"He is husband material, for God's sake." Hayland said it the way one states something that should have been obvious long ago. He reached for his glass. "He prepares most of the meals in this house. Especially yours." A pause, quieter now. "He started after you were diagnosed. After the doctor's visit. He has been doing it since."
The table held that information for a moment.
"I wish I could see your childhood."
The words left Aine's mouth before she had quite decided to say them. Across the table, Ravi set his fork down on his plate with a quiet, deliberate click. He looked away.
The silence that followed had a texture to it.
"I am sorry," Aine said quickly. "I did not mean that."
Ravi turned back to her. Something was moving behind his eyes, slow and considered, the way things move in deep water.
"Do you want to see my childhood?"
"Ravi—"
"Just answer me."
She looked at him for a moment. "Yes."
He rose from the table without another word.
He led her to a wide door at the far end of the house, one she had walked past without ever thinking to wonder about. He pushed it open and what lay beyond it was darkness, total and still, the kind that feels like it has been waiting.
The moment they stepped inside, the lights came alive.
Aine stopped breathing for a second.
The room was vast and quiet and full of things that had not been touched in years. A piano stood against the far wall, its keys yellowed beneath a film of dust. Beside it a guitar leaned at an angle, patient and forgotten. A violin rested in its open case. Drum kits were arranged at the back of the room with the careful precision of someone who had set them up and then never returned. The dust that covered everything was not the dust of neglect. It was the dust of abandonment, which is an entirely different thing.
And on the walls, photographs. Ravi, small and serious, at various ages, in various places, wearing various expressions that were all, in their own way, the same expression.
Aine moved slowly along the wall, taking each image in.
"Why were you wearing a stethoscope?"
Ravi stood in the centre of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking at nothing in particular. "Because I wanted to be a medical doctor when I grew up."
"That is nice." She said it softly, meaning it. Then she moved further along the wall and her brow drew together. "You never smiled. In almost any of these pictures." She turned to look at him. "Why?"
Ravi was quiet for a moment. When he answered his voice was flat and matter of fact, the way one speaks about something that was simply the weather of one's life.
"I was taught never to smile."
Aine looked at him. Then she looked back at the photographs, at the small serious boy staring out of each one with those same green eyes, already learning to hold his face still, already learning to give nothing away.
"That is wrong," she said quietly. "A smile is a universal language."
The room held that between them for a long moment. Ravi said nothing. But he did not look away.
Aine held his gaze for a moment, then made her decision. She stuck her tongue out and held it there, crossing her eyes slightly, pulling the most ridiculous face she could manage and bringing it as close to his as she dared.
Something happened to Ravi's face that he had no time to stop. A smile broke through before he could organise a defence against it, wide and unguarded and entirely real, the kind that changes a person's face so completely it is almost like meeting them for the first time.
Aine's phone was already out. The shutter clicked.
"Who said you cannot smile?" she said, pulling back with the satisfaction of someone who has just won something important.
Ravi looked at her, still wearing the remnants of it. "Gosh, little cosmos." He shook his head slowly. "You are very clever."
He reached out and settled his hands on her waist, drawing her in with the quiet ease of someone who has decided that this, at least, is something he is allowed to have.
"It is my wish," he said, his voice dropping to something lower and more serious, "to see you smiling. Always."
Then, before she could respond, he arranged his own face into the most deliberate and committed version of the same ridiculous expression she had just made, holding it there with complete and solemn dedication.
Aine burst out laughing.
When the laughter settled she turned and looked around the room again, her eyes finding the instruments lined against the walls.
"What about all of these? Did you ever actually learn them?"
"All of them," Ravi said simply. "Or close enough. Certain missions require it. Sometimes you have to walk into a room as a violinist. Sometimes a drummer. Sometimes a pianist. You become whoever the room needs you to be." He moved toward the drum kit at the back of the room, pulling the stool out and settling onto it with the ease of muscle memory, picking up the sticks as though they had always belonged in his hands. "I will play the kit for now."
"Go on then," Aine said.
He did.
The first strike was tentative, almost exploratory, as though reintroducing himself to something he had set down a long time ago. Then the rhythm found him, or he found it, and the room that had been silent for years filled suddenly and completely with sound. It was not a performance. It was something more private than that, a man remembering a version of himself that had existed before everything else got in the way.
When he stopped he turned on the stool and looked at her, sticks resting across his knees, and on his face was an expression that had no name but sat somewhere between pride and peace.