She had a new company.
It was smaller than PayAxis, sharper — a B2B compliance tool for fintech startups that automated regulatory filings. Less glamorous than the original vision, but she understood now, with the specific understanding that comes from watching the glamorous vision die, that glamour was not the point. The point was a problem she could solve and a market that needed solving. She had been working on it for nine months. It was profitable at small scale. She was going to raise.
She told herself she was not thinking about Aryan Malhotra when she began calling investors.
She was thinking about him constantly. Not in the way she had before — not the raw, furious, middle-of-the-night grief of the first year — but in a new and more complicated way. The way you think about someone when you are trying to reorganise what you know about them and the reorganisation keeps producing results you did not expect.
He had destroyed her career to save her life. She kept turning that sentence over. It was exactly the kind of thing that sounded like the plot of a novel, the kind of novel she had always considered slightly too convenient, slightly too structured — and then the thing it described had happened to her, and it turned out the convenient structure of it did nothing to reduce the actual pain. You could understand something completely and still be wrecked by it. That was one of the things Aryan Malhotra had taught her, apparently.
She was going over her investor list on a Tuesday morning when her phone rang. Unknown number, Mumbai area code.
"Kapoor."
"Zara." His voice. Immediately recognisable, which was annoying. "It's Aryan."
She put down her coffee. "How did you get this number?"
"Priya gave it to me. Don't be angry with her — I told her it was important."
"Priya is a traitor."
"She said to tell you she's a realist."
Zara looked at the ceiling of her Bandra office — a proper office now, not the kitchen table of the first two PayAxis years, but still small enough that she knew every corner of it. "What do you want, Aryan?"
"I want to know about the new company. I heard through mutual contacts that you're building something in the compliance space."
"And?"
