Meera's day

Suresh pulls up at the Bandra cafe at 3:48 p.m. with a vada pav from the stall near the station, which she eats in the bathroom with the door locked and her phone face down. The builder, Dhruv Khanna, arrives at 4:07 p.m. with the fixer in tow — not alone as promised — and the original phone with the cracked corner face down on a napkin at the second table. He is younger than she expected, shorter than his voice had suggested, with the habit of looking at her collarbone rather than her eyes, and she reads the gaze as either rudeness or rehearsal. The fixer slides across a printed rate card quoting Niharika's 20% undercut of Meera's standard fee as if it were a bidding war; Meera does not touch it, writes her own number on the back of the cafe receipt, slides that back. The conversation lasts nineteen minutes; he orders a black coffee he does not finish. Decision: she has not agreed to the farmhouse, has not agreed to the fee, and has walked out with the door alarm still wrapped at the bottom of her tote and her terms still on the table.