The apartment had changed. Not dramatically — the structure of the palace was intact, the objects in their positions, the shelves in their system. But there were new additions: a postcard from Ananya in Mysore, placed on the kitchen window ledge beside the mint plant. A small photograph her mother had given her — not of Rohini, of the Malleswaram apartment's view from the third-floor veranda, the specific morning view she had grown up with and which she had not known she had stored in the rosemary plant until she recovered it. The photograph was now on the mantelpiece, in the position that held the most-loved things, the most-retrieved things, the things she touched with her eyes most often.
The bookshelves had been reorganised three times. Each reorganisation corresponded to a phase of the recovery — what she needed to understand, in order. She was currently in the third phase: building the room that held what came after. The books on the third shelf now were not memory science, not trauma, not the theoretical foundations of the palace. They were books she had been meaning to read for years and had not read because the years of the palace-building had been years of functional emergency and there had not been space for reading that was just reading, for pleasure, for the specific expansion of a mind into territories it was not building defences in.
She had been reading for pleasure for six weeks. It was, she thought, one of the most specifically good things that had happened in years.
The day the prosecutor's decision came, she finished reading for the morning and she went to the map on the wall — Bengaluru, with its coloured dots, which she now remembered fully: each dot was a place she had loved, a specific location in the city that held something, an outdoor version of the palace's indoor system, the city itself organised as an extension of her inner geography. She looked at the map and she added a new dot, in blue — the HSR Layout coffee shop where she had gone with Ananya on Day Seven, where they had sat for three hours and Ananya had told her everything Layla had said and she had listened to it all and said nothing for a long time and then had said: "That's not me. I know that's not me. I built the palace so I would know." And Ananya had said: "I know," and had not elaborated because she had not needed to.
