I didn't leave my apartment for three weeks.
Kavya brought food. I didn't eat it. She brought tea. I let it go cold. She sat with me in silence, holding my hand, not asking questions, because she already knew—not the details, but the shape of it. The shape of a heart breaking.
"You have to eat," she said on the seventh day.
"No."
"You have to sleep."
"I can't."
"You have to—"
"I have to nothing." My voice was raw. Hollow. I hadn't used it in days, except to cry. "I have to sit here and feel this. Because if I don't feel it, I'll forget. And if I forget, it'll be like she never mattered."
Kavya didn't argue.
She just held my hand tighter.
On the fifteenth day, I looked at the flash drive.
My father had given it to me before I ran—pressed it into my palm, closed my fingers around it, whispered "When you're ready."
I wasn't ready.
But I looked anyway.
The files were everything he'd promised. Emails between Ahuja Industries and the hospital. Payment records. Confidential reports. And recordings—hours and hours of recordings, conversations between doctors, between executives, between my father and Aarav's father.
I listened to them all.
I listened to them plan my mother's death.
I listened to them discuss the cover-up.
I listened to them laugh about how easy it had been, how no one would ever know, how they'd done the world a favor by eliminating a woman who would have died anyway.
And I listened to Aarav's voice.
Younger. Eager. Desperate to please.
"We need to move quickly," he said in one recording. "The FDA is reviewing our application next month. If we don't have results by then—"
"We'll have results," his father interrupted. "We just need to choose the right subjects."
"Subjects?"
"Patients, Aarav. We need to choose the right patients. Ones who won't be missed."
And Aarav—my Aarav, the one who held my hand in the rain, the one who kissed me like I was something precious—Aarav had said:
"I have a list."
I threw up after that.
Then I listened to the rest.
On the twenty-first day, I went back to Midnight Brew.
I don't know why. Habit, maybe. Or masochism. Or some desperate, broken part of me that still hoped—against all evidence—that none of it was real.
He wasn't there.
Of course he wasn't there.
But someone else was.
Nisha.
Sitting at the same table, in the same chair, wearing the same silk dress, looking at me with the same unreadable expression.
"You look terrible," she said.
"You look like your brother."
Her smile was sharp. "I'll take that as a compliment."
I sat down across from her. The table felt smaller than before. Or maybe I felt smaller. It was hard to tell.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"Gone."
"Gone where?"
"If I knew, I wouldn't tell you." She leaned forward. "But I can tell you this—he meant what he said. In the message. He designed the trial. He chose your mother. He killed her."
"I know."
"Do you? Do you really know? Because the way you're looking at me—it's not the look of someone who knows. It's the look of someone who's still hoping."
I wanted to deny it. I wanted to tell her she was wrong.
But she wasn't.
Because somewhere, buried beneath the rage and the grief and the betrayal, there was still hope.
Tiny. Fading. Almost dead.
But there.
"I'm not hoping," I lied.
Nisha laughed. It was an ugly sound, sharp and bitter and nothing like her practiced social smile.
"You're a terrible liar," she said. "But that's okay. So is he."
CLIFFHANGER:
She reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope.
"He wanted me to give you this. Before he left."
I took it. My hands were shaking.
"When did he leave?"
"The night of the warehouse. He came home, packed a bag, and walked out. Didn't say where he was going. Didn't say if he was coming back."
"Why didn't he give this to me himself?"
Nisha stood up. Looked down at me with something that might have been pity.
"Because he couldn't bear to see your face when you read it," she said. "He knew you'd hate him. And he couldn't handle that."
She walked away.
I opened the envelope.
Inside was a letter.
And at the bottom of the letter, in handwriting I recognized—
An address.