Someone has read me

The Karjat staircase. I haven't written it. I haven't said it out loud in any form that could be screenshotted. Whoever that handle is, they got it from me, or from the one person I gave it to, or from someone who watched my face when it came back to me in Bandra and read it there.

I don't know which is worse. All three sit in my stomach with the two bites of kheer I didn't taste.

The threat used my mother. Not my career, not the client list, not the clip. My mother. Whoever wrote that sentence knows exactly which soft thing to press, and that means they've done this before, or they've been told. A builder's fixer would know. Kabir would know. Kabir does know now, because I handed him the screenshot and his file has a line in it that says Meera Rathore has a Karjat staircase she has never written down, and forty-three pages later there it is — my collarbone, my unsaid story, in someone else's folder under third-party identification.

I ate the kheer standing up. I didn't heat it. I held the jar with one hand and ate with the other like a child told not to touch the counter. I thought about calling my mother three times. I thought about what I would say if she answered, and what I would say if she didn't. I sent Heena something vague. She will know it is vague. She will know I am asking without asking.

At the mirror I looked anyway, even after last night's promise not to. My eyes were the same. That is the worst part — that I look like a woman who has not been ruined, and the ruin is still loading.

The rain on the window is fine. The rain doesn't know anything.