Chapter 15 — The Last Ping

Arjun was quiet."Yes," he said. "That's what she would have wanted."The apartment was quiet for a while. Outside, Delhi doing what Delhi did in March — the specific transition season, not quite winter anymore, the quality of the light changing.Her phone vibrated. A WhatsApp from Leila in Dubai — an update on the data centre's legal status, progress on the UAE angle.She replied. She put her phone down.She went back to the Gurgaon shell companies.She thought: this is what the work looks like. Case by case. One tangle at a time. The satisfaction of the case being complete mixed immediately with the next case, which was not solved and required the same attention.She thought: this is what the last four months had looked like too, except larger. Except with the specific personal weight underneath it that she had set aside during the work and was still, incrementally, processing outside of work hours.She thought about the notification she had deleted.She thought: I know where he is. He's on the sofa. He went to the market. He got coffee. The application is unnecessary.She thought: the last time I needed to know his location, it was because he had designed a situation in which his location was evidence. The application was the signal. The ping was the message.She thought: I don't need the application for ordinary Tuesday mornings.She thought: ordinary Tuesday mornings are what we're back to.She thought: ordinary Tuesday mornings are the thing we were working toward the whole time.She looked at the coffee cup he had put on her desk.She picked it up.She drank.Outside, the March light moved. The city moved in it. Arjun typed. She typed. The Gurgaon case waited with its shell companies and its patient complexity, ready to be the next thing she understood completely by the time she was done with it.She was done with nothing. That was the nature of the work.She was not done with the Vayu case — that would be in court for years. She was not done with her anger at Arjun — that was on its own timeline, real and justified and diminishing at the pace it chose. She was not done with the question of Thomas Webb, which was a question without a clean answer, only a better-than-nothing one.She was not done with any of it.But she was here, at her desk, on a Tuesday, with coffee from the place on the corner, and the case file open, and her husband on the sofa.Which was the important thing.Which was, after sixty-one days across four countries, the thing she had been working to get back to.She worked.