Vikram had three conditions.
He presented them at the planning meeting for the Ladakh trip with the particular delivery of someone who had thought about this carefully and was not going to negotiate.
"First," he said, "we fly to Leh, not drive. The road from Manali takes two days minimum and I am not putting you in a car for two days on mountain roads when we don't know who is watching."
Aanya had intended to drive. She said nothing.
"Second," he said, "we travel as a small party. You, Tenzin, Deepa. No Foundation staff, no Rathore household branding. Private booking, different names on the accommodation."
"Tenzin's name is on the monastery record," Aanya said.
"Then only Tenzin's name," Vikram said. "Everyone else is a travel companion, purpose unclear."
"Third," he said, "I send two of my people ahead. They'll be in Leh for forty-eight hours before you arrive. They'll be there when you're there. They'll come home when you come home." He looked at her over his reading glasses. "This is not negotiable, Aanya-ji. Whoever those investigators were, they traced back to someone adjacent to your grandfather. We don't know what that means yet and until we do, you are not taking a nineteen-year-old boy to a remote monastery without support I trust."
There was a pause.
"Fine," Aanya said.
Vikram looked slightly surprised. He had prepared for more argument.
"I'm not unreasonable," she said, which was a thing she said when she had already agreed internally and simply hadn't confirmed it out loud yet.
She told Tenzin the conditions that evening in the study. He listened. Turned the prayer beads once.
"Vikram-ji is right," he said.
"I know he's right," she said. "That's why I agreed."
"I just meant—" he stopped. "Thank you. For not— for agreeing without making it about whether it was necessary." He turned the prayer beads again. "Some people, when you accept safety measures, make it feel like you've admitted to being afraid. You didn't do that."
She looked at her file.
"Being careful and being afraid are different things," she said.
"I know," he said. "I know you know that." He looked at the copper snow leopard at his wrist. "I just wanted to say thank you."
She went back to the file.
He went back to the quarterly report.
Outside, the Jaipur May evening was doing its thing — the heat and the bougainvillea and the sound of the neighborhood settling into its after-dinner quality — and inside the study the lamp held its circle, and both of them worked, and the trip to Ladakh was in two weeks.
They flew out of Jaipur on a Thursday morning in the last week of June.
Tenzin had never been on a plane.
This was not something he had mentioned when they booked the tickets, because it had not occurred to him to mention it — it seemed like information that was neither useful nor urgent until he was sitting in seat 14B and the aircraft started moving and his expression went through a specific sequence that Deepa clocked in approximately two seconds.
"First time?" she said.
"Yes," he said, with the quality of someone maintaining dignity.
"It's fine," she said.
"I know it's fine," he said. "I'm fine."
Aanya, in the window seat, looked over at him. She had the expression she had when she was deciding whether to say something.
She looked back at the window.
"The takeoff is loud," she said, to the window. "And there's a moment of pressure. It's brief."
"Okay," he said.
"After that it's — nothing. Smooth." She paused. "Like driving, but quieter once you're up."
He looked at his hands on the armrests. "Okay," he said again.
The aircraft accelerated. The pressure came. He gripped the armrest — briefly, the automatic grip of something unexpected — and then they were up and the noise shifted register and below them Jaipur spread out in its pink-and-ochre morning quality, the city looking exactly like itself from above, recognizable and strange.
He looked out the window past her.
The city below. The land. The geometry of fields and roads and then the desert-dry quality of Rajasthan giving way to the gradual rise of the north. He was entirely still, looking at it.
She watched him look at it.
"Alright?" she said.
"This is extraordinary," he said, in the tone of someone who had just seen something that reorganized his understanding of scale.
She looked out the window with him.
Ladakh was two hours away.
Leh appeared below them as they descended — the high valley, the specific quality of the altitude light that was unlike anywhere else, the brown-gold of the mountains and the thin strip of town and the distant glitter of the Indus. The sky was the Ladakhi blue, the one that had no equivalent at sea level, the one that looked like someone had turned up the saturation on reality.
Tenzin, still at the window, had gone very quiet.
She did not ask. She watched his face — the recognition in it, the particular quality of return.
The plane touched down. He let out a long breath.
"Home," he said, to the window, to himself, to nobody in particular.
She looked at his profile. The copper snow leopard at his wrist. The prayer beads.
She said nothing. Some things required witnesses, not commentary.
