The question hung in the room.
'How long have you been spreading your legs for that man.'
The specific quality of it — the grammar of it, the way it was phrased, the clinical, degraded reduction of twelve hours and six years and a pregnancy and a marriage down to the single crude, accurate sentence.
Meera stood in the morning light.
Her whole body trembled.
Not the fine, post-sex tremor of hours ago. The different tremor — the deep, structural, full-body shake of someone who had received a sentence that was too true and too wrong at the same time and the body did not know what to do with the combination.
"'What—'"
The word came out of her as a gasp. The single syllable of someone whose brain had produced a beginning and could not locate the continuation.
She looked at him.
At Vikram's face.
