I demurred. “It wasn’t in English,” I said. “It’s tough to translate from Kashmiri. It’s an inside joke.” I didn’t feel like explaining what she’d said, how it felt like a promise that I could come back home if I needed to. I didn’t want anyone else to know how I could tell that after all that—all the fighting, the pleas for my case, the strident belief that he is the one—she wasn’t that sure about this marriage either. She held me, and I felt her anxiety shoot back into my body. In that nanosecond, we traded all our worries. “Wherever you go,” she told me, quietly, so quiet I had to strain to
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