Chapter Thirteen
The flat in Lajpat Nagar had two windows.
One looked into the lane, which was useful for light and sound — the fabric market woke early and the vendors' calls and the rhythm of deliveries gave the day its shape, an external clock when she had little use for the one on her phone.
The other window looked into a small courtyard shared with the floor below, where the landlady, Mrs. Batra, kept a collection of flowerpots that she tended with the dedicated intensity of a woman whose children had moved to Pune and Bangalore and who had redirected her energies accordingly.
Mihika planted her two herbs on the second window's ledge.
The thyme struggled for a week and then decided to stay. The basil took to the ledge immediately, put out three new leaves in the first fortnight, and seemed to have no complaints about the relocation.
She talked to it in the evenings. She had always talked to her plants.
It seemed stranger, now, to be doing it without the particular possibility of being heard by someone she hadn't quite given permission to know this about her — but she did it anyway, because some habits were part of how she functioned and this was one of them.
She found work through a contact from culinary school — Priya's cousin ran a catering company in Greater Kailash, small and specialized, the kind that served private events and required experienced hands rather than institutional efficiency.
She went in under a cousin's name, negotiated cash, and proved herself useful enough on the first event that they called her back for the second.
The work was familiar and manageable and required just enough of her professional attention to keep the rest of her mind from operating at full volume, which was its most important quality.
She was four months along when the nausea stopped and the tiredness became simply the tiredness of pregnancy rather than the specific misery of the first trimester.
She was five months along when she felt the first movement — a flutter, absurd and specific, like something waving hello from the inside — and she put both hands on her stomach and sat very still and breathed.
She was six months along when she started talking to him by name.
The name had come to her somewhere in the fourth month, arriving with the quiet certainty of a thing that had always been true and had only now been spoken.
Ansh. She turned it over and looked at it from various angles and found nothing wrong with it.
She said it aloud in the flat one evening and it sounded right.
It was not the full name of anyone. It was not quite a claim on anything else.
She said it to the basil plant, which had no opinions.
She said it to the baby in the evenings, telling him about the day — the traffic on the Ring Road, the event she'd worked that afternoon, Mrs. Batra's excellent opinions on the politicians, the way the afternoon light came through the lane window at four o'clock and made everything look briefly like it was made of honey.
She told him about the thyme, which was growing well.
She did not tell him about his father. She would. Later.
She missed Shivansh in ways she had not fully anticipated.
She had expected to miss his warmth, the physical reality of him, the nights that had become the most honest thing about their marriage. She had prepared for this — or had told herself she had — and it was present and real and she managed it.
What she had not anticipated was the other kind of missing.
The specific, functional absence of a person who had been in a space and was no longer.
The way she noticed things she would have told him and had no one to tell.
The morning light on a particular building she passed on the Ring Road, which was the kind of thing he didn't say much about but would have noticed.
The satisfaction of a well-managed event, which she would have mentioned at the end of a day in the shorthand they'd built, the shorthand of two people who had spent a year in the same rooms.
She did not cry about any of it.
She focused on what was coming, on the weight of him inside her, on the planning that had not stopped simply because the escape was complete. She was building something. She had always built things.
She kept building.
Sonakshi found the receipt on a Thursday, a few months after Mihika’s disappearance.
She had been going through the room. She did not explain why she was going through the room — she was Sonakshi Goenka, and the house was hers to manage, and she managed it.
She had been managing it for three decades.
She found the receipt in the back of the small drawer in the bedside table — the one on Mihika's side, which no one had cleared yet, which had been left as it was with the particular care of a household that did not quite know what the protocol was for an absent bahu.
She looked at the receipt.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she went to find Ajit.
He was in the study. She closed the door behind her, which was not usual, and he looked up from his papers with the attention of a man who had been married for thirty-five years and knew what a closed door meant.
She placed the receipt on the desk in front of him.
He looked at it. He picked it up. A doctor's name in Saket, the address of the clinic, the itemized services — the first prenatal appointment, the blood work, the dates.
He set it down.
"She was pregnant," Sonakshi said.
Ajit looked at the receipt.
"When she left," Sonakshi continued. "She was already—"
"Yes," Ajit said. He was still looking at the receipt. His voice was very even. "I can read it."
The room was quiet.
"Shivansh doesn't know," Sonakshi said.
"No." A pause. "He would have told us if he knew."
Sonakshi said nothing.
Ajit looked at his wife. He looked at her for a long moment, with the look of a man who was doing arithmetic and arriving at answers he had been slower to reach than he perhaps should have been. He set the receipt down on the desk and he said, "He must be told."
Sonakshi said, "Ajit—"
"He must be told," he said again. He was not using his authority voice, which he rarely needed to use with her and which, when he did, settled things.
He was using something underneath it — quieter, more fundamental.
"This is his child. He is looking for his wife and he doesn't know she is carrying his child. That ends today."
Sonakshi was very still.
Ajit stood up. "I will tell him," he said.
He picked up the receipt and walked out.
Shivansh was not sleeping.
This had been the condition since the first night, and four months had not resolved it.
