"Yes," Nair said. "Whatever your relationship to Rohini Sharma, you have been in this apartment frequently enough to leave your prints on every surface that would be touched by someone who lived here or spent a great deal of time here." She paused. "Not a visitor. Someone at home."
She turned back to the photographs on the bedroom wall. She had not gone into the bedroom — she had been avoiding the bedroom, the chalk outline on the floor — but now she went. She stood in the doorway and she looked at the photographs. The photographs of Rohini Sharma's life: places and people and moments, the archive of a person who had loved a lot and photographed what she loved.
She looked at every face. She looked for her own. She had looked yesterday and not found herself, but yesterday she had been looking from the outside — looking for the face she saw in the station bathroom mirror, the face she was wearing, looking for that exact face in the photographs. Now she looked differently. Now she looked for evidence of a presence without a face — photographs with someone just out of frame, photographs where something was slightly off, photographs where there was space for another person who was not there.
In the fourth photograph from the left, in the second row: Rohini Sharma at what appeared to be a hillside, green, misty, the hills of Coorg perhaps. She was smiling at the camera. Her right hand was extended — not into the frame, but toward the frame, toward the camera. The way you reached toward someone you were with. The way a hand came out naturally to the person who was taking your photograph, to touch them while you looked at their lens.
Her hand had been reaching toward someone. Someone who had taken this photograph. Someone who was not in it.
She stood in the bedroom doorway and she felt the cold come again, but different — not the cold of a stranger's horror. The cold of recognition.
She had taken that photograph. She was certain of it. She did not know why she was certain but the certainty was the same certainty as the scarf and the coffee maker and the drawer with the good knife. The certainty of things known through the body before the mind remembered them.
She had taken this photograph. She had been on that hillside. She had been there with Rohini Sharma, and Rohini Sharma's hand was reaching toward her, and she was not in the photograph because she had been the one holding the camera.
She turned and went back to the living room and picked up the next notebook.
