Chapter 7 · free to read
Two lakh, the hospital said. They say a number like that the way you'd say a bus fare, and it ends a family.
He said it kindly. That was the trouble. Kindness from a man like him always arrived with an invoice I could not read.
Ten years. I was nineteen. I did the arithmetic and found I would be twenty-nine before my own name came back to me.
The cage did not slam. It clicked, very softly, the way a good lock does. And I had turned the key myself.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.