"I asked her what was going to happen. She said she didn't know yet but she was going to think about it carefully." He picked up his chai and drank some of it. "Two days later, Ananya got messages. From her parents. Some of the six families on the list — Ananya's parents are friends with two of them. The messages were framed as concern for Ms. Rao. 'We hear she's been having a difficult time. It would be a shame if a small professional disagreement led to anything drastic.' That kind of thing."
"Threats dressed up as concern," Naina said.
"Yes." Dev looked very tired. "And Ananya came to school the next Monday with a plan. She said Ms. Rao had done the right thing, obviously, but that the school was going to make things very bad for her if it came out that we had witnessed the conversation. She said the safest thing for Ms. Rao was for us to not have seen it. She said if we all agreed that nothing unusual had happened in that classroom on that Thursday, the school couldn't use us against her."
"Ananya decided this."
"Yes. But we all agreed. We were trying to protect her. We thought — if we all said we hadn't seen anything, the school couldn't claim she was being disruptive or that she had created an incident in front of students. We were trying to take that weapon away from them."
"And then she disappeared."
"Five days later," he said. "She didn't come to school on Friday. Over the weekend the school sent a message that she had taken personal leave. On Monday Mr. Iyer came to our class and told us Ms. Rao had decided to take some time away for personal reasons and that we should all be very respectful of her privacy." He looked at Naina. "And Ananya said — later, just to us — that we needed to keep the agreement. Because now that Ms. Rao was gone, the school might try to say things about her. Make it seem like she was unstable or unprofessional. And our silence protected her reputation."
"Dev," Naina said carefully. "Do you believe Ms. Rao left voluntarily?"
He looked at the table for a long time. Then at her. "No," he said. "I think they made things so difficult for her that she felt she had to leave. Or—" He stopped. "Or something worse, which I'm trying not to think about."
"She's alive," Naina said. "She texted her roommate ten days ago." She watched relief move through his face — genuine, the relief of a child who had been quietly carrying a worst-case fear. "She said she's safe. I believe it. But I need to find her, and to find her I need to understand what she found — because the grade falsification was the surface. I think there was more."
