When the shock of Daiwik's confession faded, the world did not soften; it sharpened. Every familiar object in the clinic—metal trays, folded bandages, the wooden box where I kept his letters—took on the metallic taste of betrayal. I moved through the day like someone wearing someone else's skin: my hands did what they'd always done—clean, stitch, soothe—but my mind rewound and replayed every look, every silenced moment, until I could no longer tell whether the memory belonged to me or to another version of my life.
It was late afternoon when Nandini appeared at the tent flap, as if she'd been summoned by some private weather. She looked smaller than usual in the clinic's bright light; the white coat hung on her like a borrowed banner. Her eyes found mine and did not look away. There was that particular tightness at the corners of her mouth—an expression I know well from long nights in hospitals when interventions fail and doctors are left holding explanation like a blunt instrument.
"Kavya." She closed the flap behind her and stepped in like someone entering a confession booth. "We need to talk. Privately."
My throat had not yet found its steady voice for the week; it came out thinner than I wanted. "Is this about the chain of custody?"
She shook her head once, fast. "No." Then she hesitated. "It's about something older. I couldn't wait until everything in the tent quieted down."
I thought of a thousand older things: my mother's chemotherapy, the smell of parathas in my childhood kitchen, the first moment Shash had looked at me in that way that made the world fall into my chest. I thought of secrets like snow—how they pile up until they shift and bury people alive.
"Sit," I said. There was a chair by the supply crates. She sat like someone settling for an ordeal.
"Before I say anything," she began, "I need you to understand: I am not trying to hurt you. What I'm about to tell you has been eating me for years."
The sentence settled between us like thin glass. I had trained men to name trauma out loud, to tag it and put it in a safe place. I had taught them that truth can be stabilizing. I wanted to believe her, because otherwise the world felt like a house of cards and I had no hands willing to rebuild it.
"Go on," I said. My voice felt clinical to my own ears.
Nandini inhaled. "Years ago—during academy days—I—" She stopped, as if she feared words could become weapons. "I had an affair with Shash."
The words fell like a door slamming in an empty hallway. For a moment I sat in the aftermath and counted small things: the number of times Nandini had hugged me in the mess tent, the number of late-night coffees she'd brought, the afternoons we'd traded patient notes while the snow fell like sleepy henna. An affair. With him. The man whose letters I kept in my pocket like talismans.
"You mean—" I let the sentence die partly so she could finish. The clinic's hum quieted, the way people's breaths do when a story becomes raw.
"Yes," she said, eyes brightening with a terrible, weary honesty. "We were young—stupid in the way young people are. It was before you met him, Kavya. I didn't... I didn't tell you because I thought it would be worse to say and then watch you lose the man you loved. I thought if I kept it private, it would remain regrettable and small, instead of something you had to fight with."
I felt my stomach drop: not simply with betrayal but with the surreal geometry of it all. Nandini—Daiwik's sister, my friend, the woman who teased me mercilessly about my "martyr kink"—had been with the man who now lay in evidence folders and pending DNA reports. The fact that it had been "before you met him" did not cushion the blow. History has a way of folding over itself like old maps; lines intersected in places I had never imagined.
"How long?" I asked. I needed details like someone needs stitches: clean edges to work with.
"Six months, maybe less," she said. "It was messy, intense. It ended because I realized... I realized he didn't love me the way I loved him. He loved something else—perhaps the idea of being wild, or the danger—but not me. Or maybe he just loved a version of himself I wasn't part of." Her hands trembled a little at the description. "We parted. I married into my work. I married the idea of skill and distance. I thought—God, I thought it would be easier for me to be your friend than to complicate your love."
My chest felt tight with a different kind of grief—the grief of learning the map beneath my feet had secret routes I had never known about. For a long while I was simply a container for facts that did not sit well inside me: his letters, her confession, Daiwik's lie. They arranged themselves into a pattern of three-way geometry that I was not sure how to inhabit without breaking.
"You kept it from me," I said. It was a fact more than an accusation.
