She went to the nightstand. The right-angle corner of the nightstand — there was nothing there now, the blood had been cleaned by forensics, but she knew it was there because it was in the post-mortem report that Nair had read to her. The corner of the nightstand. She looked at it and she felt herself looking at it and she felt the night trying to surface — not the full night, not yet, but the shape of the night, the arc of it, the specific quality of what the night had been.
She closed her eyes. She stood at the nightstand and she let herself be in the apartment that was her apartment and she tried to walk backward through the memory palace to the beginning of the night.
The door.
She had opened the door. Late — past midnight. She had been asleep and the knocking had woken her. She had known who was knocking before she opened the door. She had not been surprised. She had been afraid. She had opened the door because not opening it had a cost she was no longer willing to pay — the cost of the waiting, of not knowing what Layla was doing on the other side of the door, of the uncertainty that was always worse than the confrontation.
Layla in the doorway. She had looked the way she always looked when she came like this — controlled, composed, the composure of someone who had decided how this was going to go. The composure that made Rohini feel like the unreasonable one, the one who was making it dramatic, the one who couldn't manage a simple conversation.
There had been a conversation. She could not yet hear the words — the memory gave her the shape, the quality, not the content. The conversation had been in the bedroom. She had let Layla into the bedroom because Layla had been in her bedroom a hundred times and because — because the apartment was her palace and her palace had always been where she was strongest, and she had believed, going into the bedroom, that she was strongest here.
And something had happened. She stood at the nightstand and she felt the shape of something happening and she felt her own body in the memory, her body that had known this body for thirty-three years and which the night before last had gone somewhere she could not follow, and she felt at the edge of it—
"Rohini." Nair's voice from the doorway. Quiet, not alarming — just present. "What are you finding?"
She opened her eyes. She looked at the nightstand. She looked at Nair in the doorway.
