In the hallway, my father explained it in about ninety seconds. Priya’s questions over those three months had not been curiosity. They had been screening. My dad, who negotiates for a living and reads people for a living, had seen the pattern in the messages I forwarded him without thinking, the steady drift toward money, the way every friendly exchange circled back to what we had. So he ran a test. He dressed down, borrowed my uncle’s dying minivan, packed my things in garbage bags, and walked in looking like a family with nothing. Not to embarrass me. To find out who my roommate was when she thought there was nothing to gain.
He got his answer in the first ten seconds. The “oh.” The tight smile from her mother. The hesitation before her father shook his hand. And then the whispering, the “I didn’t know,” the way she barely spoke to two people she had spent three months trying to impress by association, the instant she decided we were beneath her. My father had watched a girl’s warmth switch off the moment she calculated it would not pay off.