"I kept it because I thought it would be selfish to tell you," she said, and in her voice there was a defensiveness that wanted to be absolving. "Also because I was ashamed. And because... because after we broke, I saw how he treated you. I wanted you to have that. I wanted you to be happy, even if I had loved him first."
The kitchen in my childhood used to be a place where secrets were not hidden but folded into tea. If you told your mother you had fallen in love with a man who might not be from your world, her hands would be busy giving you paratha. There, shame could be softened. Here, in the high-altitude gray, shame is sharper. Nandini's confession made the shame communal.
"You should have told me," I said, the sentence a small, precise scalpel.
She bowed her head. "I know. I know that now. I wanted to protect you from the complicated part of my past, and I wanted to protect myself from my own guilt. But there's more—"
My throat tightened. There was a hunger in me—some part of the psychologist trained to bracket information and make sense of it. I wanted context, timeline, motives. It was survival; understanding is a kind of triage.
"He told me things," Nandini said. "Not everything. But he told me things about his missions, about the sensitivity of certain operations. He asked me, once, if I would ever tell someone. I said no. At the time it was a flirtation with secrecy—stolen notes you exchange like contraband. I didn't think then that it would matter."
Her fingers curled in on themselves. "When he went away on that mission months ago—before the ambush—he wrote to me. He said the mission might require him to disappear for a while, to let the operation play out without anyone's knowledge. He asked me—he asked me not to tell anyone, not even his father, if something looked off. He wanted silence to be a shield."
The shard of information she gave me—Shash asking Nandini for silence about a possible disappearance—arranged the previous puzzle differently. Not only had Daiwik been asked to keep silence; Shash had asked another person from his past to be quiet as well. The idea that he was planning a kind of vanishing act, or at least considered the possibility, made the leak that announced him missing feel crueler—like a match tossed into a room where someone was still trying to breathe.
"Why would he confide in you?" I asked. "Why not tell me?"
Nandini's eyes were steady on mine in a way that was discomfiting. "Because we were friends then. Because he feared the thing you now bear—he feared that if you knew, you'd try to follow him, to hazard your life because love makes people reckless. He thought—" She stopped. "He thought I would be less likely to draw attention, to make a spectacle. He thought I'd be good at keeping things folded."
"And you kept it."
"I kept it," she said, the words flat and simple. "I don't have an excuse that will make it right. I only have an explanation, and it's ugly: I thought I was protecting you. I thought I was protecting the operation. I thought—God, I thought I could be the person who made the hard choices for everyone."
There was a long silence after that, the kind that carries the worn-out sound of machines adjusting in the clinic. We both seemed to listen to the same imaginary tape: the letters I had pressed to my chest, the pendant photograph that had chilled my palm, the thread of secrecy that had been woven through our lives by someone who wore uniforms as easily as breath.
"Did you tell Daiwik?" I asked.
Nandini looked at her hands, then up at me. "No. I should have. I didn't. He'd have thought—he would have thought I was betraying him. He would have thought I was choosing Shash over him." Her mouth twisted. "He was young then. He would have hated me. We were a family—that made everything more dangerous. I kept it to myself because I was cowardly and because I wanted to preserve whatever little dignity I had."
The confession cut in a way I did not expect. It wasn't simply the historical fact; it was the revelation that the people who had been closest to me—Daiwik, Nandini—had kept a geography of silence that excluded me. They had made decisions about what I could carry, rather than giving me the choice. In the clinic I'd taught veterans that agency matters; here I was, facing a theft of agency disguised as kindness.
"You knew about the pendant?" I asked, voice small. "About his asking you to keep silent about that mission?"
Nandini's lips parted. "He mentioned he had something he wanted kept close. He never named the pendant. I didn't know it would become evidence. He swore me to secrecy because he believed the mission would be compromised."
"How long has this been going on?" I asked. The question was not rhetorical. I needed timeline: when did their affair end, when did he make this request, when were you both keeping secrets? The past had been edited without my consent.
