Karthik Shah arrived eleven minutes late, which Ananya's mother forgave instantly and completely, because punctuality was apparently not among the "good values" under discussion.

He was, Ananya thought, watching him fold himself into the chair across from her with the easy confidence of a man who had never once had to wonder whether a room wanted him in it, exactly the kind of person the last three years of her life had been quietly engineered to produce a match for. Pleasant enough face. Good job. A mother who beamed at Kavitha like they were already sharing a grandchild. Absolutely nothing wrong with him, in the specific way that a beige wall has absolutely nothing wrong with it.

"So," he said, unfolding his napkin with more ceremony than the moment required, "your mother says you're good with numbers."

"I'm an engineering student," Ananya said. "Numbers are sort of a baseline requirement."

"Cute," he said, in a tone that suggested he had not, in fact, found it cute, so much as manageable — a category she suspected he applied to most things about women, filed somewhere between acceptable and will require light supervision.

Over the next forty minutes, she learned that Karthik had done his MBA at a "very good college, not the very best, but very good" — a distinction he drew four separate times, with four slightly different inflections, as though repetition might eventually convince the table it mattered. She learned that his family's textile business had "diversified nicely" in the last decade. She learned that his car — a sedan he described with the reverence usually reserved for firstborn children — had a sunroof, though he clarified, unprompted, that he "didn't use it much because of the dust."

He did not ask her a single question about herself that wasn't, in some way, a question about her suitability. Not what she wanted to do after graduation — only whether she planned to "continue working" after marriage, delivered with the specific gentle condescension of a man offering permission for something he assumed she'd be relieved to be talked out of. Not what she loved — only whether she was "the homely type," a phrase that made something in Ananya's chest go very still and very cold, because she recognized, with sudden clarity, that this entire lunch was not actually about getting to know her. It was about confirming she would take up an acceptable amount of space in someone else's life.

At one point, Karthik's mother asked Ananya to fetch water from the kitchen, a request phrased as a suggestion but delivered with the specific unmistakable weight of a test — how gracefully would the prospective daughter-in-law perform a small domestic errand in front of an audience. Ananya fetched the water, smiling the entire time, and thought, pouring it into glasses that didn't need pouring, that she had spent an entire childhood being evaluated this way without ever once being told the criteria, and had gotten so good at passing invisible tests that she'd forgotten, until this exact moment, how exhausting the performance actually was.

"You pour very nicely," Rekha observed, when Ananya returned to the table, in the tone of someone awarding a small but meaningful point.

"Thank you," Ananya said. "I practiced."

She had not, in fact, practiced pouring water. She had practiced, for three years, the much larger and much more exhausting skill of being whatever a room needed her to be, and pouring water without spilling it was simply one small, current application of a much older, much heavier competency.

Under the table, her phone buzzed. She didn't check it. She knew what it said.

"Ananya's very disciplined," her mother said, filling a silence Ananya hadn't noticed she'd left. "Top of her class. Very responsible."

"Responsible is good," Karthik said, nodding at Ananya like she'd passed an inspection she hadn't consented to. "My mother always says the wife should be the anchor. The husband can be the ambition, but somebody has to be the anchor."

"And what happens," Ananya asked, unable to stop herself, "if the anchor wants to be the ambition sometimes too?"

The table went quiet in a way that suggested the question had genuinely never occurred to anyone sitting at it. Karthik blinked, visibly recalibrating.

"I suppose," he said slowly, clearly improvising an answer he had not prepared, "there would need to be a discussion. About priorities. Whose ambition takes precedence, given practical constraints."

"Practical constraints," Ananya repeated.

"Household matters. Children, eventually. Someone has to manage the household while the other pursues bigger things." He said it so reasonably, so entirely without malice, that Ananya understood with sudden clarity that he genuinely believed this arrangement to be fair — that he had never once had to examine it, because the arrangement had always, conveniently, worked in his favor.

Her mother shot her a warning look across the table, the specific silent signal that meant stop now, before this becomes a real conversation instead of a pleasant one. Ananya, for the first time in three years, considered ignoring it, and then thought of the bus ticket in her bag and decided this particular battle wasn't worth spending her remaining patience on. There would be other battles today, bigger ones, and she needed to save her nerve for those.

Ananya smiled — the practiced, closed-mouth smile she'd perfected over three years of being pleasant to people who had already decided who she was going to be — and thought, with a clarity that felt almost violent in its suddenness: I have spent three years being an anchor for a family that never once asked if I wanted to float.

Karthik's mother, a formidable woman named Rekha who had spent most of the lunch examining Ananya with the specific clinical interest of someone assessing livestock, leaned across the table at that exact moment and reached for Ananya's hand without asking permission.

