"I'm asking you to tell me when you're making decisions that affect me," she said. "Before you make them. Not after. Not when it's safe. I'm asking to be in the room when it matters, even if the room is difficult." She turned to face him. "I'm asking you not to protect me from information. I'm a thirty-one-year-old woman who has survived a company failure and an investor investigation that wasn't mine and two years of rebuilding from nothing. I can handle information."
"Yes," he said. "You can. I was wrong about that."
"Then say it like you mean it."
"I mean it." He stood up too. Walked toward her, and she stood her ground, which she had not been certain she would do. "Zara. I was wrong to protect you from the ED situation rather than bringing you into it. I was operating from a place of — I thought I was protecting you. I was also, if I'm being honest, protecting myself from having to tell you something that I didn't know how to say to you. Because saying it would have required a kind of conversation I wasn't built for then."
"What kind of conversation?"
He was close now. Not touching her. The distance he always kept, the precise and maddening boundary of a man who moved toward things very carefully.
"The kind where I would have had to explain that I couldn't let you walk into an ED investigation because the prospect of that outcome was not something I could be professionally indifferent to," he said. "And being professionally indifferent was supposed to be my only option."
She looked at him. At the distance between them, which had gotten smaller without either of them explicitly closing it.
"You're saying you were personally invested," she said.
"I'm saying I was in significant trouble the moment I sat across from you in that first pitch meeting, and I dealt with it the only way I knew how, which was to make a unilateral decision and say nothing and hope the silence would hold everything in place."
"The silence didn't hold anything in place."
"No," he said. "It made everything worse."
She thought about what to do with this information. About where to put it in the architecture of everything she was rebuilding about who Aryan Malhotra was and what he had done and why. About the way "personally invested" sounded in his voice, stripped of its professional language — not calculated, not strategic, just true.
"You could have told me that," she said softly. "Even then. You could have said: there's a complication, and the complication is personal, and I need to tell you something difficult because the alternative is worse."
"I know." A pause. "I'm telling you now."
"Now is late."
"Yes," he said. "Now is very late. But it's what I have."
She looked at him for a long time. The argument had not resolved — the thing it was about was still real, the line she had drawn still mattered, she had not changed her position and did not intend to. But underneath the argument was something else. The particular human pain of two people who had gone around each other rather than through each other and were only now, imperfectly and with significant difficulty, trying to go through.
"I need you to learn the kind of conversation you weren't built for," she said.
"I know," he said. "I'm trying."
She looked at the distance between them. Made a decision.
She stepped forward. Put her hand flat on his chest, over his heart, the way you check if something is real. He went completely still. She felt his heartbeat, which was not as controlled as the rest of him. Faster than she expected. The honest body and the managed face, and now she knew which one to read.
"Try harder," she said.
He covered her hand with his. Didn't pull her closer. Just held her hand where it was, against his chest, in the afternoon light of a Bandra office while the city outside did what cities do.
"Yes," he said. And this time it didn't sound like concession. It sounded like a promise.
