The third person was Rajan's daughter's boyfriend, who was the only person outside the building who had maintained consistent contact with her in the period before she went to floor ten and who had, twelve years later, a box of her belongings and a photograph and the specific grief of someone who had never been given an explanation and had stopped expecting one.
Rajan met him. She did not attend — that was Rajan's meeting, private, the meeting of two people who had both lost the same person in different ways. She waited outside the coffee shop. When Rajan came out, his face had the quality of something that had been held tightly for a very long time and had, very slightly, released. Not resolved. Not healed. Released — the first millimetre of a grip loosening.
"He didn't know what happened to her either," Rajan said. "But he said she had told him something, in the week before she disappeared. She had said the building was different at night and she didn't know how to explain it but she was going to find out." He paused. "She was always going to find out. She was that kind of person."
"Like you," Meera said.
"Like me," he said. "Her father." He said the word with a particular precision, as if it were important to say it correctly now, after twelve years of not saying it in that context.
