The courtroom was smaller than she had imagined — a place where something important was being decided slowly, the way important things usually were, in increments and arguments and the patient accumulation of the record.
Sanjay Rao was across the room with his legal team. He looked smaller than he had been — not physically, but with the particular diminishment that happened to a person when the authority of their position was stripped and they were just a person in a room being held to account. He looked at her when she walked in. She looked back. She held his gaze and found she couldn't entirely read what was in it. Regret, perhaps. Not the performed kind — something more private.
She gave testimony. Clearly, in order, with the precision of a person who had been preparing for eight months. She described the Mehrotra surgery. The liver, the quality of it. The conversation with Rao afterward. The files she had accessed and what they contained. Her visit to Raju Waghmare. The forty-eight hours in the settlement with Sunita. All of it in the register she had learned in twelve years of medicine — factual, specific, without editorialising, letting the facts do the work.
