"I know," Nair said. "The notebooks made that clear."
She went up to the apartment. She let herself in with her key — her key, the one she had had in the pocket of the grey salwar that she had apparently been wearing when she had finally gone to bed after Layla left and she had still been wearing when she woke up on the floor. The key to her apartment, which she had had all along, which she had not known was hers.
She went to the kitchen. She made chai. She stood at the window while the milk heated and she looked at the herbs on the ledge — the rosemary in the leftmost position, the beginning, the root. She touched it very gently and felt the morning with hills, her mother's kitchen, the beginning of something that had survived everything that had tried to end it.
She took her chai to the sofa. She sat on the pale blue sofa, in her own apartment, and she drank her chai and she looked at the bookshelves and she thought about reorganising them tomorrow. She thought about what she needed to understand next and where she would put the books she needed and how the system would look when it was built for what came after all of this.
It was going to look different. She was going to be different. She had been displaced from herself for five days and in those five days she had walked through the palace she had built and she had recovered herself piece by piece, object by object, room by room. She knew things now about the architecture of her own mind that she had spent eighteen months building the tools to understand. She was going to use those tools. She was going to understand what had been done to her and what she had survived and what the surviving meant, and she was going to put it, carefully and precisely, in the place it belonged.
A place for everything. Everything in its place.
She drank her chai. The apartment was around her — hers, entirely hers, every object in its position and every position holding its memory and the whole of it, the palace she had built in a life she had lived fully enough to have something worth building it from. She was going to add new rooms. That was the next thing — the rooms that came from surviving this, the rooms that would hold what she now knew, the extension of the palace into the territory that was on the other side of the night she was not going to call the worst night because the worst night was a designation she refused to give to anyone who had tried to take her from herself.
It was a night. It had happened. She was here. The rest was rooms still to be built.
