They didn't say the name out loud again that night. Aditi wasn't ready, and Dev, watching her hands go still around the edges of the photograph, understood that pushing her toward it would only teach her to hide the next thing better.

They worked instead — the diary, the note, the dates — until the small room behind the thana had gone dark enough that neither of them noticed how late it was, and somewhere in the middle of cross-referencing Kashinath's temple accounts against the old FIRs, Aditi put her head down on her folded arms for just a moment, just to rest her eyes, and found Dev's hand in her hair a moment later, not asking anything, just there.

"You don't have to be strong about this one," he said quietly. "Not with me."

"I don't know how to be anything else."

"I know." His hand didn't move. "I'm not asking you to change that. I'm asking you to let it rest, just for tonight, on someone who isn't going anywhere."

She lifted her head and looked at him, and something in his face — tired, steady, entirely without the careful distance he'd kept between them for months — undid the last of whatever argument she might have made for pulling back.

She kissed him first. That much, at least, stayed true to the woman she'd built herself to be — she closed the distance, she decided it — but everything after that came apart from any script she'd ever rehearsed. She reached for control out of old habit and lost it almost immediately, his mouth slow and unhurried against hers in a way that gave her nothing to perform against, no audience to be Damini for, only his hands finding her waist and staying there, patient, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.

"Aditi," he said, once, against her jaw, and it sounded like a question.

"Don't ask me anything tonight," she said. "Please. Just tonight."

He didn't. He carried her, instead, the short distance to the narrow cot in the corner of the room, and undressed her slowly enough that she had to stop thinking in order to keep up with him — no room left in her head for anything but his hands and his mouth and the low, unhurried way he said her name like it mattered more than the case, more than the town, more than anything either of them had agreed, out loud, to want. A woman who'd spent six years thinking her way through every room she walked into had, for once, no thoughts left at all.

She cried afterward, quietly, her face against his chest, and he didn't ask her why, because he already understood it wasn't about him at all — it was six years of a murder book, and a photograph she couldn't stop carrying, and a name she didn't know how to say, all of it arriving at once now that she'd finally let someone hold still long enough to catch it.

"I've got you," he said. He couldn't fix any of it — the case, the town, the years of secrets — but for the first time in longer than she could remember, that was exactly enough.