can do that," he said, and then, after a pause, in a voice thick with something I rarely heard from him: "I am sorry, Ishita. I am more sorry than I know how to say."
It was strange, hearing my own name spoken like that — gently, apologetically — after a day in which I had mostly been "beta," "the girl," "the bride's sister," passed between so many hands that I had almost stopped feeling like a person with a name of my own. I told him I loved him, which was true, and hung up before either of us could say anything else that might undo the fragile, careful truce we'd just built across three hundred kilometers of telephone wire.
Amit's mother — Mrinalini, I learned her name was, finally, from one of the relatives still lingering in the courtyard — did not try to stop me when I told her I intended to spend the week at my parents' house. If anything, she seemed almost relieved, as though a week without the newest, most complicated variable in her household would give her time to deal with Ghosh, with Bimal's factory, with whatever remained of the fallout from that morning's revelations, without also having to manage a daughter-in-law she hadn't chosen and didn't yet know how to read.
Amit drove me himself. We didn't speak much on the way — there wasn't much left to say that the morning hadn't already said for us — but somewhere past the second bridge, watching the paddy fields blur past the window in the pale midday light, he said, without looking away from the road, "I meant what I said in the hallway. About the week being genuinely yours. I won't call unless you call first."
"Thank you," I said, and left it there, because I still didn't fully trust the softness that kept surfacing between us, didn't trust yet whether it was real or simply the natural result of two frightened people clinging to the one other person who understood exactly what the last day had cost them both.
My parents' house, when I finally walked through the gate, looked exactly as it had two days before — the same chipped paint on the veranda railing, the same tulsi plant by the door, the same faint smell of my mother's evening cooking drifting from the kitchen — and yet it felt entirely different to walk into it now, as a married woman uncertain of her own marriage, rather than as the daughter who had left it in a borrowed peach lehenga.
Kajal found me before anyone else did, pulling me into the small back room we'd shared as girls, shutting the door behind us with the particular urgency of someone who had been waiting all day for a chance to talk without an audience.
"Didi," she said, sitting me down on the edge of the old bed, "tell me everything. Rishi told us some of it, but I want to hear it from you."
So I told her — all of it, the box, the contract, Priya, Ghosh, the phone call to the bank — and watched her face move through the same arc of shock and fury I imagined my own had moved through the night before. When I finished, she was quiet for a long moment, twisting the new sindoor at her hairline absently between her fingers, a habit she hadn't yet unlearned from being a bride only three days old herself.
"Do you hate him?" she asked finally. "Amit?"
I thought about the question longer than I expected to. "I don't know what I feel about him," I said honestly. "I know I don't hate him the way I thought I would this time yesterday. He gave me something today that no one else in either family bothered to give me from the start — a choice. That doesn't erase everything else. But it's not nothing, either."
Kajal studied me for a long moment, and then, with the blunt honesty only a younger sister can get away with, said, "For what it's worth, Sourav told me last night that his own cousin knows Amit slightly, from university. Said he's known as a decent man — quiet, serious, not the sort to run around with a dozen women or waste money he doesn't have. That's not love, didi. But it's not nothing either, is it?"
I didn't have an answer for her. I only leaned my head against her shoulder, the way we used to when we were small and frightened of thunderstorms, and let the two of us sit there in silence, two brand-new brides in an old, familiar room, neither of us entirely certain yet what our own lives had become.