Dev didn't move for the better part of an hour after Aditi left. He sat with his tea going cold at his elbow, the ceiling fan ticking through its bad rotation overhead, and looked at the one page he'd let stay behind on his desk — her handwriting pressed hard enough into the paper that he could feel the letters under his thumb when he ran it over the ink.

Then he pulled the old files.

Not officially. There was no such thing as officially reopening anything in a thana with one working motorcycle and a hawaldar who treated his afternoon nap as a constitutional right. Dev knew exactly how little authority a Sub-Inspector posted to a town this size actually had. But he pulled the files anyway, that night, after Balki had gone home to his wife and his two sons and the daughter he was always mentioning, as if her existence were an argument he was quietly making to himself.

Dev read the files hoping to be wrong. Five files in, he wasn't.

A panchayat head, 2012. Heart attack. Found in a harvested wheat field in December. Right hand missing, presumed rats. A priest, 2014. Drowned in a temple pond no deeper than a man's knee. Both ears missing, presumed fish. A midwife, 2017. Dead of drink. Two fingers missing from her right hand, presumed rats again — the same explanation, offered so many times over so many years, that it had stopped sounding like an explanation at all.

What unsettled Dev wasn't any single file. It was the spacing. Two deaths close together in 2012. Then nothing for two years. Then one. Then nothing again. Then one, and one more. A rhythm with no rhythm to it — the kind of thing a man trained to look for patterns eventually can't unsee.

Balki found out the next morning. He found out the way he found out everything in Devipur — immediately, and before anyone had told him.

"Saab," he said, "these files are closed. You reopen a closed file, the district office sends you somewhere worse than here."

"Is there somewhere worse than here?" Dev asked.

Balki thought about this seriously, the way he thought about anything requiring real consideration, and after a while said, "No." It was as close as the two of them ever came to agreeing that something in this town needed a second look.

---

The Sunday after the farmer's death belonged, as far as Aditi knew, entirely to her uncle.

It was a ritual her mother had kept up every week of Aditi's adult life without ever once questioning why she did it — send Aditi across town with a box of sweets to her elder brother's house, so he wouldn't feel forgotten now that his wife was gone and there was no one left to cook for him properly.

Raghunath Tiwari's house sat behind the school he'd run for as long as Aditi could remember anyone running anything — a large old place with a veranda too big for one man and a garden he kept better than anyone else in town kept anything. He opened the door himself, the way he always did. No servant. No delay. As if he'd been standing just inside it, waiting for the exact moment she'd knock.

He fed her kheer he'd made himself, in the copper pot that had belonged, he'd told her once and only once, to his wife. He asked about the farmer — of course he knew about the farmer, the whole town had known by nine that morning — and she told him what she'd seen. The ear. The eight others before it. She told her uncle things she never told her own mother, on the theory that he was the one adult in her life who had never once told her to make herself smaller.

He listened the way he always listened, without interrupting, his glasses folded in one hand. When she finished, he told her the truth had to come out, but that she should be careful, because the powerful in this town didn't like questions. He said it so plainly, so kindly, that she didn't think to ask which powerful men he meant, or whether he was warning her away from a danger, or simply naming one he'd already measured down to the inch.

There was a room in that house she'd never been inside. It sat at the end of the corridor past the kitchen, and the door was always shut. She'd always assumed, the way you assume things about people you love without examining them, that it held whatever belonged to his dead wife that was too much to look at and too much to throw away. Saris. A photo album. The ordinary furniture of a grief no one expects a widower to finish having.

That Sunday, she noticed the lock on the door properly for what felt like the first time — a good, solid, modern lock, on a door in a house where nothing else had ever needed locking.

She didn't ask him about it.

She wants that recorded honestly, in the same spirit as everything else she keeps in her notebook that doesn't do her much credit: she sat in his veranda, eating kheer from his dead wife's pot, and she saw a locked door in the house of the one man she'd never once suspected of anything — and some very old, very well-trained part of her decided, before she'd even finished the thought, that it was none of her business. And moved on.

He touched her head as she left, the way you bless a child, even though she was twenty-five, even though less than a day earlier she'd done something in a mango orchard that would have ended his affection for her instantly if he knew. His hand stayed there a moment longer than the gesture required. The way her father's hand stayed on the ten-rupee note a moment longer than it needed to.

She rode home in the last of the daylight, past the school, past the temple, past the tea stall where Balki's brother-in-law held court most evenings on politics he wasn't qualified to have opinions about. She didn't think again, not once, about the locked door — not until the ride was almost over, when she caught herself checking the rearview mirror at a stretch of empty road for no reason she could name, and made herself stop.

---

Nine days later, the school cook was found.

Geeta Devi, forty-one, dead in the storeroom off the kitchen where the midday-meal rice was kept. The first word that went round, before the police had even arrived, was drink — she liked her drink, everyone knew that, and a woman who liked her drink dying in a storeroom full of liquor bottles she had no business keeping near a school kitchen was, to the town's satisfaction, the whole explanation required. Filed and closed before the body had gone properly cold.

Aditi heard it from the school peon, who told her things for reasons she'd never fully worked out and had decided, on balance, not to examine too closely. A source who examines his own motives too closely stops being useful to you.

He told her, in the hushed voice he used for information he knew was worth more than she was paying him for, that Geeta Devi's fingers were missing. Two of them, off the right hand. And that the police had already said rats, in the storeroom, and that everyone had already agreed this made sense.

Aditi went that night. She knew exactly how it would look if she got caught — a woman climbing through the window of a school storeroom after dark with a torch and a phone camera — and she went anyway. Somewhere in the last nine days, she'd decided that fear was a choice. You were allowed to feel it. It just didn't get a vote.

She was inside less than four minutes. Long enough to photograph where the body had lain. Long enough to measure, with her own eyes, the distance from the door to that spot and find it didn't match anything the peon had described.

Then a torch beam that wasn't hers swept across the room.

She turned. It was Dev, on his night patrol — an institution she hadn't known existed until it was standing right in front of her, looking, for once, less angry than afraid on her behalf.

"You could have been killed," he said.

"Then file it as a natural death," she said.

For a moment, in the dark, between the sacks of rice and whatever the town had already decided to believe about a woman it had already decided not to look at too closely, neither of them said anything else.

It was the first time either of them understood — in that quiet, after-the-fact way you understand things only once you've nearly done something foolish — that this would not be the last time they'd find themselves standing somewhere they had no business standing, in the dark, waiting to see who spoke first.