By the time Amelia arrives I have been waiting for a long while. Two drinks are down to clinking half-blocks of ice. My phone, heavily thumbed during the wait, has been re-cased and re-bagged. The waiting cannot be seen as casual. It has to seem excessive. It has to seem arduous. I have taken great pains to craft a look of cool impassivity for her. Surely it must show.

When Amelia arrives, she does so with apologies and excuses in abundance. Her hair is shorter than it used to be — this is the first thing that strikes me, though the new look does suit her. She smiles and flashes her wide pleading eyes, and I respond carefully and deliberately, with pursed lips, with raised brow, with a small nod. It makes no difference. Moments after her “Sorry, Ve,” we are somehow talking about The Good Wife and she has already forced a smile from my lips, perhaps even two. I have already let slip a reluctant laugh. Amy has always been this way — delicately manoeuvring conversations. By the time you realise what is happening, you’re deep within her world, or miles outside of it, with no idea of the turns she took to take you there. She used to do it to guys all the time. I remember how they would walk away, with tilted heads and glazed expressions, not entirely convinced that they had just been rejected, because she had not explicitly said the words. Amy never makes it look intentional. She just ricochets off on her own course, carefully hiding any semblance of deliberate intent. Perhaps she never has any. Perhaps that’s why it works so well.

By the time I wrest the conversation back we are lamenting a seventh season downturn in The Good Wife, chipping away at the praise we have just heaped.

“Look Amy, I’m sorry about your dad,” I say, cutting in abruptly. She freezes for a moment, then recovers and relaxes, absently stroking her shoulder with her fingertips. “I should have been there. I wish you’d told me.”

“Yeah. Well I’m sorry about your wedding —”

“— Don’t even try it.”

She glances up to check me, to read me face, and then she laughs. “Worth a shot,” she says. “Doesn’t matter Ve, you know what Dad was like. There was never really enough to miss. But your wedding …”

Amelia trails off. She seems to shrink, as if her breath has sent the life right out of her, leaving her body slack and her eyes misted over. I want to give her no quarter, no comfort, for she does not deserve these things from me. I tell myself this beforehand. I pen my arguments and counter-arguments and I ready myself well in advance. Then the moment comes, and the moment passes. And I find I’ve said none of the things I meant to, and all of the things I didn’t intend on.

“Amy —,” I begin, but the waiter interrupts and asks if we wish to order. His notepad is large, comically so, and we watch him struggle with the pages of his pad, and the vast expanse available to his pen. He stumbles over his words. We order Fettuccini Carbonara and refills for our drinks. The waiter leaves and the moment passes.

“Listen, Ve,” Amelia says, appearing to have caught and rebottled the life that had seemingly escaped. “I … it shouldn’t have mattered what I thought. What my hangups were. I should have been there for you. I still can’t quite believe I didn’t go.”

I find myself nodding and saying, “You know he’s a good man, Rahul.”

Amelia laughs and says, “I’m sure he is. I’d like to meet him, and get to know him.”

“I’m sure you’ll get the chance.”

The waiter returns with the wrong dishes. “It’s fine, don’t worry,” we tell him. But I get the sense that things are far from fine for him. His head is not with him today. Perhaps he has more to deal with than two plates of Fettuccini Carbonara.

“So what’s he like?” Amelia asks, in between forkfuls.

“Well, he works hard — he’s pretty ambitious, you know. Wants to have his own Dental Practice one day. He’s actually really sweet. He buys flowers, he tries to cook, he gives me the kind of cheesy compliments you hear in movies. At least I hope that’s where he gets them from. He’s nice.”

“And ‘nice’ is good enough?”

“Nice is fine.”

Amelia smiles, shakes her head and says, “I still can’t believe you married a guy you barely know Veena. It just … I just thought you would end up with someone you met here.”

“Didn’t work out that way.”

“You’ve dated plenty of guys Ve. None of them were good enough?”

“Guess not,” I say.

Amelia puts her fork down. “So what about meeting someone and falling in love?” she asks.

“Amy, not everyone expects love to hit like a thunderbolt,” I say. “Sometimes you just hope that it will sneak up on you — that you’ll just slip into it one day. People in arranged marriages enter hoping to fall in love. Lovers do their best trying not to fall out of it.”

“Are you saying it’s a better choice?”

“No … just a different choice. I did what I thought was right for me. All I wanted from you, was for you to be around”

“And I wasn’t,” says Amelia.

We clear our plates and our glasses, request the bill, receive the wrong one, and eventually exchange it for the correct one. Amelia remains quiet through all of this. Before we leave she turns and asks me, “So do you love him?”

“I don’t know,” I reply.