Simran had just finished her twelfth grade. She enrolled in college for a B.Tech, and everything felt foreign and new. For the first time, she tasted freedom—because until twelfth grade, she had been suffocated. In college, she would glance around and see couples everywhere, their easy intimacy a quiet taunt.

At home, she had two brothers: Rohan, twenty-three, and Arav, sixteen. Rohan worked as a software developer at an MNC. He lived in the gym, his body carved into something chiseled and dangerous. Arav was a school football player—mischievous, tall at six feet, with girls swarming him like moths. Rohan stood five-eleven, but his frame was model-perfect, and when he dressed for the office, he turned heads. Surely, she thought, he left a trail of flings behind him.