“The sentence landed. She watched it land. Watched the composure crack — not break, crack. A fissure. The kind you don't see unless you've been studying the surface for twenty years. His jaw tightened. His hands pressed together harder. His eyes — brown, the brown that Ananya had inherited, the brown that Meera had fallen in love with at a JNU seminar when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-five and the world was two rooms in Malviya Nagar and a shared chai cup — went: dark.”