Six minutes and the chai

I keep coming back to six minutes. That is the number. Ira's phone, the studio's shared iCloud, six full minutes of my Bandra clip sitting in a folder that any intern with a thumb could have thumbed open. Heena's Aakash didn't. Probably didn't. I will never be able to prove he didn't, and that is the specific shape of this fear — not the leak itself but the silence after it.

The envelope is back in the tote under the shelf tonight, not under my pillow. I am trying to teach myself that there is a difference between locking something away and sleeping on top of it. I don't think I learned it. I checked the chain twice between voice notes to Heena like a woman rehearsing the sound a latch makes when it is wrong.

Niharika. Three kissing emojis. Before your big Karjat thing. She knew before I said it out loud, which means someone in Heena's circle has a mouth that moves faster than mine, and I have not yet found which mouth. I wrote back next week. I wanted to write something worse. I want to be the woman who writes something worse and doesn't regret it for a single second, and I know I would regret it, which is the kind of knowing that feels like a cage I built on purpose.

The chai at five from Ira's studio assistant — I don't know her name, I've seen her face four times — was the only soft thing that landed today. And Devika signing her own NDA in under ten minutes. A person who has never worked a fixer gig and doesn't argue about paper. I could have cried about the chai. I didn't. I drank it too fast.