Sonali Kumari was, by nature, not a woman who waited well.

She had spent the better part of two days now doing exactly that — waiting, with a patience that cost her considerably more than it appeared to on the surface, for some word to come from Mumbai confirming what everyone in the house already suspected but nobody had yet said aloud: that Amogh's family, too, wanted to move this forward. She had decided, somewhere in the private, old-fashioned calculus she'd inherited from her own mother, that it wasn't her place to call first. A girl's family didn't chase. A girl's family waited, with whatever dignity it could manage, for the boy's side to come forward with the next step.