Vikram's people were waiting at the small terminal — two of them, dressed like ordinary Leh visitors, carrying the specific relaxed alertness of professionals at rest. They acknowledged Deepa with the minimal eye contact of people who had been briefed and would be present without being visible.
The drive to Thiksey took twenty minutes. Tenzin sat in the back and did not sleep, which was unusual — he slept in cars reliably, a monastery habit, the body taking rest when rest was offered. But this was twenty minutes through the valley he had grown up in, past the villages he had learned the names of, along the road where the mountains were familiar and the smell of the air was the specific thin clean smell of high altitude that you carried in your body as memory and didn't know you were missing until it came back.
He didn't comment on most of it. But when the road curved and Thiksey appeared — the monastery rising in its tiers against the mountain, white and ochre, the enormous Maitreya Buddha visible from the road — he went entirely still.
"Oh," he said.
Aanya looked where he was looking.
She had seen photographs. The reality was something else — the scale of it, the way it belonged so completely to the landscape that it seemed impossible it had been built rather than grown, the specific quality of a place that had been sacred for many centuries and knew it.
She looked at his face.
He was looking at the monastery with the expression of someone seeing the face of something they had loved for a long time.
Jamyang was waiting at the outer gate.
He had come down from the monks' quarters to wait, which Tenzin would understand later — he had been standing there for fifteen minutes, which was how Jamyang expressed significant feeling about something.
He looked the same and not the same. A year was not a long time, but Tenzin had changed enough that the year was visible, and Jamyang, seeing him walking up the path, went very still for a moment.
Tenzin stopped a few feet away.
They looked at each other.
"Jamyang-la," Tenzin said.
Jamyang looked at him. The slightly moist quality of his eyes. He had buried their parents. He had carried fifteen years of a secret to protect this person walking toward him who was now, clearly, different from the person who had left.
"You're taller," Jamyang said.
"You always say that," Tenzin said.
"It keeps being true," Jamyang said.
And then Tenzin crossed the last few feet and Jamyang put a hand on the back of his head — not a hug, but the specific weight of a hand that had been doing this since Tenzin was four years old and could not stop now — and they stood there for a moment in the morning Ladakhi light.
Aanya watched from a slight distance with Deepa. She had instinctively given them space — the movement backward was automatic, the reading of what the moment required.
Deepa looked at her.
Aanya looked at the monastery gate.
After a moment, Jamyang stepped back and looked over at Aanya with the careful attention of someone who had heard significant things and was now seeing the original.
He put his palms together.
She returned the gesture.
He looked at her for a moment — the wheelchair, the particular quality of her stillness, the reading he was doing — and then he looked at Tenzin, and something passed through his face that was too layered to name. Approval was part of it. Something that was closer to relief was another part.
"Come in," he said. "Rinpoche-ji is waiting."
The head lama, Rinpoche-ji, was very old and very sharp, which Aanya had been told and now confirmed. He had the quality of extreme age in people who had been attending to the contents of their own minds for many decades — a specific lightweight aliveness, the senses acute, the eyes seeing more than they appeared to.
He received them in the senior monks' hall, and he looked at Aanya with the look of someone checking a calculation.
"The young woman with the Kaal Sarp Dosha," he said.
"The fainting spells have stopped," she said.
"Of course they have," he said, with the equanimity of someone for whom the outcome had never been in question. He looked at Tenzin. "And you are well."
"I am very well, Rinpoche-ji," Tenzin said.
The old man looked at them both together for a moment with an expression that was not readable but was definitely something.
"Guruji Nandana chose well," he said. "He usually does." He waved a hand. "Jamyang will show you the guest quarters. You'll stay three nights?"
"Three nights," Aanya said.
"Good," he said. "The mountains require time. You can't arrive and leave and have seen anything." He looked at her. "You've never been to Ladakh."
"No," she said.
"Then look," he said. "Put the files away and look."
She looked at him.
"How do you know about the files?" she said.
"Guruji mentioned you," he said, and waved them out with the gesture of someone who had said what needed saying and was done.
The monks who had been Tenzin's were not, technically, supposed to abandon their afternoon duties to mob the guest courtyard.
They did it anyway, with the quality of people who had been reasoning their way around a rule for approximately thirty minutes and had arrived at but we're not working, we're just also in the courtyard coincidentally.
