She came to on the floor of her studio with her cheek against the cool wood and no clear memory of getting there.

The first thing she registered was the drafting table above her, closer to the ceiling than it should have been from this angle, and the second was Anjali from the flat next door crouched over her saying her name in a pitch that suggested this was not the first time she'd said it.

"Meera. Meera, hey, can you hear me, you fell, I heard the chair go —"

"I'm up," Meera said, though she wasn't, not really, the room still doing a slow, syrupy tilt that made the word up feel aspirational. She'd been at her desk — she remembered that much, the tooth-clinic signage file open, a headache building behind her left eye the way it had been building most mornings this week — and then a strange white crowding at the edges of her vision, like a photograph overexposing from the corners in, and then wood against her cheek and Anjali's voice arriving from very far away.

"I heard the crash through the wall, your chair must've gone over. You've been out — I don't know, maybe a minute? I was already knocking before you came round." Anjali had her phone out, thumb hovering. "I'm calling someone."

"Don't call an ambulance, I'm fine, I just —" Meera pushed herself up on one elbow, the room resettling into something like order, and felt the specific, betraying throb of a headache that had clearly been trying to warn her for an hour before it escalated to this. "I'm in a drug trial. There's an emergency line. Let me just — my phone."

It was on the desk, face-down where it always was. Anjali passed it to her without letting go of her own vigilance, hovering the way people hover when they've decided, correctly, that you cannot be fully trusted to assess your own state.

Dr. Kapoor's clinic answered on the second ring, and within four minutes Meera was talking to a nurse who asked a rapid, practiced set of questions — had she eaten, had she taken her dose on time, was she dizzy now, any chest pain, any vision changes currently — and then, satisfied enough for the moment, put Dr. Kapoor herself on the line.

"Syncope," Dr. Kapoor said, without preamble, once Meera had described it. "Fainting spell, textbook presentation — the crowding vision, the fall, the brief unconsciousness. It's a known, though uncommon, dosage-related effect in this window of the protocol, usually resolves with a dose adjustment. It is not dangerous in itself, but I don't like you unsupervised for the next several days while we recalibrate, because falls are how uncommon-but-not-dangerous becomes dangerous-actually, if you understand me."

"I understand you."

"I need someone checking on you daily, in person, until we've confirmed the adjustment is holding. Preferably someone who already knows your file, so we're not re-explaining the whole protocol to a stranger every visit." A pause, papers shuffling somewhere on Dr. Kapoor's end. "Who do you have."

Meera thought of her mother, three buses and a knee replacement away, who would arrive within the hour if asked and then spend every visit quietly panicking in a way that would help no one. She thought of Ananya, and reached for her phone to check, though she already half-knew the answer — three days of silence in their thread beyond a single madness here, will call when I surface sent at 2 a.m. Singapore time, the specific unreachability of a lawyer mid-acquisition, phone confiscated by her own calendar.

"My best friend's out of the country for work, hard to reach for the next couple weeks," Meera said. "My mother could come, but she's — she's dealing with her own health thing, I don't want her managing stairs to check on me."

"Understood." Dr. Kapoor's voice didn't change, brisk and unbothered as ever, but something in the pause before she spoke again suggested a decision being made in real time. "I'll assign someone from the site team. Daily, brief, just enough to confirm you're stable — blood pressure, a quick symptom check, make sure you're taking the adjusted dose correctly. I'll have them start tomorrow."

She hung up before Meera could ask who.

---

Vikram found out twenty minutes later, standing in Dr. Kapoor's office with a printout of the day's enrollment numbers he'd been about to hand over.

"Anand had a syncopal episode this afternoon," Dr. Kapoor said, not looking up from her screen, already typing an adjustment order. "Fell at home. A neighbor found her. She's stable, vitals were fine when the nurse spoke to her, but she needs daily monitoring through the dose recalibration — five, six days, maybe a week."

Vikram felt the printout go slightly damp under his own hand. "Is she okay?"

"She's fine. Uncommon side effect, well within our expected profile. I need someone on the ground daily. She has no one local who can reliably do it — friend's abroad, mother has her own medical situation." Dr. Kapoor finally looked up. "You already know her file. You already have her trust, which matters more than people think it does when you're asking someone to let you check their blood pressure in their own home every day. I'd like to assign you."

There was a version of the next four seconds where Vikram said the thing he knew, with total clarity, he was supposed to say — I don't think that's appropriate, given that we're close, I'd rather Priyanka or one of the nurses take it, there's no real conflict on paper but there might be one in practice. He had the sentence fully formed. He had, if he was honest with himself, had some version of that sentence ready for weeks now, ever since Meera had first sat down across from him in the intake room and he'd found himself unreasonably, disproportionately glad that Malini had assigned him the case at all.

He thought about Ananya somewhere over the Bay of Bengal or wherever her flight path currently put her, unreachable, building a life with him at a pace that had always felt, to Vikram, like something he was fortunate to be swept along inside of rather than something he was actively steering.

He thought about Meera on the floor of her studio, alone, a wall's width from help she'd needed a stranger to summon.

"I can do it," he said. "I know the protocol. I'll keep good notes."

"Good." Dr. Kapoor had already moved on, back to her screen, the decision so small to her it barely registered as one. "Start tomorrow evening, after her adjusted dose has had time to settle. Keep visits under twenty minutes. Vitals, symptom check, confirm compliance. Don't linger."

"Understood," Vikram said, and left the office, and stood in the hallway for a moment with the printout still in his hand, the numbers on it meaningless to him now, and thought, with the particular precision he brought to everything he didn't want to examine too closely: this is just logistics. She needs monitoring, I'm available, I know the file. This is the sensible allocation of a limited resource. It has nothing to do with anything else.

He believed this the way a man believes a bridge will hold — not because he'd tested it, but because the alternative, looking down, was worse.

He texted Meera that night, after Dr. Kapoor's team had confirmed the new dosing schedule, something short and steady, the kind of message he was good at, that gave nothing away and asked for nothing back.

Heard what happened. Glad you're okay. I'm on your monitoring roster starting tomorrow — I'll come by around 7, shouldn't take long. Eat something before I get there, and text if anything changes before then.

Her reply came twenty minutes later, and he read it twice before setting the phone face-down on his desk, the way you set down something you're not ready to keep looking at.

Of course it's you. Okay. See you at 7.

He did not examine why of course it's you sat in his chest the way it did, warm and unwelcome, like a coal someone had pressed into his palm and told him not to notice was burning.