CHAPTER 20
Three Days Later - Ranawat Estate
The note had been discovered on a Monday morning.
Tanisha had found it on her phone—a message from Kabir's number, sent at 11 PM on Sunday night.
Can't do this anymore. The family pressure, the scrutiny—it's too much. I'm sorry. Don't look for me.
She'd called the number seventeen times before accepting it was dead.
She'd appeared at the estate at seven in the morning, red-eyed and rigid, and had been sitting in Saroj's sitting room ever since.
Nimisha could hear her crying through two closed doors.
She sat at her desk with her laptop open and her manuscript untouched, a cup of tea going cold beside her keyboard, and felt something complicated about the sound of that grief.
She knew what it was to love someone who turned out to be something other than what you believed.
The difference was that Tanisha's version, at least, was over cleanly.
A knock at her door.
"Come in."
It was Samarth. He was already dressed—dark suit, the expression he wore when he'd been managing difficult things before most people had gotten out of bed.
"She's been told," he said.
"I heard."
He crossed to her desk, picked up her cold tea without asking, and went to replace it at the small electric kettle she kept in her study. She watched him move through her space with the ease he'd developed over the past weeks—like he belonged in it, like the room had made room for him without either of them noticing.
He brought back her tea, properly hot, and set it within reach.
"She's asking to see you," he said.
Nimisha looked up. "Me?"
"She specifically asked for you. Not me. Not Ma." His expression was unreadable but careful. "You."
Nimisha was quiet for a moment.
She thought about the slap. Aboutyou seduced him, didn't you.About months of careful cruelty from a girl who'd been so in love she'd chosen blindness over truth.
She thought about what it was to be young and certain and wrong.
"Alright," she said.
Saroj's Sitting Room - 9:47 AM
Tanisha had the look of someone who'd cried until crying stopped working—red-rimmed, hollow, stranded somewhere beyond tears on the other side of them.
She looked up when Nimisha entered.
The guilt on her face was immediate and genuine and painful to witness.
Nimisha sat across from her.
