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Ramesh was especially handsome in the candlelight. He refilled his wineglass, apparently not noticing that Nayana had only been swirling hers. There was a lightness about him again, here at their favorite restaurant. He hadn’t stopped smiling since they sat down. The test run of the new tunnel had been a success, and she could see the relief in his face. The festive mood as he ordered a bottle of their special-occasion red wine. Even as he spoke about work, the fine-tuning his team would still have to do, he was excited again, and his voice lacked the urgency and anxiety she had noticed in it of late. And he promised the long hours he’d been putting in were coming to an end. Nayana felt a twinge at the thought of sharing her evenings again. She’d grown used to having them to herself. She was just being silly. A defense in case he took the news of her pregnancy badly. Would knowing add to his joy this evening? Or dampen it, giving him something to worry about again? Though a child was what he wanted, what they both wanted, they’d retreated from expressing that desire since the second loss. And then there was Daniel, casting a shadow of uncertainty on the already agonizing guilt she felt, not to mention her shame for being so terribly reckless in the first place. Would the sudden announcement force Ramesh from ignorance to face the truth he’d been denying? Was she wrong to think he had some idea about her recent transgressions? He was on his third glass of wine by the time their pastas arrived. He would get drunk at this rate, which he so rarely did. And she didn’t like to rein in his celebratory spirit. Maybe she’d tell him over dessert, if the meal had sobered him up. And if not, then later tonight or tomorrow morning. She liked when he drank too much. He was jolly, flirtatious.

“My poor brother will still be in the thick of it for a while,” he said. “A minor issue with the cooling pipes. I told Raj it’s only fair, though; after all, he started after me. A younger brother thing, I told him.” She smiled at his joke and his sudden hunger. “It is a shame, though,” he continued, taking a break from his pasta to have more wine. “Jasmeen must miss her dad.”

“As must his wife.”

“Of course. But at least Tahira has Mum.”

For once, Nayana might have preferred thinking of her mother-in-law to the thoughts that were suddenly floating through her mind. Could she justify waiting until she made it through the first trimester before telling him? Until after she’d done a paternity test and at least knew where they stood? All the doubt felt like so much pressure to put on the thing that was struggling just to grow and find a way to life in this world. But she wasn’t sure she could contain another secret from Ramesh physically. It was as if there weren’t room enough in her body for both. As if the lies would not make space for life.

“Ram,” she said, making an effort to smile up at him. She could feel the desire in his locked gaze, and she almost blushed. “What if we took a little holiday? Got away for Christmas and the New Year? Paris?”

He looked away, and she knew he was disappointed to have the mood interrupted with such an impossible request. He hated to say no to her, and she knew this, too. But even worse was that she could feel herself pulling his strings: if he said no to this, it would be harder to resist her plan to visit India when she finally revealed it to him.

“Jaanu,” he signed. “You know we can’t suddenly leave for the holidays. Mum lives for the times when we’re all together. She would make our lives miserable. Especially yours.”

It was true. His mother had never forgiven Nayana for stealing her elder son from the family home, for disrupting all natural order in their family, for not being Punjabi, for working and wanting a career, for acting so English. But mostly for giving her no grandchildren. Before meeting her mother-in-law, Nayana had been given no indication that anyone in Ramesh’s family expected her to be a traditional wife. And while he most certainly did not, he’d never prepared his poor mother for Nayana, either, perhaps knowing this would not be possible. He’d told Nayana he was taking a flat where they could live together alone, outside the family home, because that was what he wanted. In time, she realized it was to spare them both what he must have known would be inevitable. Soon enough, Nayana learned what it truly meant that Indian women married whole families and not just sons: marital conflict could stem from more than two sides. Regardless, when Nayana decided to tell Ramesh about this pregnancy, she would make him promise not to tell his mother. The last time they’d gotten the woman’s hopes up—they kept the first pregnancy, along with the loss that had burdened their early days of marriage, to themselves—she took it harder than anyone. So hard in fact that Nayana had felt like her own ration of mourning had been used up by her mother-in-law’s grief. She wasn’t going through that again.

