Mama-ji came to the house that evening, as he always did when trouble touched the family, carrying a tiffin of food he'd cooked himself and a face arranged into exactly the right proportions of concern and calm.

"I heard about the Rathore boy," he said, setting the tiffin on the kitchen table while Lata fussed uselessly around him. "Terrible business. This town has had enough grief without a child going missing on top of it." He looked at Aditi, and his eyes were warm, and worried, and entirely convincing. "You look exhausted, beta. Have you eaten today?"

"Not really."

"Sit. Eat something. You cannot help anyone if you fall over from hunger."

She sat, because some old and exhausted part of her still wanted, more than anything, to let him take care of her the way he always had, and it was only halfway through the meal, watching his hands as he served her more rice than she'd asked for, that she noticed the tremor.

It was small. A fine, fast shiver in his right hand as he set down the serving spoon, gone almost as soon as it appeared, the kind of thing she would never have registered on any other evening of her life. She'd seen it before, she realised — a dozen times, a hundred, always dismissed as an old man's habit, always covered, she understood now, watching him clasp his hands together in his lap the way he did whenever this particular subject came near him.

"You should rest, Aditi," he said. "The dead deserve better than a town that forgets them by lunchtime, but the living deserve rest too. You cannot carry every grief in Devipur on your own shoulders."

"Some men are not worth my worry," she said, quoting him back to himself without quite meaning to, watching his face for a reaction he didn't give.

"No," he agreed easily. "Some are not. But you have always had trouble telling the difference between the men worth worrying about and the men worth fighting. I only want you safe. That's all I've ever wanted for you."

She believed him. That was the terrible part, sitting there with rice going cold on her plate — she believed every word of it, because it was true, in its own way, and had always been true, and that was exactly why none of the town's old rumours had ever once reached her ears as anything other than gossip about a man too good for this place.

He left a little after nine, and at the gate, out of some instinct she didn't examine too closely, Aditi asked to borrow his key ring — a lie about needing to fetch a book from his study, delivered so smoothly she surprised herself — and pressed it, quickly, into a bar of wet soap she'd carried out in her pocket for exactly this purpose, before handing the keys back with an apology for fumbling them.

He didn't notice. Or if he did, he gave no sign of it, kissing her forehead the way he always did, and walking home through the dark with the same unhurried, untroubled gait he'd had her entire life.

Aditi stood at the gate a long time after he'd gone, holding a bar of soap with the shape of a key pressed into it. There was no taking this back now — she turned the soap once in her palm, feeling the sharp little teeth of the impression, and made herself admit it out loud, to no one, in a whisper: some part of her, the part that had spent six years learning to trust her own eyes over everyone else's comfortable explanations, had already decided, long before tonight, exactly where this was going to end.