There were six of them — ranging from early twenties to one who was maybe seventeen and had been a novice when Tenzin left and was now visibly proud of having grown taller than him in the intervening year. They poured into the courtyard with the accumulated energy of people who had been saving things to say for eleven months.
"Tenzin-la! Your hair—"
"He looks different—"
"He looks like a person from outside—"
"That's because he is a person from outside now—"
"Lobsang said you'd forget how to do anything properly—"
"I didn't say that, I said he might get soft—"
Tenzin stood in the middle of this with the expression of someone being struck by several things simultaneously and finding all of them welcome. He was taller than most of them. He had been, when he left, one of the youngest. The balance had shifted.
One of them — the youngest — looked at his wrist. "What is that?"
Tenzin looked at the prayer beads and the copper snow leopard. "A snow leopard," he said. "Someone gave it to me."
All six of them looked at Aanya, who was standing at the courtyard entrance with Deepa, watching.
She looked back at them with the expression she used for situations that were going to require management and in which she was choosing her approach.
"Your — " the youngest started.
"Yes," Tenzin said, which was an answer to an unfinished question, delivered with the calm of someone who knew what the question was going to be.
The youngest looked at Aanya again. She held his gaze without expression.
"She's very—" he started.
"Careful," Tenzin said.
"—composed," the youngest finished, in a different tone than he had started.
Aanya looked at Tenzin. Tenzin looked at the monks.
"Lobsang-la," he said. "You said I might get soft."
Lobsang, who was twenty-three and had the look of someone who regretted some of what he had said to the youngest, cleared his throat. "I said might."
"I would like to discuss that later," Tenzin said, with the mildness that was his version of a challenge.
Lobsang looked at his sandals.
Jamyang had arranged the guest quarters thoughtfully — two rooms, side by side, the traditional style of the monastery's guest wing with low cots and thick wool blankets and windows that faced the valley. Simple and sufficient and clean.
After they had settled their things, Jamyang came to find Tenzin.
Aanya understood, without being told, that this was a conversation she was not part of. She took the valley view Rinpoche-ji had ordered her to attend to and went to sit at the courtyard wall.
Deepa sat beside her.
They sat in the thin high-altitude sun and looked at the Indus valley below — the river catching the light, the fields, the distant peaks, the specific quality of the light at this elevation that made everything look more itself.
"He'll be alright," Deepa said.
"I know," Aanya said.
"Jamyang is good," Deepa said. "Whatever he has to tell him, he'll do it right."
Aanya looked at the mountains.
She thought about fifteen years of a secret kept for love and protection. About Jamyang at a grave in the rain, making it unmarked so that the wrong people couldn't find it. About the boy who had become the nineteen-year-old who had come back to where he started.
"Yes," she said. "He will."
They sat in the Ladakhi afternoon and said nothing else, because it was enough to sit, and Rinpoche-ji had been correct about needing to look.
In the afternoon, Tenzin found her.
He came into the main courtyard where she had been talking with one of the younger monks about the monastery's history — she had asked, because she was Aanya and she always read the room she was in — and he looked at her face and she looked at his face and the thing that had happened with Jamyang was visible, the way things were visible in him.
"Okay?" she said.
"He told me — he told me the details," he said. "The full ones. About the burial. About—" he stopped. "About why he kept it the way he did." His jaw worked. "He said they wanted to name me after my grandfather. The Namgyal grandfather. My mother refused. She said—" he stopped again. "She said the name Sonam was his father's name, the name from Ngawang's family, and that was the name she would give him."
Aanya looked at him.
"Sonam means merit," he said. "Accumulated goodness. She chose it because she wanted that for me." He pressed his lips together. "She argued with her family about it. My grandfather — the Namgyal one — he has never spoken her name since she left. She argued with him and chose this name and then she—"
He stopped.
She waited.
"I want to visit them tomorrow," he said. "Jamyang will take us."
"Yes," she said. "Whenever you're ready."
He looked at the Maitreya Buddha visible above the courtyard, the massive gold face serene and enormous against the Ladakhi sky.
"She fought for my name," he said, and it wasn't said to her, exactly, but she heard it and held it carefully.
After evening prayers — which Aanya attended without participating, standing at the back of the assembly hall and watching the monks chant in the low lamplight — Tenzin found her in the corridor.
"There's something I want to show you," he said.