"Let me see your palm," Rekha said. "I have some knowledge of these things. My sister's palmist was very accurate about my daughter-in-law."

"I don't really believe in—"

"Nonsense, everyone believes in it, they just pretend not to until it tells them something they like." Rekha turned Ananya's hand over with brisk efficiency, tracing a line near the base of her thumb with one manicured nail. "This one is interesting. It splits here, you see. Very unusual. It means you have two paths available to you and haven't chosen between them yet."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Neither. It just means you're the kind of girl who could still surprise everyone at this table." Rekha released her hand with the satisfied air of someone who had delivered a great deal more meaning than she'd been asked for, and returned to her tea, entirely unaware of how close to accurate she'd just been.

Karthik, oblivious to the exchange, had moved on to describing the sunroof a second time, apparently under the impression that repetition constituted elaboration.

Ananya excused herself for the washroom eleven minutes later, with the same unremarkable calm she brought to everything, and did not go to the washroom.

She had cased the ground-floor window two days prior, during a moment of what she'd told herself was idle curiosity and now recognized as meticulous planning she hadn't been ready to admit to herself yet. It opened onto the side alley behind the kitchen garden, a gap just wide enough for someone her size, hidden from the dining room by the angle of the wall. She'd checked the latch, tested the give of the frame, noted the exact number of seconds it took to open without the telltale creak that would carry through the thin partition to the table where her entire arranged future was currently discussing sunroofs.

She climbed out with her bag already slung across her body, the binder a solid, reassuring weight against her ribs, and ran — down the alley, through the gate she'd oiled herself three nights ago under the pretense of "helping with garden maintenance," out onto the main road where an auto was, by pure lucky coincidence or possibly the universe finally deciding to cooperate, idling at the corner.

"Bus depot," she said, breathless, climbing in. "Please. Fast as you can."

The driver glanced at her in the mirror — yellow kurta, wild eyes, a girl clearly running from something — and, with the specific unbothered competence of Indian auto drivers everywhere, simply nodded and pulled into traffic without asking a single question.

Halfway there, he did ask one question, unable to resist. "Boyfriend trouble?"

"Arranged marriage trouble," Ananya said. "Worse category, longer paperwork."

"Ah." He nodded sagely, as though this explained everything, and swerved around a stalled scooter with the specific unbothered confidence of a man who had navigated considerably worse traffic for considerably lower stakes. "My sister did the same thing. Fourteen years ago. Climbed out of a wedding, if you can believe it — not an engagement lunch, the actual wedding, mandap already set up. She's very happy now. Runs a bakery in Pune."

"Did her family forgive her?"

"Eventually. It took some years. But happiness has a way of eventually looking like the right decision, even to people who were furious about the manner of it." He glanced at her in the mirror again, kinder this time. "You'll be alright, I think. You have the same look my sister had. Determined, but also a little bit terrified of your own determination. That's usually the right combination."

Ananya laughed despite herself, some of the wild adrenaline of the escape settling, briefly, into something steadier. "Thank you. That's oddly reassuring, coming from a total stranger driving me away from my own engagement lunch."

"I contain multitudes," the driver said, unknowingly echoing a phrase she would hear twice more before the week was out, and pulled up outside the bus depot with two minutes to spare, refusing, despite her protests, to accept more than the meter fare.

Behind her, in a dining room she was already three streets away from, Karthik Shah was probably still describing his car. Her mother was probably still performing the specific graceful hospitality of a woman who had built an entire identity around managing other people's comfort. And somewhere in that house, on a hallway table drawer nobody opened, a stack of unread birthday cards from Pune sat as proof that leaving cost something — that Ananya knew exactly what she was risking, and was doing it anyway.

Her phone buzzed once, breathless, as she ran the last stretch toward the platform — a voice note from Meher, sent the second Ananya's earlier frantic text (leaving now. wish me luck. do NOT call, i'll explain everything after) had come through.

She didn't have breath to spare to listen to it yet, but she caught, in the three seconds before she silenced it and shoved the phone back in her bag, the unmistakable sound of her best friend shrieking with delight into a hostel pillow, half-laughing, half-crying, already narrating the moment for posterity the way she narrated everything that mattered: oh my GOD, Ananya Iyer, two years of secret savings and you actually DID it, I am so proud of you I could throw up a little, text me every hour or I am calling the Nashik police—

She made the 2:45 bus with ninety seconds to spare, hoodie zipped to her chin, heart going like a dhol at a wedding she hadn't been invited to, and did not look back once.