“She had not been back since the arrest. The investigation had consumed six months of her life—the CBI interviews, the forensic briefings, the court appearances where she sat in the witness box and described, in the measured voice that the prosecution required, the night at Sharma's dhaba, the weeks of searching, the breathing through the basement vent, the word help spoken in darkness. The trial had consumed three more months. The verdict—life imprisonment, no parole—had been delivered in November, one year after the arrest, and the courtroom had responded with the subdued, complicated silence of people who wanted justice and had received it and found that justice, when it arrived, did not feel the way they had expected it to feel.”