# Chapter Twenty: The Weekend of Everything Else

## As Told By Sneha

Here's the thing nobody tells you about the best night of your life.

It doesn't end. It just keeps going, in smaller pieces. You think the big moment's over — the restaurant, the crying, the ring, the room — and then it's eleven at night and you're lying on ruined hotel sheets with a man's hand on your stomach, and it turns out the whole night is still happening, it's just happening in a vest and shorts and a paper cone of chips.

I'm Sneha. I'm twenty-five. I have a ring on my finger that I keep checking, and I have been greedy all my life and never had anything worth being greedy about until six months ago. I want to write this down properly. Not because anything big happens in it. Nothing big happens in this chapter at all, and it's my favourite part.

The knock came at 11:44.

I came up out of sleep in pieces — hand first, then head, then eyes, twice, with suspicion.

"What's that."

"Food."

"Food," I said, and sat up so fast I took the entire sheet with me.

I want to be clear about this because I will be telling this story for the rest of my life: I opened a hotel room door at midnight wrapped in one white sheet, nothing else, with my hair a disaster and my face a disaster and last night's mascara under both eyes, and the boy from room service looked at the trolley so hard I thought he'd go blind.

I signed the slip. He looked at the pen. He said, "Have a good night, ma'am," and left at a speed that can only be called professional.

I wheeled the trolley in myself — chips in a silly tall paper cone, two desserts, a bottle of water I didn't let him open because I'm a suspicious woman and always will be — and got back into bed with it, cross-legged, sheet round my waist.

"You know there's two of everything," he said.

"Yes. One for me, one for me." I gave him a chip. "You can watch. And if you're very good you can have a bite."

We ate. I talked with my mouth full. I put my cold feet under his thigh and he let me, which is, and …