CHAPTER 18

OJASWINI

I didn't go back to sleep.

I sat on my bed with the door locked — the old-fashioned iron bolt, the kind that slots into a bracket in the doorframe with a sound like a bone setting — and the Wüsthof chef's knife across my thighs. The blade was eight inches of German carbon steel, hand-forged in Solingen, and I'd sharpened it that morning on the whetstone I always carried. The edge could split a hair. It could also split skin, muscle, tendon. I'd never used a knife on anything except food. But the weight of it on my legs was a comfort — the only comfort available in a dark room on a dark island where someone had just been breathing outside my door.

I tried to think. My brain felt like a kitchen during a bad service — too many tickets coming in, not enough hands, the orders blurring together into a wall of noise.

The wet footprints. Small. Bare. A woman's feet. Someone had been outside my door. Someone who'd been in the rain — which meant someone who'd been outside the house and come back in. Through which door? The front door was heavy teak with iron fittings — you couldn't open it silently. The back door, the one off the kitchen, had a latch that creaked. The servants' entrance on the west side was bolted from inside — I'd checked it myself.

So how had they gotten in wet?

Unless they hadn't gone out at all. Unless they'd been inside the whole time, and the wet footprints were from something else — a bathroom, a leak, water from one of the cracks in the old walls where the monsoon found its way in.

But the footprints led from my door to the east wing. Not from a bathroom. Not from a leak. From my door. Someone had stood there, breathing, and then walked — not run, walked — to the empty rooms in the east wing.

Options:

1. Deven. Checking on me. Testing me. Playing whatever sick psychological game he was playing — the kind of game a man who builds deepfake detection systems for a living would play, because when your entire career is about separating truth from fabrication, eventually you start to enjoy fabricating truths of your own. 2. Tapsee. Sleepwalking? She was on antidepressants and had been drinking wine all evening. Tricyclic antidepressants plus alcohol can cause parasomnias — I knew this because my Pune roommate had sleepwalked twice during the first month of her medication, once into the hallway and once all the way to the building lobby. But Tapsee was also genuinely sick. Could she even walk that far? 3. Arya. Coming from the guest cottage through the rain? But the footprints were bare feet. Arya wore chappals everywhere — I'd never seen her barefoot. And why would she come to my door at 11 PM and stand there breathing instead of knocking? 4. Someone else.

Option four made my stomach lurch. A physical thing — the muscles of my abdomen contracting, my diaphragm spasming, the taste of bile rising in the back of my throat.

There's no one else on this island.

Three people lived here: Deven, Tapsee, Arya. I was the fourth. Sameer had left yesterday afternoon. The next boat wasn't until morning.

Unless there was a fifth person. Someone I hadn't been told about. Someone who knew the house well enough to navigate it in the dark. Someone who knew about the east wing — the empty rooms, the locked doors, the hidden spaces of a mansion that had been hiding things since the Portuguese built it three hundred years ago.

I sat with this thought for a long time. The rain on the windows. The darkness pressing against the glass. The knife on my thighs.

At 5 AM the sky lightened from black to dark grey — not sunrise but the monsoon's version of dawn, a grudging acknowledgment that somewhere above the clouds the sun existed. The rain had downgraded from apocalyptic to merely torrential. Still heavy enough to blur the view from my window, to turn the garden into a watercolor, to make the path to the dock invisible.

I went downstairs.

The staircase was cold under my bare feet. The stone steps had absorbed the night's chill and the moisture in the air had condensed on them — a thin film of water that made each step treacherous. I held the banister with one hand and the knife with the other and descended floor by floor, listening. The house was quiet. The kind of quiet that isn't silence but an accumulation of tiny sounds — the tick of cooling wood, the drip of water somewhere inside the walls, the distant moan of wind finding its way through cracks in the old masonry.

The kitchen smelled wrong.

Not bad — not spoiled food or gas leak or burnt oil. Just different. A disruption in the olfactory signature of a room I'd spent three days in, whose smells I knew the way a musician knows their instrument's tuning. There was a trace of something that didn't belong. A perfume. Not Tapsee's Chanel No. 5 — I'd know that warm, aldehydic blend anywhere. This was something sharper. Younger. More synthetic. A department-store fragrance, the kind marketed to college students — fruity top notes, a chemical sweetness, no depth. The kind of perfume a twenty-something would buy at a Shoppers Stop in Pune or Mumbai.

My skin prickled.

I checked the spice rack. The knives. The pantry door. The walk-in cooler.

Nothing missing. Nothing visibly moved. The spice jars were in the order I'd arranged them — turmeric, chili, cumin, coriander, garam masala, left to right, large to small. The knife roll was on the counter where I'd left it. The cooler temperature was steady at 4°C.

But the feeling stayed. A violation. My space — the only space on this island that felt mine, the only territory I'd claimed in this borrowed, hostile house — had been breached. Someone had been in my kitchen while I slept. They'd touched my air. Breathed my oxygen. Left their scent on my counter.

I made chai. Strong — three spoons of Assam loose leaf in a small pot, boiled hard until the water turned the color of dark wood. Two sugars. Ginger that I grated fresh, a thumb-sized piece, the fibers catching on the grater, the juice running sharp and pungent — ginger strong enough to strip paint, as Riddhi would say. Boiled the milk until it rose and fell three times, each rise building the flavor, concentrating the tannins, turning the chai from a drink into a weapon.

Drank it standing at the window, both hands wrapped around the steel tumbler, the heat almost unbearable against my palms but necessary. The chai burned my tongue. The ginger burned my throat. Good. Pain meant I was still here. Still awake. Still thinking.

Outside, the sea threw itself against the cliffs — grey water against grey rock, the spray rising twenty feet, the sound a constant boom-hiss-boom that was both terrifying and oddly rhythmic, like the heartbeat of something ancient and indifferent.

Today was Sunday. Sameer was coming. He'd promised — first light, sea or no sea. I could leave.

I just had to survive twelve more hours.

Twelve hours. Seven hundred and twenty minutes. Forty-three thousand two hundred seconds. I counted them the way I counted prep time before a big service — breaking the impossible into increments, making the overwhelming manageable, one task at a time.

First task: breakfast.

Feed the people. Stay alive. Get on the boat.

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