He took her to the prayer hall — not the main assembly hall but the smaller one, the one closer to the monks' quarters, the one she had passed earlier without going in. A low doorway, the smell of incense, the butter lamps in their rows, the thangka paintings in their colors on the walls.
She stopped at the doorway.
"Come in," he said.
She came in.
He pointed to the cushion on the left side, low, the position for someone accompanying without participating. "Will you sit?"
She looked at the cushion. At the room. At the butter lamps.
She sat.
He knelt at the prayer mat before the central altar — the Medicine Buddha, blue and serene and ancient, the traditional iconography that she recognized from the photographs she had seen at Thiksey when she was preparing for this trip. He picked up the small wooden mallet. He looked at the prayer text.
He looked at her, briefly.
"I'm going to chant the Sukhavati prayer," he said. "For my parents. But also—" he paused. "Also for your peace. If you don't mind."
She looked at the Medicine Buddha.
"I don't mind," she said.
He turned back to the altar and bowed three times. He began to chant.
The sound filled the small hall in the specific way of a space that had been built for this — the low ceiling holding the sound, the stone walls giving it resonance, the butter lamps making their flickering light. His voice was neither performative nor self-conscious. It was the voice of someone who had been doing this since childhood and had come back to it after a year away and found it waiting, unchanged.
She had not expected this.
She had been in prayer halls before — as a child, following her family, performing presence. She knew how to be appropriately still. She had never felt anything in one.
She felt something now, and she was not sure what to do with that.
The Sukhavati prayer was long. He chanted for nearly two hours. She sat. The butter lamps held their light. Outside the small hall windows, the Ladakhi night was a different dark from anywhere else — deeper, the stars at altitude visible in the way they weren't in Jaipur, the mountain cold pressing against the glass.
In the last thirty minutes, she stopped thinking about what she was thinking and simply sat.
The final syllable resonated and then the wooden mallet struck the small drum — a single, clean, resonant note that seemed to take the whole accumulated sound of the past two hours and release it all at once.
Silence.
She breathed.
He bowed three times. Set down the mallet. Turned around.
She was looking at him.
He had the expression of someone who has gone somewhere deep and returned, the way she had only seen in him before in sleep — the specific openness of having been fully present, without armor, without management.
He opened his arms slightly, the involuntary gesture of someone whose body had made a request before the mind had checked it.
She crossed the small hall and sat beside him on the prayer mat.
He looked at her.
"Thank you," she said.
"I wanted to," he said. "Rinpoche-ji says the Sukhavati prayer holds peace for the living as much as the dead." He looked at the altar. "You work so hard," he said, quietly. "And you carry it without— you don't tell anyone when it's heavy." He turned the prayer beads. "I wanted to give you something you couldn't manage or organize or plan. Just—" he looked at the Medicine Buddha. "Just peace, if you'd take it."
She looked at her hands in her lap.
She thought: nobody has ever done anything like that for me.
She thought: I don't know what to do with that.
She said: "Your knees."
He looked at her.
"You've been kneeling for two hours," she said.
He looked at his knees. "They're—"
"Come on," she said, standing, and held a hand to help him up.
He took it.
He was, in fact, stiff — the two hours had been two hours, and the cushion on the prayer mat was thin. He stood carefully, the specific careful movement of someone whose knees had an opinion.
She looked at him. "Can you walk?"
"Yes," he said, which was mostly true.
In the guest room, she made him sit on the edge of the low cot.
Deepa had packed the medicinal oil — she had packed everything, Deepa, including three contingency items that Aanya had looked at and not asked about, because sometimes you simply accepted that Deepa was thorough.
She sat on the low stool. She rolled up the leg of his kurta to the knee.
"This is—" he started.
"Quiet," she said.
She poured the oil into her palm and began to work it in. Her hands were precise and unself-conscious, the way they were when she did things she had decided to do — no performance, no announcement. The oil was warm from being carried in the bag and the room and the residual heat of the day.
He went still.
Not the stillness of discomfort — the other kind. The kind that came when something was being done for him and he was, with some effort, allowing it.
She worked through the muscle on either side of the knee, the area below the kneecap, the tendons. She had been paying attention to Dr. Kavya's explanations for months and she knew what she was doing.
He made the sound of someone who had been carrying something they had not acknowledged.
"Hurt?" she said.
"The opposite," he said.