“You’re right,” she said, smiling at him. She reached for his hand, hoping to recover his good mood. “I just thought you could use a break. You’ve been working so hard.”

The waiter took away their plates. Her favorite pasta had proved too rich for her tonight. Ramesh ordered a tiramisu to share. As he had with the wine, he would enjoy it mostly alone. He had drunk most of the bottle by the time they left, and he found his frisky self again in the taxi. Clearly he had ideas about how they were going to spend the rest of their evening. In the lift alone together, he pushed back Nayana’s hair from her neck and kissed her while she searched for the keys. As she was unlocking the door, he kissed her cheek, then turned her face to him. His breath sweet with wine, his lips and teeth stained purple. She told him to stop, as though she were being coy. He said he would never stop and tried to kiss her again in the entryway. She left him there, eyes closed and mouth waiting, and laughed her way down the hallway. She peeked her head into the office to check the answering machine. There were no messages. It was Saturday. What was the date? She looked at the calendar on her desk. It was the eighteenth, which meant Christmas was a week away. If she had thought of it, she would have stayed in tonight. Her sister always took Birendra into town on the Saturday before Christmas, and they called from the kiosk. Perhaps because Christmas fell on a Saturday this year, she would wait to ring on the day itself. She wanted to believe there was some explanation other than Aditi’s disappointment. Ramesh was filling the kettle in the kitchen. She stepped into the hall and called to him, “Ram, you’ve been wiring the money to Adi, right?”

He came out from the kitchen and clumsily propped himself in the doorway. His drunkenness made her smile.

“Of course, jaanu. I go to the Western Union by my office at the beginning of every month. Has she not received a transfer?”

“No, I’m sure she has. It’s just that she didn’t call.”

She told him to go sit down; she’d bring the tea. What if Aditi wasn’t waiting to call the following Saturday, either? If she was giving Nayana time and space? It would be just like Aditi not to confront Nayana with her neglect. Why was it that people in her life gave her a wide berth when what she needed was their presence, their pressure? It was the same with her girlfriends from university, too, all married, rarely in contact. Nayana pushed people away, of course; she had grown reckless with the affections of others, a symptom of her unhappiness, itself a product of the loneliness she felt in her life in London.

She joined Ramesh with the tea. He reached for her hand and tried to pull her onto his lap once she’d set it down. She smiled but released herself and sat across from him. This was his corner of their house, where he read his newspapers and drank his tea and the occasional whiskey. Where the lamplight dimly touched down on the brown leather chairs. This corner functioned as an anchor for their home, as Ramesh did for her when she let him.

She prepared their tea, adding plenty of milk in hers. He was waiting for her to make eye contact. She could sense it.

“Naya,” he said. “What is it?”

She looked at him over her teacup. It was his adoring gaze, protective of her, the love there, that finally gave her the strength. She set the cup down and put her hand over his.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, just like that, and she thought she felt his hand try to retreat.

He was speechless a moment. She strained to smile. With a shrug, she squeezed his hand, feeling it relax a little. When he spoke, his speech had sobered, and she was sorry for it.

“How far along?” he asked.

She hated that he wasn’t allowed a joyous response, for that moment of shock to quickly blossom as it once had to dreams of a family. Miscarriages took away that privilege, made a couple wary, distrustful of their biology, of everything. For Nayana, they brought into question his paternity, their marriage, her home there, as though the failure of the product of a love brought into question the love itself.

“About two months, and I feel okay—I feel great. Dr. Shah says there’s every reason to hope.”

The word, she knew when he looked at her, tasted bad in his mouth, too.

“Of course, jaanu. Still, you must rest now and let me take care of you.” She nodded, but it was mostly that she was relieved to have told him. “Do we tell the others? Perhaps on Christmas?”

She wouldn’t bring up his mother tonight.

“No, I think not. Let’s wait a while yet,” she said. “Our little secret?”

Ramesh responded, as he rarely did anymore, his head bobbing along the coronal plane, that Indian gesture reserved now for moments when there were no right words, no answers.

“Okay,” he said. “Our little secret.”