Avery leaned on her knees and clasped her hands in front of her, like a coach watching a particularly grueling game she can do nothing to change. Her jaw twitched as she stared ahead.
“It’s all my fault,” she said.
“Do you think you and Chiti will split up?” Bonnie asked.
“I don’t know. She’d have every right. Every right,” she repeated quietly.
“I love Chiti…” said Bonnie.
Avery felt a sinking sensation in her chest. She was breaking her sisters’ hearts too. She had spent so long trying to be an example for them, trying to prove that marriage—life!—could be different, better, than the model they were offered by their parents. She had wanted to give them hope, but she had been another disappointment instead. Bonnie placed a hand on her back. It felt soft and heavy, like the paw of some friendly bear.
“But you have to be who you are,” Bonnie said.
Avery let herself lean into Bonnie.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
She dropped her head into her hands and let out a shuddering sigh.
“It’s okay for you to be angry with me,” she said between her fingers. “I understand you’re disappointed.”
Lucky got off the bench and knelt in front of Avery. She took Avery’s hands away from her face and held them. Her bony grip was surprisingly strong.
“Look,” said Lucky. “We’re your sisters. Whatever you do, we’re ultimately on your side. You could kill someone, and I’d help you sneak the body back to us and fill a bathtub with hydrochloric acid so we could dispose of it discreetly.”
Avery tried to suppress a smile.
“That’s weirdly specific,” she said.
“I wouldn’t like it and I don’t like this,” said Lucky. “But I’d do it.”
Bonnie scooched over so she was nearer both of them.
“Me too,” Bonnie said. “Fill that tub.”
—
Avery arrived back in London just as the sun was rising. She took a taxi from Heathrow through the slowly awakening streets, past the bread delivery vans idling by the restaurants and early-rising shop owners flinging up the latticed metal gates to reveal their window displays. A peach sun smeared across the sky, scattering violet and blue clouds. She arrived at their address in Hampstead and looked up at the beautiful, crumbling brick house they had spent the last eight years making a home together. Letting herself in quietly, she headed straight upstairs. Chiti was asleep in their bed, her dark hair coiled in its bedtime bun on the cream pillowcase. She noticed with a pang that Chiti was wearing a pair of Avery’s blue cotton pajamas, something they always used to do when the other traveled and they missed the other. Chiti stirred at the sound of Avery entering.
“Is it you?” she murmured.
Avery nodded, her eyes already filling with tears. Chiti had been the home she wanted to return to for so many years.
“It’s early,” said Avery.
She reached for her suitcase and extended and retracted the handle nervously, then stopped and went to sit on the bed.
“I have to talk to you about something,” she said softly.
She knew if she waited even one minute there was a chance she would talk herself out of it, prolonging the inevitable even further. Chiti sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees under the covers. Her gaze, which before had been sleep softened and warm, turned cold.
“I’ve been waiting,” she said.
“Chiti,” she said quietly. “There’s more I haven’t told you. And I’m sorry I didn’t before I went to New York, but I needed to know it was true.”
She saw Chiti brace herself. Avery took a deep breath.
“I don’t want to have a baby.”
It was as though the last invisible thread holding Chiti upright had been snipped. She crumpled back against the headboard and dropped her head into her hands. Immediately, Avery wanted to take it back, tell her she’d been wrong, pull Chiti’s hands from her face, smooth her brow, kiss her temples, get into bed beside her and stay there all day with this woman she loved, who had loved her so well and for so long. Chiti’s voice, when she did speak, was small with defeat, empty of recrimination.
“Then why did you say you did?” she whispered.
“I wanted to want one,” said Avery. “I’d hoped that was enough.”
Chiti shook her head and clasped her hands together in front of her.
“I should have listened to my mother,” she said.
Avery felt a twinge quicken her pulse. Ganishka had never warmed to her, it was true, but her coldness seemed less to do with Avery as a person than the fact she was an American. It wasn’t fair to act as though Ganishka had been right all along now; she had been a good partner to Chiti for seven of eight years—that should still count for something.
“She never liked me,” Avery said.
Chiti shook her head.
“Oh, it’s not that. Or not only that,” she said. “She said you were not cut out for motherhood.”
Avery frowned. Fucking Ganishka, she thought. She resented her for talking about Avery as if she knew her. She resented her even more for being right. What Ganishka didn’t understand was that Avery had already been a mother. She’d raised her sisters; for her, that was enough.