"Years," she said. "We loved in a messy, stupid way. We broke. He kept moving. He made deep, solitary commitments. When he left the front for training, he confided in me sometimes. Once, he asked whether I could keep the fact of a mission from someone who might follow him—meant as a hypothetical. I said yes, stupidly. I thought I was only playing a bit part. I never imagined it would be a floor upon which my life would rest."
I thought of the number of times Nandini came to the clinic with reports, the way she'd offered sly commentary about Shash's letters, the ways she'd always been at my elbow when I needed a friend. People hold in their silence so many reasons.
"You should have told me," I said again, not because I wanted to lecture her—though part of me did—but because the simple insistence of the sentence felt like a tether: telling me would have allowed me to own my grief and my choices.
"I know," she said. "And I am sorry. I thought if I protected you from something messy, I'd be doing the right thing. I was wrong. I was selfish."
Her apology was an interesting thing—an amalgam of contrition and practicality. She had no right to ask my forgiveness, and yet she asked it as if it were something I had to give her to maintain the world's balance. Forgiveness is rarely a single motion.
We talked for a long time after that—about what it had been like in the academy, about the boyishness of fear, about how we each learned to fold ourselves into roles that seemed to make the world safer. She told me when they had ended; she told me that she had loved and been hurt, and that guilt had been a private companion she'd carried since.
At the edge of our conversation she reached into her pocket and brought out something small and folded. It was a photocopy—faint, edges ragged—of a note. The heading read, in Shash's compact handwriting: If ever the operation needs silence, trust N. The paper was not dated. The note's ink had bled in one corner, as if it had been exposed to rain.
"I kept this," Nandini said. "Because when the radio said your name and then said wrong things, I thought maybe this would be useful. I didn't know how. I thought—if anything happened, perhaps this would show he had intended secrecy. But I never thought it would be used to retroactively justify my silence."
I felt the photocopy like an accusation from the past. The note read as both trust and premeditation. Paper can carry intent, but paper is also vulnerable to interpretation.
"Thank you," I said finally, though the word felt inadequate. For once I could not be a therapist to the world and ask everyone to sit in a chair and tell me their stories in clinical form. This was raw; it required human measures—anger, distance, and then, if possible, the work of repair.
Nandini rose to go, her shoulders a little straighter for having told me. "I will help you," she said. "With the chain-of-custody requests, with statements. I will stand with you and tell the truth of everything I know."
Her offer felt like a small salve. It could not unmake the lie. It could, however, help me begin to shape an account that belonged to me as well.
When she left, I stood in the middle of the clinic tent with his photocopy in my hand, the feel of paper under my fingertips like a small, relentless geography. I read his words again: trust N. They were both a benediction and a puzzle. Had he intended to hide, or did he simply choose weapons he thought would spare me? Did he imagine that the silence would be a shelter and not a stone?
Outside, the press trucks hummed like wasps. Somewhere, a man in polished boots plotted the next line of a press release. Inside, three lives had been altered by a constellation of secrets: the man at the center, who had chosen silence; the woman who had kept an affair secret; the friend who had obeyed a soldier's request and a brother who thought silence would save.
The night settled in and I wrote. I wrote a list of demands we would file in the morning: full evidence chain, access to forensic notes, witness statements, and the piece that felt like a righteous ember—an official record of who knew what and when. I would use my professional language; I would be meticulous and uncompromising. The paperwork would be my weapon against a narrative crafted in ink by men who loved to be first.
Then I set Shash's photocopy beside my journal and folded myself into the small chair by the lamp. I thought of forgiveness and how it is not a gift given lightly. I thought of Nandini's confession and how love sometimes breaks people into new shapes. I thought of Daiwik's apology, still raw and waiting like a second wound. And I thought, with a small clarity that felt like both mercy and steel, that whatever I chose next would have to be exactly my own.
Outside, the ridge breathed cold and steady. The lanterns were small stars in a world that had suddenly stretched in every direction. I clutched the paper to my chest and, for the first time since the radio had made my private life public, tried to make a decision that was only mine.