This chapter has already been written within Chapter Thirty-Two — Maya's return speech is the emotional center of Act Three's opening movement.
The chapter you are now holding is the sequel to that return: the morning after everything settled.
She woke at five-thirty.
She lay in the dark and listened to him breathe — the slow, steady rhythm of someone who had, for once, slept deeply — and she thought about Thursday and the three simultaneous crises and twelve pages of annotations and the journalist interview scheduled for this morning, which was going to require her to say, on the record, things she had never said to anyone but Divya.
She thought about being asked: Mrs. Raisinghani, how would you describe your marriage?
She thought about what was true.
She had been wrong about a grea
