There was a pause. Shreya had gone home an hour ago. Dev was finishing his packing-up. It was nearly midnight. Ten days of shared exhaustion and shared purpose had produced the specific intimacy that comes from working on something hard together — not romantic, but real in its own right. The familiarity of someone who knew how you thought and what you looked like when you were tired and what you looked like when something landed right.
"Arjun," she said. Dev was gone. Just them. "Thank you." Simply, without performance.
"It's my job," he said. Standard.
"Some of it isn't," she said. "The part that isn't — thank you for that too."
He looked at her. He looked away. He picked up his own papers. "Get some sleep," he said. "Tomorrow is going to be difficult."
"Yes," she said. And then, so quietly he might have been wrong about hearing it: "I'm glad you were here."
He left the apartment and stood in the stairwell for a moment. He was being professional and focused. He was both of those things. He was also, and he might as well acknowledge it since denying it had not been working, falling for a woman he was protecting. He was going to deal with that problem at a later time, preferably after she was safe.
