"Ananya," Kavitha said. "I know exactly why you did it. And the reason was right, even if the outcome was complicated." She looked at the group assembled around her — most of the class, the ones who had been closer to the front. "All of you. I know why you did it. I know what it cost you to keep it. I am not angry at any of you."
Rohan was leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed and an expression that was the most unguarded Naina had seen on him. "We should have told someone sooner," he said. Not accusatory — to himself as much as the room.
"Yes," Kavitha said. She didn't soften it. "But you were thirteen, and an adult in authority had told you to stay quiet, and another adult you trusted had given you a different reason to stay quiet that felt like the right thing. You did what you could with what you had." She looked at him directly. "The only thing I want is for you to remember this. To remember what it felt like to hold something like this. And to know, next time, that you can tell."
"Tell who?" Meera said. "If the adults are the problem—"
"Find the person who isn't part of the problem," Kavitha said. "There's always someone. Sometimes it's a stranger." She looked at Naina. "Sometimes it's a substitute teacher from Mumbai who notices things."
Thirty students looked at Naina. The look was utterly different from the first day. The first day's look had been the performed openness of children maintaining a front. This look was the real thing — curious, warm, the assessment of people who were seeing her for the first time now that they were not performing.
"She read the notebooks," Dev said. From the middle of the class. "She noticed the reflection question."
"I know," Kavitha said. "She told me." She looked at Naina. "Thank you."
"It's the job," Naina said. Not dismissively — the same way she said most things she meant.
"It wasn't just the job," Kavitha said. "And you know that." She looked at the class. "Let's sit down. We have thirty minutes before the period ends." She moved to the front of the room — to the desk that was hers, that had always been hers, that had contained a red pen and a hand cream and a bookmark in the book she was going to teach next. She sat down. Thirty students sat down. The room organised itself around her with the ease of something returning to its natural state. "Where were we?"
"Chapter twenty-two," Ananya said. "The town's reaction."
"And the question from last Thursday," Dev said. "The one Ms. Sharma left us."
Kavitha looked at Naina. "What was the question?"
"I asked them to think about what Atticus meant when he said: 'The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience,'" Naina said. "And whether they thought that was true."
Kavitha was quiet for a moment. Then she looked at the class. "Is it?" she said. "What do you think?"
