The ten-block walk home was exactly what Naina needed. The breeze wafting up from the bay ruffled her skirt and she patted it down, feeling where Vansh’s hands had trailed up her skin. It was a miracle he hadn’t followed her, but she’d take the small victory.

When she passed Yash’s condo, their makeshift office, her heart cramped so hard that pain radiated down her limbs. Had it really been only months since Yash’s victory party on the Raje estate? How had Naina thought she’d ever be done with the Rajes? One was never done with the Rajes.

The disappointment in Mina Auntie’s eyes was going to haunt her forever. If she’d been cold before, today she’d been downright livid.

As Naina approached her building, her eyes fell on a portly man leaning on the wall next to her door. A portly man in an expensive coat who made every bad feeling inside Naina expand and slither around even as it made the icy numbness return.

If she’d thought her evening had gone badly until now, this was about to make everything that had happened feel like a picnic.

What had she ever done to deserve this? Was it too late to pretend to not have seen him?

“Knightlina,” he said, and a horrible shiver ran down Naina’s spine.

“Please don’t call me that.”

“It is your name. It is who you are. Just because you changed it on a piece of paper doesn’t make you someone else.”

Was it even possible to feel this much hatred for a person who’d had a hand in your creation? Maybe hatred wasn’t quite accurate. She felt entirely disconnected from him. Like they lived on two different planets and some grotesque time-space glitch had made it possible for them to be talking.

She stood there with her hand on the door, wishing she could go inside and have it slam in his face. But Mummy still lived with him. Mummy, who’d finally forgiven her and been excited when Naina talked to her this morning. She’d talked about maybe turning her hobby into something else. She’d sounded happy. And she still lived with him.

“I always knew you would bring shame on the family,” he said in that ugly voice he never raised but that still somehow always made Naina feel like she was being screamed at.

Naina answered the way she always answered him, with silence.

“This is a little bit too vulgar even for you, don’t you think?” he said, pushing.

Letting the door go, Naina turned to him. “I thought the only way I could erase the shame I brought on the family was by finding a man.”

The laugh he gave was precise and cruel, Dr. Kohli in a nutshell. “You didn’t find a man. You found a child.”