Kabir did not message the next day. Tanya checked often enough to become angry at herself. On Thursday he sent one voice note.
“I’m sorry I made a simple question complicated,” he said. “I care about you. I am not ready to give this a conventional name, but I do not want ambiguity to become disrespect. Can we speak?”
Tanya listened three times.
The apology addressed the method, not the missing fact.
They met Friday at his flat. Kabir admitted he had flirted with Rhea in Goa and stayed in casual contact.
“How casual?” Tanya asked.
“Messages. Coffee.”
“Kissing?”
Kabir paused. “Once in Goa.”
“After you and I?”
“The last night.”
Tanya remembered Rhea’s joke on the beach.
“And Delhi?”
“We have met.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It has not been exclusive or serious.”
“Physical?”
Kabir looked away. “Yes.”
The truth arrived in one controlled portion. He did not mention Meher or Naina.
Tanya stood.
“I need to go.”
“Tanya.”
“Did she know about me?”
“I did not discuss you.”
“So no.”
“No.”
“Were you going to tell us?”
“I am telling you now.”
“After I asked for two months.”
She left the flat. Kabir did not follow.
In the cab, Tanya opened Rhea’s chat. She typed: Are you sleeping with Kabir?
Before she could send it, Rhea called.
Tanya answered but said nothing.
“Can we meet tomorrow?” Rhea asked.
Her voice sounded controlled and frightened.
“Why?”
“Kabir.”
There it was.
“What about him?” Tanya asked, buying one final second of ignorance.
“Not on the phone.”
“Tell me one thing. Are you seeing him?”
Rhea breathed out. “Yes.”
Tanya closed her eyes.
“He told me,” she said.
“Everything?”
“Is there an everything?”
Rhea did not answer.
They agreed to speak the next day. Rhea then called Kabir and demanded the café meeting that would lead to the screenshots.
Saturday morning, Tanya taught an optional exam-preparation session. She had slept three hours. Thirty students arrived with questions about literary conflict.
“Internal conflict,” she wrote on the board, “exists when a character holds incompatible desires.”
Aakash raised his hand. “Like wanting to know something and not wanting the answer?”
Tanya stared at him.
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”
After class, Arjun brought tea.
“Boyfriend who isn’t?”
“Seeing my best friend.”
Arjun sat down. “Did she know?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then she is not the enemy.”
“I know.”
“Your face has not received the memo.”
“Stop repeating useful lines.”
He placed the tea on her desk. “What will you do?”
“Meet her. Ask him. End it.”
“Order?”
“Unknown.”
At Meher’s apartment that evening, Tanya and Rhea initially intended to tell only Meher and Naina about their overlap. Meher had invited everyone for dinner before the crisis. Rhea arrived with her screenshots. Tanya arrived with Kabir’s partial confession.
Naina and Meher entered the conversation carrying their own secrets.
The identical messages illuminated before anyone found the correct opening.
Rhea photographed them because facts were easier than speech.
“What are you doing?” Tanya asked.
“Finding context,” Rhea said.
Meher looked at Kabir’s name on Tanya’s screen.
Naina looked at the same name on Rhea’s.
Before the emergency meeting was even called, four women knew enough to stop sleeping.
Tanya spent that sleepless night reconstructing conversations.
Naina’s “someone from Goa.” Meher’s rooftop photograph. Rhea’s favourite-lawyer tag. The masala tea, the loyalty card, the repeated line about luggage. Each clue had been visible. Tanya’s failure was not stupidity; it was interpretation shaped by desire.
At two, she opened the group chat and searched Kabir’s name. It appeared twenty-three times before the current week, usually inside jokes about Goa. Meher had asked whether anyone knew his event company. Naina had requested the café name he recommended. Rhea had called him “professionally slippery.” Tanya had reacted to all three without asking why.
At three, Kabir messaged.
Are you awake?
Tanya typed Yes and did not send.
He called. She watched the phone ring out.
Rhea was also awake, converting hurt into documentation. She found restaurant payments, cab receipts and a photograph of Kabir’s kitchen containing Tanya’s engraved pen. The pen had appeared in the background of a casual picture he sent Rhea while claiming to be alone.
Meher examined her own photographs. In one mirror, Naina’s masala-tea box sat on the counter. In another, Tanya’s green dress hung over a chair. Kabir had not merely recycled places; he had allowed women’s objects to share rooms while their owners remained separate.
Naina built the first timeline before dawn. She colour-coded each woman, then changed colours twice because assigning Kabir’s relationships brand identities felt obscene. She used initials instead.
At seven-thirty, the group chat received her message:
I think this is larger than Tanya and Rhea. We meet today. No separate calls to Kabir until then.
Meher replied: Too late. He called me. I did not answer.
Tanya wrote: Same.
Rhea: I spoke to him yesterday. He lied by category.
Naina: Eleven. Rhea’s. Bring phones.
For the first time in months, all four names appeared beside one decision.
Kabir, meanwhile, attempted separate repair.
He called Tanya, Rhea, Meher and Naina in that order, unconsciously ranking urgency rather than harm. Nobody answered. He messaged Dev.
They know.
Dev replied: Tell whole truth once.
Kabir wrote: Need to speak privately.
Privacy is how you built it.
At eight, Kabir drove toward Tanya’s neighbourhood and turned back. Appearing uninvited would violate her rule and look desperate. At nine, he ordered four coffees because each woman had once responded to care through routine. He still imagined he could enter the room carrying personalised knowledge and be recognised as more than the deception.
The coffees would become the worst detail.
Before leaving home, Tanya told Sunita the workshop was cancelled and she was going to Rhea’s.
“Problem?” Sunita asked.
“Possibly four.”
“You are one of four.”
“That is the problem.”
Sunita handed her a container of food.
“Do not take snacks to emergency,” Tanya said.
“Then return them.”
Tanya carried the container. At Rhea’s apartment it sat unopened beside printed screenshots, a domestic object witnessing friendship rupture.
The emergency meeting would begin with evidence and end with old wounds. But before anyone arrived, Rhea stood alone in the living room and moved four chairs into a circle.
Then she changed them to one side of the table, as if preparing court.
Naina arrived first and moved them back.
“We are not prosecuting one another,” she said.
“We may prosecute him.”
“Later.”
Meher entered next, saw the chairs and sat farthest from both. Tanya arrived last carrying Sunita’s food.
“My mother sent parathas,” she said.
For one second, the absurd normality nearly saved them.
Then Rhea placed the identical messages on the table.
Chapter Seven began.
Three weeks before that photograph, Tanya and Kabir spent a Sunday pretending the word boyfriend had no relevance to their argument.
The plan had been breakfast and a drive. Kabir arrived outside Tanya’s building at seven-thirty with coffee, sunglasses and no destination.
“You organised an event without a venue?” she asked, getting into the car.
“Experience begins with uncertainty.”
“Kidnapping also uses that line.”
He handed her his phone. A map showed Neemrana.