The butter lamp she had carried from the hall gave the room its light — low and warm, the same quality as the prayer hall. Outside, the Ladakhi night was doing the thing Ladakhi nights did, which was being profoundly cold and profoundly clear and profoundly itself.
After a while he said, sleepily: "Guruji Nandana came to Thiksey three times."
"I know," she said.
"He came and he watched me and he talked with Jamyang and with Rinpoche-ji and he—" he paused. His voice was taking on the quality of someone losing the fight against sleep. "He knew about my parents. He knew about the investigation Jamyang did. He knew someone might come looking eventually." He turned his head slightly. "He chose me knowing all of that. He thought — Jamyang said he thought — that putting me here, with you, with this house, with—" he stopped.
She looked at him.
His eyes were closing.
"He thought I'd be safe here," he murmured. "He thought you'd—"
He was asleep.
She looked at his face.
The prayer beads at his wrist. The copper snow leopard. The legs stretched out on the cot, the oil still warm on his knees.
She finished applying the oil to both knees carefully, even though he was asleep and couldn't feel it anymore, because it needed to be done. Then she set the cloth aside and washed her hands at the small basin.
She was about to leave when she heard it.
A sound.
From the roof.
The sound was small — a displacement of weight, the specific quality of a footstep trained to be light on an old roof, the kind of sound that would not exist to someone who had not been listening for it. She had been listening for it since Vikram's briefing, in the way you listened for things you had been told were possible, the specific alertness of preparation.
She stood still.
The footstep stopped.
A pause — the pause of someone checking, orienting, confirming something below. Then the sound of tiles: a slow, careful displacement, someone looking through. Looking in at the room beside this one — Tenzin's room, which they had been in earlier in the evening before moving to the prayer hall.
The tiles replaced. The weight shifted.
Someone coming down.
She looked at Tenzin — asleep, unaware, the prayer beads still. She made a decision in approximately three seconds and came to the window, which was the angle of the approaching figure's descent, and she signaled into the darkness in the direction where Vikram's people would be.
The response came back — a single small movement of shadow. Acknowledged. Present.
She went out.
The person dropping from the guest quarter roof was dressed in dark clothing, face covered, and landed with the quality of a trained professional. They had not expected anyone in the corridor. They saw Aanya standing there and stopped.
They reached for her.
She stepped aside — not dramatically, just the slight efficient movement of someone who had decided the attack was going to miss before it started — and the hand caught air.
The person recalibrated. Looked at her.
In the dark, she could see their eyes — sharp, assessing, recalibrating the threat level from an inconvenient witness to this is more complicated.
"You're looking for someone," she said, in a low voice. "You've come to the wrong place tonight."
The person said nothing.
"Whoever sent you," she said, "they gave you the wrong information. The person in that room is my husband. If you move toward that door, I will ensure you don't get back up."
She said it with the specific quality of someone for whom this is a statement of logistics rather than a threat.
The person looked at her. Looked at the room. Their posture shifted — a confirmation that this information mattered, that the person in the room was the intended target, that the arrangement she had described (her: between them and the room) was a problem.
They moved.
She was ready for them to move.
She was not, she would acknowledge later to Vikram, ready for how fast. The person was trained in a way that was specific and serious, and the first strike was aimed not to subdue but to incapacitate, and she deflected it but it was close enough that she revised her assessment of who was behind this significantly upward.
This is not an investigator, she thought. This is a professional.
She fought without speaking. She had learned — in this life, from Vikram's quiet insistence when she was sixteen and still learning who was after her — that fighting required every available piece of attention and conversation was not something she could afford.
The person was faster than her. She was smarter than them, which was a different kind of faster. She kept the corridor, kept the door, kept the geometry that meant they could not pass her without going through her.
She called back over her shoulder: "Now."
Vikram's two people came from the outer courtyard entrance. The person in dark clothing looked at the three of them and reached into their sleeve.
The dagger caught the moonlight through the corridor window — Ladakhi moonlight, the particular bright quality of it at altitude, throwing the silver clearly.
It left their hand aimed at her.
She caught it.
The edge went across her left hand's index finger as she caught it — the same finger, the thought came through specifically, slightly absurd — and she held the dagger between her index and middle fingers and looked at the person in dark clothing who was now being restrained by Vikram's two people and was not, anymore, going anywhere.
Blood ran down her hand and dripped onto the stone floor.
