Breakfast in our house was a production with a call sheet. Eight a.m., the long table on the east veranda where the morning light came in low and buttery through the neem trees, my father already reading three newspapers he didn't need three of, my mother directing Meena's niece through the tea service with a single raised eyebrow, and now, apparently, Viraj Sethi, seated exactly where Karan usually sat, going through a folder of papers like breakfast was a regrettable delay between him and actual work.

I arrived last, which was tradition, and took the seat across from him, which was not — that was usually Karan's, but Karan had gone to drop something at the office and I'd claimed the chair before I could think too hard about why I wanted it.

"You're up early," Viraj said, not looking up from the folder.

"I'm always up early. I just don't usually come downstairs for it."

"Efficient."

"I contain multitudes."

That got him to look up — just briefly, just a flick of dark eyes over the folder's edge, assessing, the same fast unhurried read from the day before, and it hit me again in the same place, low in my spine, an intrusion I hadn't invited and didn't entirely mind.

"How was the flight," I tried, because someone had to be normal.

"Fine."

"How's the merger going."

"Fine."

"Do you only have one setting."

"Depends who's asking."

Meena's niece set down a plate of parathas between us with that loud clatter of someone who'd rather be somewhere else, and my father, from the head of the table, looked up from his newspapers with the delighted, oblivious warmth he reserved for watching two people he'd decided liked each other get along.

"Ira, make sure Viraj eats something more than tea, beta, he works too much, his mother would scold me if she saw how thin he's gotten—"

"I'm not thin, Uncle."

"You're thin for a man who used to eat like he was afraid the food would disappear," my father said, entirely without malice, entirely without noticing what he'd said, already turning the page of his paper.

The table went quiet in that specific textured way it had gone quiet the day before. Viraj's jaw did something small and controlled, a muscle setting rather than clenching, the practiced stillness of someone absorbing a hit he'd been hit with before. I watched him decide, in real time, not to react — watched the decision cost him something, a fraction of a second where his eyes went somewhere else entirely, some other table, some other year — and then watched him come back, composed, folder back in his hands, like nothing had happened.

It shouldn't have mattered to me. I'd known this man for approximately eighteen waking hours of my adult life. But something in me — something that had spent twenty years being talked about at this exact table, in this exact careless way, by people who loved me and never once asked if the talking hurt — recognized what had just happened to him and didn't like watching it happen twice in front of me.

"Pass the parathas." I reached mostly to give the table something else to look at, and reached across to take one off his plate instead of the serving dish, deliberately, the way I'd take food off Karan's plate, the small entitled theft of someone who considers you close enough to steal from.

Viraj looked at his own plate, minus a paratha, then at me.

"That was mine."

"Was."

"You have your own plate."

"I have my own plate with a paratha on it now, that used to be yours, which is a completely different and much better situation for me."

Something happened to his face that I would spend the rest of the summer trying to categorize and never quite could — not a smile, exactly, more like the tax a smile pays before it's allowed to exist. His mouth stayed flat but something eased around his eyes, some tightness that had been there since my father's comment let go, just slightly, just for me.

"You're ridiculous," he said, and it didn't sound like an insult.

"I'm the youngest." Like that explained everything, which — in this house, it mostly did.

---

Karan came back from the office at nine, tie already loosened, looking like a man who'd aged four years since breakfast, and dropped into the chair beside me with that exhausted flop of an eldest son carrying a merger he hadn't asked to be the face of.

"Papa wants me in every meeting now," he said, low, just to me, while Viraj was pulled aside by our father to discuss something involving the word land parcel in a tone that made it sound more important than the two words alone should have carried. "Like I need supervising with my own company."

"You basically do run it though."

"I run the parts Papa lets me run." Karan reached over and stole a piece of paratha off my plate now, the same theft I'd committed twenty minutes earlier, and I let him, because that was the rule in our family — you could take from anyone who'd take from you back. "What do you think of him. Sethi."

I thought about the four seconds at the window. About a jaw setting instead of clenching. About that was mine and the tax a smile pays.

"Rude." I said it instead, safely. "Efficient. Doesn't laugh at his own jokes, which I respect, actually, because he doesn't seem to make any."

"He's sharp," Karan said, and there was something underneath the word, something not quite worry yet but a worry's younger, smaller cousin. "Papa likes him too much. That's usually when things go wrong in this family — when Papa likes someone too much to ask the hard questions."

I looked across the veranda at Viraj, standing very still while my father talked at him with both hands, nodding at exactly the right intervals, giving away nothing.

"Do you not trust him?"

"I don't not-trust anyone yet," Karan said, which from my brother, careful with words the way our mother was careful with her teacup, was itself a kind of answer. "I just think it's worth someone in this house keeping their eyes open. That's all."

I didn't tell him I'd been doing exactly that since the moment the gate opened yesterday morning. Some things, even with Karan — especially with Karan — I was learning I'd rather keep for myself a little longer.