Curry leaf — third from left. She touched it. Nothing came immediately. Then: a sound. Not visual, not tactile — a sound. A voice. Layla's voice, she understood, in the register that Layla used when she wanted something, the specific warmth of it that was indistinguishable from actual warmth unless you knew to listen for what was underneath it. She couldn't hear the words. Just the register. The register and what the register made her feel — the very specific feeling of a person who is being managed and knows it and does not yet know what to do with the knowledge.
She took her hand off the curry leaf. She went to the bedroom.
The bedroom was the hardest. She had been avoiding it — the chalk outline on the floor, the space where Layla had been found. But the bedroom was part of the palace and she needed the bedroom, and she had promised Nair she would tell her everything she found, and avoidance was not a tool she had the luxury of.
She stood in the bedroom doorway. She looked at the room. The photographs on the wall — she knew each of them now, knew the memory each one held. She looked at them in order: left to right, top to bottom, the order she had established when she arranged them.
Fourth photograph, second row. Coorg. The hillside. Her hand extending toward the lens. The person behind the lens.
She had been wrong about who was behind the lens.
This came to her now, standing in the doorway: she had not taken that photograph. She had been in front of it. The person behind the lens had been someone else — not Layla, someone before Layla, someone who was the memory that the photograph actually held. She had stored it here because it was the beginning of understanding what she had come from, before Layla, the version of herself that had existed before.
