Chapter Nine
The nausea came on a Thursday.
Mihika was at the restaurant since eight — she came in early on Thursdays for the supplier meetings, the weekly accounting of what the kitchen needed and what had been wasted and what the next week demanded.
She liked Thursday mornings for this, liked the purposefulness of them, the clean arithmetic of a well-run kitchen.
She was reviewing the week's invoices when the smell hit her.
It was the chicken stock.
The kitchen had been making stock since seven — a routine operation, deeply familiar, the smell of it something she had walked into hundreds of times without a second thought.
She walked in on this particular Thursday morning and the smell of it rose and hit the back of her throat and she had to put her hand on the counter and breathe very carefully through her mouth.
She straightened. She looked at the invoices. She continued.
An hour later, the nausea returned. Not the smell this time — simply a wave of it, rising from somewhere below her ribs with the absolute, undiscussable authority of her body making a demand she had not been consulted about.
She set down her pen. She pressed her hand flat against the counter. She breathed.
The wave passed.
She sat very still for a moment.
She thought: tiredness. She had been working long hours. The award nomination had brought an additional wave of attention to Sattva that was welcome and exhausting in equal measure. She had not been sleeping quite enough.
She thought: coffee. She had been drinking less of it recently — she'd noticed that her second cup had started tasting wrong, slightly metallic, and she'd put it down to the new beans. She would switch the supplier.
She thought, with the careful controlled quality of someone not yet ready to think the full thought: it has been six weeks since the last time.
She returned to the invoices.
At two o'clock, when the lunch service had concluded and the restaurant had gone to its quiet interlude between meals, she told Deepak she was stepping out for an errand.
She did not go to the pharmacy near Sattva, where people knew her face.
She took an auto to Lajpat Nagar and found a pharmacy there, in a busy market lane where she was one face among hundreds, and she stood in front of the relevant shelf for perhaps thirty seconds — the particular stillness of a woman making a decision she has already made — and then she picked up three.
She took them in the bathroom of Sattva.
The staff bathroom, the one off the back corridor near the dry store, which she had used many times without giving it a second thought. She locked the door and sat on the edge of the crate she kept for reaching the high shelf and she read the instructions, though she did not need to.
The first result took three minutes.
Positive.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she did the second.
Positive.
The third.
Positive.
She set them down on the edge of the crate and she looked at them, three white sticks in a row, all reading the same thing, and she did not move for a while.
Then she put her hand over her stomach.
It was still entirely flat. There was nothing to feel, no physical evidence, nothing that could be read by touch. But she put her hand there anyway, and she sat in the staff bathroom of her restaurant on a Thursday afternoon, and she felt it.
Love.
It arrived before she'd had time to prepare for it, before she'd had time to think about what this was or what it meant or what she was going to do — it arrived complete and total and with the overwhelming conviction of something that needed no argument.
She loved this child. She loved it already, before she knew its face or its name or anything about it except that it was there, it was real, it was hers.
It was his.
The love was immediately followed by fear.
Not a vague or general fear — a specific, precise fear, the kind that came from knowing a situation fully and clearly.
She knew the Goenka household. She had spent twelve months learning it in the particular detail of someone who lived inside it.
She knew Sonakshi's opinion of her, stated in the careful, deniable language of polished cruelty: a replacement for a woman who ran.
Eventually, he'll see it. She knew what Dhawan blood meant in that house — she had heard it in half-conversations, in the pauses before compliments that became qualified, in the particular way Nandini and Sonakshi looked at each other when Mihika's family was mentioned.
She knew what a child meant, in that world.
Not hers. A Goenka heir. The family's continuation. A child that would belong to the dynasty first and to its mother — its Dhawan mother, its replacement-bride mother — second. Or not at all.
She had heard Sonakshi say, at a dinner early in the marriage when she had not yet calibrated how carefully Mihika listened: "The Goenka line has never been compromised. Whatever else, that holds." And Nandini nodding. And Ajit saying nothing, which was not the same as disagreeing.
She sat in the bathroom with her hand on her stomach and she felt love and fear in equal measure, and they were both enormous, and they were both true, and she did not know what to do.
She did not call Shivansh.
She sat in the staff bathroom for a while longer and breathed, and then she washed her hands and looked at her face in the mirror — still her face, the same face — and she unlocked the door and went back to the restaurant.
She finished the afternoon.
She went home.
She put the tests in the lining of her bag, wrapped in a tissue, and she sat at dinner and ate and said the required things, and across the table Shivansh looked at her once with the attentive precision he sometimes turned on her, and she met his eyes and smiled, and he looked back at his food, and she breathed.
She had not decided anything yet.
But she knew that she needed to.