The silence after she said it lasted long enough that Aditi started counting her own heartbeats, which was a thing she hadn't done since she was small and frightened of the dark, and which told her, more than anything else, how frightened she was now.

"You knew," Dev said finally. His voice had gone somewhere flat and cold she'd never heard from him before. "You've known since the attendance register. You wrote his name down and burned it, and you never told me, and now my son is missing, and you're telling me now."

"I didn't have proof. I had a coincidence and a feeling and a man who has never once—"

"He kidnapped my son, Aditi. He is very likely going to kill him, on a schedule that involves the moon, and you've been sitting on his name for weeks because you didn't want it to be true."

"You think I don't know how that sounds?" Her own voice cracked now, the careful control she'd built over six years finally giving out all at once. "You think I haven't spent every single night since I found that register lying awake trying to find another explanation? He raised me half as much as my own father did, Dev. You don't get to stand there and act like loving someone and doubting them are simple things I should have sorted out faster for your convenience."

"I don't care about my convenience. I care about my son."

"So do I!" She was shouting now, in the doorway of the thana, in full view of two of Balki's search party still filing past with unlit lanterns. "You think I don't care about Aarav? He's the first child who's ever looked at me and just — liked me, without wanting anything from it. You think that doesn't matter to me?"

"Then you should have told me the moment you suspected it. Instead I've spent the last six hours running to an empty well because you decided your uncle's feelings were worth protecting over my son's life."

That landed exactly as hard as he meant it to, and Aditi felt something in her chest go very still and very cold, the particular stillness that came, she'd learned over the years, right before she said something she couldn't take back.

"You were supposed to protect him," she said quietly. "That was your job before it was ever mine. Don't stand here and make this my failure alone."

Dev flinched like she'd hit him, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the accusation sitting between them with all the terrible, unfair accuracy of the truest things people say to each other in the worst hour of their lives.

"I am protecting him," Dev said, low and furious now. "By hunting the monster you raised."

Aditi didn't have an answer for that. She stood in the doorway with the marigold's note still folded in her bag, and watched something close over in Dev's face that she understood, with a sick certainty, she wasn't going to be able to undo just by apologising.

"I need you to leave," he said. "Not because I don't believe you. Because I can't look at you right now without wanting to say something worse than what I've already said, and I don't have room in me for that today."

She left. She rode home in the flat grey light of a morning that had promised, an hour ago, to be the day they found Aarav together. Somewhere on the canal road, with the wind pulling her hair loose from its pin, she stopped the scooter, put both feet down in the mud, and sat there a long moment without moving — because whatever she and Dev had built over these last two months might not survive what came next, and she was going to have to finish this, one way or another, without him.