He was functional — he was operating the empire, meeting obligations, running the territories — but he was running on something other than rest, some alternative fuel that Abhinav watched with the quiet concern of a man who knew this was not sustainable but understood that saying so would accomplish nothing.
He had lost weight. He would not have described it this way, but Manik had, to Abhinav, in the kitchen one morning, in the specific language of a younger brother who had watched someone he loved disappear from inside themselves.
He was in his office when Ajit came in.
His father almost never came to the Delhi office. He operated at a remove from the daily machinery, the older generation's arrangement with the empire. Shivansh looked up when the door opened, registered his father, and stood.
"Sit," Ajit said.
He sat.
Ajit placed the receipt on the desk.
Shivansh looked at it. He looked at the name of the clinic, the date, the itemized line for first prenatal consultation. He looked at the date. He looked at it again.
He picked it up.
He read it again.
"Abhinav," he said, without looking up.
Abhinav, who had been in the adjacent room, appeared in the doorway within four seconds.
Shivansh held up the receipt. "This clinic," he said.
His voice was very quiet. "Saket. Find out if this appointment was made under her name or another.
Find out what else they have. Find out—" he stopped.
He looked at the date. He looked at it one more time, and he calculated, and he put his hand flat on the desk.
"Abhinav." He said it very carefully. "How far along would she be now?"
Abhinav looked at the receipt. He calculated. He said, "Seven months, Bhai."
Shivansh said nothing.
Ajit stood at the desk and said nothing.
The room was absolutely still.
Abhinav waited.
"She was three months when she left," Shivansh said. He said it in the register of a man confirming a fact he was still assembling. He was still looking at the desk, at the flat of his own hand against the wood. "She was three months pregnant when she left this house."
"Yes," Abhinav said.
"She left—" He stopped.
He put the receipt down.
He picked up his phone and set it down. He picked it up again and set it down again. He stood up and went to the window and he stood there, looking at the Delhi street below, with his back to both of them.
Ajit looked at Abhinav. Abhinav looked at the floor.
No one spoke.
Then Shivansh said, to the window: "How far along was she when she found out."
Abhinav said, carefully, "Based on the date — she would have been about six weeks at the appointment. Given when she left, she had been carrying it for—"
"She knew for six weeks before she left," Shivansh said.
"Yes."
"She was in this house, at that table, knowing, and she said nothing." He said it without inflection. He was still at the window.
"Yes," Abhinav said.
The word sat in the air.
Then Shivansh turned around.
He looked at the room — at his father, at Abhinav, at the desk and the receipt and the entirety of what the last four months had been — and his face was doing the thing it very rarely did, the thing that meant the control had found its absolute limit.
"Double everything," he said. His voice was very quiet. "Every resource, every network, every contact. I don't care who we call in. I don't care what it costs." He looked at Abhinav directly. "Find her."
Abhinav said, "Yes, Bhai," and was gone.
Ajit remained.
He said, "Shivansh."
His son looked at him.
"When you find her," Ajit said, with the measured weight of a man who had made a number of mistakes across a long life and had eventually learned from some of them, "go carefully.
She made a choice. A woman does not run from her home with a child she's carrying because she is careless. " He looked at his son. "Go carefully."
Shivansh held his gaze for a moment.
"Yes," he said.
Ajit left.
He did not speak for twelve hours.
Abhinav brought briefings. He processed them and gave instructions with the minimal efficiency of a man operating at reduced capacity and refusing to show it.
The empire functioned. The networks moved.
Somewhere in the city — in some two-room flat, in some neighbourhood they had not yet identified — Mihika was seven months pregnant with his child, alone, and she had been there for four months because she had concluded, at some point in this house, that leaving was the only option available to her.
He sat with this.
He sat with it at midnight in the office with the Delhi lights outside and Abhinav somewhere down the corridor and the certainty that she had been in this house, across from him at that table, knowing — and she had said nothing.
He thought about the dinner. The one he could not now not think about. Sonakshi saying certain unions and the right foundation and some people are not suited, and himself saying nothing, eating his food, holding his position of carefully managed neutrality.
He thought about what neutrality looked like from the other side of the table, when the woman on the other side of the table was six weeks pregnant and had not yet decided to run.
He thought: she was waiting for me to say something.
He thought: I said nothing.
At midnight, he said it. He said it to the window, to the Delhi night, to the room that was empty except for him:
"She was afraid."
Not of him. Or not only of him. Afraid of the house, of what the house would do with a child, of what it had already done with her and what it would do with more leverage.
Afraid that he would side with the house the way he had always sided with the house, the way neutrality under his mother's roof had always been its own kind of choosing.
She had been afraid, and she had planned with the precision of a woman who had no one to trust with the planning, and she had left in the dark with one bag and two herbs and his kurta, and she had not left a letter because there were no words that covered it.
He understood.
He sat at midnight in the office and he understood, and it cost him something substantial to understand it, because understanding it required him to look at twelve months of his own behaviour and read them from a direction he had not previously chosen to face.
He understood.
And then he picked up his phone and he called Abhinav and he said: "Whatever it takes. However long it takes."
Abhinav said, "Yes, Bhai."
He was going to find her.