In the twenty-second week the original man returned two days after the long Sunday collection that had answered the five required empty nights. He opened the notebook, read the dense pages that recorded both the absence and the scale of the fullness, and then looked at Rajesh across the dining table while Priya stood naked in the gray light, the continuous dark map still vividly dark across the soft undersides of her breasts under Rajesh’s hand.

“The longer absence did its work,” he said. “From now on, after any required emptiness of three nights or more, you will write a short note in the log before the answering night is shaped. Not only what was done. What the absence did to her. What it did to you. How the hunger showed. How the marks lightened. How the single stretch of ordinary marital sex felt after the dual had been withheld. The note will sit between the empty lines and the fullness that follows. The debt requires the record of the contrast, not only the contrast itself. That is the next permanent piece.”