She Returned to Expose His Sister, He Won Her Heart Again novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Bait

Mira leaves the stranger's session linked and, with Nandini, writes a bait message about a Thursday café meeting; on Thursday she watches Rhea walk in wearing Mira's missing blue dupatta and take an envelope from a man.

Mira did not log the stranger out.

She sat on the edge of the bed with her thumb over the button and thought it through.

If she removed the session, Rhea would only link another one, and Mira would never learn when or how.

She turned the phone face down on the quilt.

Dev came in an hour later and sat on his side of the bed to take off his watch.

They had slept in this room for fourteen months.

In all that time they had said perhaps a hundred sentences that were not about the household.

"Good night," he said.

"Good night."

He lay down with his back to her, and the bed stayed wide and cold between them.

In her first life, she had lain awake every night like this, working out what she had done wrong.

Now she lay awake and looked at the back of his neck, and she was angry, which was easier.

Breakfast was parathas and Rhea's mango pickle.

Rhea set a cup of tea in front of Mira with one sugar in it.

"Did you sleep? You look pale again," Rhea said. "Eat the paratha, beta, don't just push it around."

"I'm eating," Mira said, and ate.

Dev read his newspaper at the far end of the table. Harish read his own.

Neither of them had mentioned the earrings, which meant both of them were thinking about the earrings.

At the bank, Nandini Bose was already at her desk.

Her glasses were pushed into her hair and she held half a samosa.

"You look terrible," Nandini said. "Sit."

Mira sat. She closed the glass door of the small meeting room first.

She did not tell Nandini about the truck, or the rain, or the first life.

She could not have made a sensible sentence out of them.

She told her the part that could be proved.

"Someone is reading my messages. There's a linked session on my phone. A laptop I don't own."

Nandini put down the samosa.

"Who has your phone?"

"Nobody. It sits on my pillow all night."

"So they never touched the phone," Nandini said. "They scanned the code once, and they've been reading ever since."

She frowned. "Who has been in your room?"

"Everyone who lives in the house."

"Mira."

"I think I know who," Mira said. "I need to see it myself first."

Nandini looked at her for a long moment. "Fine. Then don't log them out. Make them show you."

"That's what I was thinking."

"You write something that only the reader of that chat can act on," Nandini said. "Then we watch who acts."

She pulled over a notepad. "Something small. Something they'll find irresistible."

They wrote it together, while the sun moved across the meeting room table.

Mira picked up her phone and typed to Nandini, in the chat anyone would read.

I'm returning an old college friend's notes on Thursday at four, Café Rustom. Don't tell anyone. It will look strange.

There was no such friend in Delhi, and no notes.

Nandini read it over her shoulder. "That's a lot of rope."

"She has always liked rope," Mira said.

"She? You said you didn't know who."

"I said I needed to see it."

Nandini let it go, but she wrote on the notepad, in capitals, THURSDAY, and underlined it twice.

The next three days were the longest Mira had lived in either life.

She ate Rhea's food and thanked Rhea for the tea.

She let Rhea touch her shoulder, and every time she thought of the pawnshop slip she kept her face still.

On Wednesday evening, Dev found her on the veranda and stood beside her without speaking for a while.

"Papa locked the earrings away," he said finally. "He told me to tell you it was a sensible idea."

"Thank you."

"Was it? Sensible?" He did not look at her. "You were not like that before."

"Before what?"

"Before last Sunday."

She looked at his hands on the railing.

They were big and scarred across one knuckle, and she had never once said aloud how gentle they were.

"I just want my things written down," she said. "That's all."

He nodded slowly and went in.

On Thursday she told her manager she had a dentist's appointment.

At ten to four, Mira sat in the passenger seat of Nandini's little grey hatchback.

A newspaper lay open on her knees, and Café Rustom was across the road.

As far as the message went, Mira was meant to be inside that café.

At four minutes past, a woman in a green silk kurta came down the pavement with a blue dupatta folded over her arm.

It was Rhea, and the dupatta was Mira's. It had been missing from her cupboard since Monday.

She did not look around.

She pushed the glass door open and sat at the table by the window.

A man in a grey shirt stood up from the next table and set a thick envelope in front of her.

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