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alone in the kitchen.
    There’s a rhythm to this end of the day. It goes on in his absence, but rejoining it affords him a deep pleasure. Maya will prepare the children’s packed lunches for the next morning, tutting over their nutritional foibles, but indulging them nonetheless. An apple, always, for Asha, but no tomatoes, ever. Mehul’s craving for cheese is met with one of those little red-waxed balls Maya hates. She mutters as she slips it into his lunch bag. Satish leans against the hob, watching her work. He likes the back of her neck, the space between her hair and the neckline of her blouse. It’s an unguarded, vulnerable place; he remembers how she’d nuzzle that same spot on her babies, and he can watch it unnoticed. His fingers drum the countertop beside him. Their gallop keeps pace with the thing in him that is not at peace. As Maya drops her head forward, her thick hair rides up, exposing a little more skin.
    ‘Tired, Sati?’
    ‘Not yet. Still running on adrenaline. Work was interesting, though. A couple of good catches.’
    ‘Yeah?’ She pours juice into Asha’s sports bottle. He knows she misses it, the bustle of the ward, the drama of it, being at the centre of things. She even misses the more pedestrian satisfactions of her stint as a school nurse. He knows she’s waiting for the moment – maybe three or four years hence – when the kids are old enough not to trouble her conscience, when she can go back to work and not feel guilty. They’re crying out for good people. She’ll walk into a job.
    ‘Three-day-old baby girl, blue. Transposition of the great arteries.’
    ‘Oh, God. Heroics.’
    The baby had come in from a hospital thirty miles away. Lights and sirens, the registrar crouched in the back of the ambulance with the patient. ‘It’s a close one,’ the reg had said. ‘Hurry.’ What you had to do, in these circumstances, was not catch the fear around you. You had to breathe, loosen your shoulders, be methodical.
    Satish had performed the procedure in the Cath Lab, a room so quiet he could hear his own exhalations as he fed the catheter through the child’s blood vessels. All the clamorous things outside the lab – the ambulance, the registrar, the parents prowling the waiting room – those things were behind him now. The mercy dash was in its final few centimetres: the steady advance towards the heart, into it, and down to the septum, the wall dividing the chambers. There it was on the screen: the tiny hole which had kept her alive so far. Satish breathed slowly in and out, focused on keeping a steady hand. Narrowing his eyes, he inserted the catheter into the hole. Then – carefully does it – he inflated the balloon at its tip, and the hole stretched larger. When he’d finished, the balloon withdrawn, he’d watched the screen to see oxygenated blood rushing across the septum through the space he’d widened. It happened again, and then again as the heart pumped. The baby had sighed and twitched in sedated sleep, raised her fist off the table and then settled it down again. The nurse turned to Satish and smiled: ‘Nice one.’
    Now Maya stops what she’s doing for a moment and turns to him, smiling also. ‘That is a good catch. Very satisfying.’
    Satish stills his fingers – just a few minutes, be patient – and reaches out to Maya. He touches his thumb to C4, her fourth cervical vertebrae, just below the jut of her skull, buried beneath the warm skin and hair. When she doesn’t shake him off, he traces the length of her spine, letting his hand tilt as the bones undulate beneath it.
    ‘Satish …’
    ‘I know, I know. Just let me …’
    She lets him. She remains pointedly motionless, her work arrested. When he reaches L4, the penultimate lumbar vertebra, the tips of his fingers come to rest inside the beltline of her jeans. He loves the parts she hates, the extra fat she laid down here to have their kids, the little swells of flesh she never used to have, which