The email came at 9:04 the following Monday, cc'd to Dr. Kapoor, subject line Subject Roster Reassignment — VER-204.

Hi Meera — reassigning your file to Priyanka going forward for continued monitoring/taper check-ins, she's got capacity now and it makes more sense operationally for one coordinator to carry the full back half of the protocol without handoffs. She'll reach out today to get a visit scheduled. Let me know if you have any questions. — V

Meera read it twice, the way she read everything from him, and found nothing to audit this time, because there was nothing underneath it to find. That was the whole trick of the email. It was so clean. Not a single word in it was untrue, and not a single word in it was for her.

She did not reply okay or sure or any of the small, warm nothings that usually padded the space between them. She typed Noted, thank you and sent it and looked at it sitting there in the thread, two words doing the work of a door closing, and thought: so this is what it looks like when he decides.

Priyanka called forty minutes later, brisk and pleasant and entirely unaware she'd been handed anything but a scheduling task. "Hi, Meera, I'll be taking over your check-ins — I've got your file up, looks like you're doing great, taper's on track. I can do Wednesdays and Saturdays, whichever works better for you?"

"Wednesdays," Meera said, because it didn't matter, because none of the days mattered anymore in the way they had.

---

She heard about the venue tasting from Ananya's Instagram before she heard about it from either of them directly — a story, posted at 11 p.m., of a long table set with white linens and votives, a plate of something involving burrata, and Ananya's hand in frame holding up a glass, the caption venue #2 down, this one might be The One 👀🍾. Vikram wasn't in the photo. He rarely was; he was always the one behind the phone, which Meera had once found sweet and now found, looking at the story at midnight from her own dark apartment, like a small mercy she hadn't asked for and didn't especially want.

Two days later he texted, out of nowhere, no lead-in: Doing cake tastings Saturday if you want to weigh in on flavors, Ananya says three opinions are better than two. It took her a full minute to understand this wasn't cruelty. It was the opposite. It was Vikram trying, clumsily, loudly, to prove to himself that nothing between them had shifted, that he could still fold her into his wedding the way he'd have folded her into it eight weeks ago, easy, unweighted, a friend among friends.

Can't, deadline, she wrote back, which was true, and also would have been true on any Saturday for the rest of her natural life if it meant not sitting in a room watching him choose a cake with his fiancée's opinion in one ear and, presumably, some private accounting of guilt in the other.

He didn't push. That, too, told her something.

---

She watched it happen from a slight distance after that — the wedding accelerating the way a car accelerates when the driver has decided the fastest way through a bad feeling is simply more road. Vikram started going to the gym before work, a new habit, mentioned once by Ananya in a comment under someone else's photo — he's basically a different man, up at 5 now, all this wedding fitness energy lol. He took over the guest list spreadsheet, apparently, color-coding it by side and RSVP status with the same upright, careful diligence he brought to a consent form. He posted, for the first time in his life as far as Meera could remember, an actual sentimental caption — a photo of a save-the-date proof, the words counting down. lucky man underneath it, three words that read, to anyone who didn't know him, like romance, and read, to Meera, like a man building a wall out of the nearest available bricks.

She knew this specific flavor of overcorrection. She'd built her whole personality out of it.

---

Meera's own way of coping did not look like anything a film would bother filming.

She reorganized her invoicing spreadsheet. Not because it needed it — she kept meticulous books, always had, the one area of her freelance life that ran with total order — but because on the Tuesday after the reassignment email she sat down at nine in the evening and rebuilt the entire thing from scratch, new tabs, new color-coding, a fresh formula to auto-flag anything thirty days overdue, and worked on it for four straight hours with a focus that had nothing to do with spreadsheets and everything to do with the specific, monastic relief of a task with a right answer. Cell references either worked or they didn't. A formula either returned the correct total or it threw an error you could find and fix. Nothing about a spreadsheet asked her how she felt about anything, and for four hours that was the whole appeal.

She also, without deciding to, started cooking things that took a long time. Not because she was good at it — she wasn't, particularly — but because her mother's rajma recipe, the one she'd finally learned to make properly after the salt incident months ago, required two hours of low simmering and periodic, undemanding attention, and there was something in standing over a pot doing almost nothing, stirring every fifteen minutes, that occupied exactly the amount of her mind she needed occupied. She made a pot on the Wednesday Priyanka took over her check-ins and ate a third of it and put the rest in the freezer in labeled containers, methodical, dated, the same handwriting she used for client invoices.

She did not cry, particularly. She noticed this about herself with a kind of clinical remove, the same remove Dr. Kapoor might have logged in a case file. She felt, instead, a persistent low static, an underlying hum she couldn't locate in one organ or one hour of the day, and she managed it the way she managed everything — by finding a task with edges, a task that ended, and doing that task with more care than it required.

Her mother called on Thursday. "You sound tired."

"I'm fine, Ma. Busy with clients."

The old sentence. It came easily now, no headache behind it, and Meera noticed that too — that she was two-thirds through her taper, Dr. Kapoor had told her, dose stepping down steadily, and the compound's grip on her was loosening in exact proportion to how badly, this particular week, she wanted it to hold on. She wanted, perversely, the headache. She wanted the physical proof that she was lying, because at least a lie that cost something felt like it meant something, and this one — I'm fine, Ma — was sliding out of her frictionless now, easy as breathing, and that frightened her more than any fainting spell had.

She hung up, opened her spreadsheet, and started a new invoice for the dental clinic's final round of assets, the sad tooth character finally, mercifully, approved as-is. She worked until midnight. She did not look at Instagram. She looked at it anyway, once, at 12:14 a.m., and found a new story — Vikram and Ananya at a florist, an armful of white roses, Ananya's laugh mid-motion, blurred with movement, alive.

She closed the app, put the phone face-down the way she'd taught herself to over seven years of exactly this, and went to bed with the low static still humming, unaddressed, patient, willing to wait her out.