The bus back from Kanpur smelled of diesel and boiled peanuts, and Dev spent the whole four hours rehearsing what he'd say to Aditi when he arrived, and none of it survived the moment he actually saw her waiting at the stand, arms crossed, helmet under one elbow, looking like she hadn't decided yet whether she was relieved or angry that he'd come back at all.

"Aarav's fever broke two days ago," he said, before she could ask. "He's fine. Running around demanding I buy him a bat before I even sat down properly."

"Good," Aditi said. Then, because she had never once in her life managed to just leave a silence alone, "You look terrible."

"Kanpur does that to a man."

"So does a two-day bus journey and a sick eight-year-old."

"Also that." He studied her for a moment — the shirt, the tired eyes, the particular stillness she wore whenever she was holding something back. "You found something. While I was gone."

She had. She'd carried the photograph in her shirt pocket for three days now, folded so small the crease had gone soft, and she still hadn't decided how to say the word Savitri out loud to a man who might, if she let him, start asking questions she wasn't ready to hear answered.

"Later," she said. "There's something else first. Pandit Kashinath is dead."

Dev's face changed instantly, the tiredness sharpening into something more useful. "The temple priest?"

"Found this morning. Old age, everyone's saying. Heart just stopped in his sleep." Aditi started walking toward her scooter, and he fell into step beside her without being asked, the way he'd been doing for months now, without either of them ever quite naming it. "Except his ears are gone. Both of them. Clean."

Dev didn't say anything for a moment. Then, quietly, "How many is that now?"

"Eleven," Aditi said. "If you count him."

"I'm counting him."

The temple courtyard was already filling with the kind of crowd that gathers less out of grief than out of a need to be seen grieving properly, and underneath the wailing and the marigolds Aditi could hear, if she listened for it, the same old phrase starting to circulate again, quieter than before but unmistakable. Savitri ki chudail aa gayi hai. The witch has come back.

She had heard that sentence her whole life without once asking who Savitri was. She knew now. She still hadn't told anyone that she knew.

"You've gone somewhere else," Dev said, watching her.

"I'm right here."

"You're not, actually. You've had that face since the bus stand." He didn't push it. He'd learned months ago that silence worked on her better than questions ever did — she'd fill it herself, in her own time, if he just didn't ask twice. "Whatever it is. I'm not going anywhere this time."

Aditi looked at him for a long moment, at the tired, familiar lines of his face, at the four hours of diesel and boiled peanuts still clinging to his shirt, and felt something in her chest loosen slightly, the way a held breath loosens when you finally decide to let it out.

"Tonight," she said. "Not here. Not with half the town watching us not-talk about the priest."

"Tonight," Dev agreed, and neither of them said anything else about it, though both of them spent the rest of that long, crowded, marigold-heavy afternoon a little too aware of how far away tonight still was.