She looked at it with the mild expression of someone doing a damage assessment.
"Well," she said, to nobody in particular.
The room door opened.
Tenzin stood in the doorway.
He had been asleep three minutes ago. The sound had woken him — not fully, the three-quarters waking of someone coming up from deep sleep, the eyes not fully focused, the hand reaching for the prayer beads automatically.
He looked at the corridor. At Vikram's people holding the dark-clothed figure. At Aanya standing with a dagger between her fingers and blood running down her hand.
"Aanya-ji—"
He stepped forward.
His knees, which had been kneeling for two hours and had been treated and had been asleep for less than fifteen minutes, made their opinion known immediately. He came down — not a fall, a controlled loss of altitude, one knee to the stone, the other following, the specific involuntary descent of legs that had run out of structural argument.
"Don't—" she said, already crossing to him.
He was on both knees on the stone corridor floor looking up at her, and she was crouching in front of him with the bleeding hand and the confiscated dagger and the expression of someone who had just been in a fight and was now deeply annoyed at herself for something else entirely.
"I told you not to move quickly," she said.
"I woke up and you were—" he looked at her hand. "You're bleeding."
"It's a cut," she said. "My knees did not give out."
He looked at his knees on the stone floor.
"That's fair," he said.
Jamyang appeared from the inner courtyard entrance — someone had woken him, or he had heard, or he was simply Jamyang, who was always where things needed a steady presence. He took in the corridor in one sweep: the restrained figure, Aanya crouching with a bleeding hand, Tenzin on his knees.
He looked at Aanya.
She looked back at him.
"The dark-clothed person," she said. "Vikram Sood in Jaipur will need to speak with them. Do not let them make any calls until I tell you to."
"Yes," Jamyang said, with the tone of someone who had decided some time ago that this woman was a person he should listen to.
He went to deal with it.
Aanya looked at Tenzin.
Tenzin looked at Aanya.
"Can you stand?" she said.
"Yes," he said, which was again mostly true.
She took his arm and helped him up, the bleeding hand and the uninjured one both, careful and efficient, and he rose without putting weight on the knees more than necessary.
He looked at her hand.
"It needs cleaning," he said.
"I know," she said.
"Is it—"
"It's a cut," she said again. "I've had worse."
He looked at her face in the moonlight through the corridor window — the particular quality of her after something difficult, which was the same as her before something difficult and during something difficult, which was steady and present and entirely without performance.
He thought: whoever came for me tonight, she stood between me and them.
He thought: she caught a thrown dagger with her bare hand.
He turned to say something and she was already looking at him with the expression that meant don't.
"Not yet," she said. "Let me see to the hand first."
"Okay," he said.
She took him back into the room.
Ladakh was cold and clear outside the window and the butter lamp was still going on the low table, and Vikram's people were in the corridor with whoever had come and been stopped, and his knees ached on the wool blanket, and she was beside him with the medical kit from Deepa's bag unwrapping the cut with the focused precision of someone who had decided this was the task and was doing the task.
He watched her work.
He thought: I will not make her say the things I already know.
He thought: I know them.
He put his hand over hers — the uninjured one, briefly, just the weight of it — and then took it away.
She looked at him.
"I know," he said.
She looked back at the hand. Finished wrapping it.
"Go to sleep," she said.
"My room is in the corridor," he said.
"Use this one," she said. "I'll take the other."
"Your things—"
"Are portable," she said. "Sleep."
He lay back on the low cot. The prayer beads at his wrist. The copper snow leopard. The Ladakhi night outside, cold and clear and full of stars.
She went to the door.
"Aanya-ji," he said.
She stopped.
"Tomorrow we visit the graves," he said. "You'll come?"
She looked at the doorframe.
"Yes," she said.
She went out.
He lay in the dark and listened to the night — the silence of high altitude that was not silence but simply a different frequency of sound, the mountain-quiet that he had grown up in and had been missing without knowing he was missing it.
He thought about the prayer hall. About two hours of chanting and her sitting at the side cushion, present, not leaving. About I wanted to give you something you couldn't manage or organize.
He thought about her hand on the prayer beads and the snow leopard and the corridor and the dagger she had caught.
He thought: she is the most extraordinary person I have ever met.
He thought: tomorrow I am going to visit my parents' graves.
He thought: I will tell them her name.
He slept.