Whose Side Is She On

Reya waited outside the café with the green awning until Nisha came out alone. Then she stepped in front of her on the pavement, shaking, and said, "You were with his lawyer. You were laughing with him."

Nisha did not look surprised, or caught, or even annoyed. For one moment she looked tired.

"You followed me," she said. "I told you not to improvise."

"You told me to trust you and let you handle it, and I did. I kept my mouth shut. I let my own daughter go on thinking I'm the sick one. I did everything you said." It came out too loud. A man buying cigarettes glanced over. Reya lowered her voice, but it was shaking worse now. "And then I find you smiling at Deshpande like you're friends. So tell me the truth. Are you working for him? Is that how this goes? He bought the lawyers, he bought the doctor, he bought the judge's good opinion. Why not mine too? Did he pay you to make me feel like I tried, so I'd finally give up and go quiet?"

She waited for the denial. For anger, even. Anything she could believe.

Nisha just looked at her, for a long, flat moment, and said, "Come. Not on the street."

Back in the empty office, Reya said it again, plainer. "Just tell me why you were with Vikram's lawyer. One true thing. Like the first day."

And Nisha, who had given her a true thing on the first day, gave her nothing now.

"I don't explain my method to my clients," she said. "That's not part of the arrangement. You agreed to the arrangement."

"That's not an answer."

"No," Nisha agreed. "It isn't." And she went to her chair and sat and did not say anything else about the café, or Deshpande, or whose side she was on. The silence stretched until Reya understood she was going to get nothing, and that the getting-nothing was the whole answer she was going to be allowed.

That should have been the moment Reya walked out. She didn't. She would spend a long time afterward asking herself why, and the honest reason was small and awful. She had nowhere else to go. Four lawyers had told her no. This one had said yes. A drowning woman does not check the hand too closely.

So she stayed. And the weeks that followed were the strangest of her life, because everything Nisha did looked like a woman working on something that was not Reya's case at all.

She never once brought up the affair. Never the paid psychiatrist. Never the drained accounts. Never Anaya. None of the things that had actually happened to Reya, the things Reya had come for. It was as if the whole engine of Reya's ruin, the part that kept her awake at night, simply did not interest her lawyer. Instead Nisha wanted documents. Boring ones. Vikram's fund filings. Old property records. The paperwork of a family trust Reya had barely known existed. Insurance forms. She had Reya sign requests for financial disclosures so dull that Reya fell asleep reading them. Forms about money and companies. Nothing to do with custody. Nothing to do with her daughter. Nothing to do with anything that had ever hurt her.

"This isn't about me at all," Reya said one afternoon, signing the fourth such form. "None of this is about what he did to me. It's all about his money."

"Yes," Nisha said, not looking up.

"Then whose case is this?" Reya heard her own voice go thin. "Because it doesn't feel like mine. It feels like you're using my name to get at something you want, and you won't even tell me what it is."

Nisha's pen stopped. Just for a second. Then it kept moving.

"Sign there too," she said.

And that was the thing that started to frighten Reya more than the café had. Not that Nisha might be Vikram's. That Nisha might be nobody's but her own. A bought lawyer, at least, she could understand. That was just Vikram, doing what Vikram did. This was worse. This was a cold woman digging through a stranger's ruin for something buried in it that had nothing to do with the stranger, and not caring, not even pretending to care, about the daughter and the lie and the eight months.

Then, at the end of a long session of signing forms, Nisha asked the question, and the way she asked it made everything worse.

She asked it lightly, which was itself wrong, because nothing Nisha did was light.

"Vikram was married before you," Nisha said. "Wasn't he."

Reya looked up. "Yes. Her name was Meher. She died before I met him. Years before. He doesn't talk about it. She fell, from their balcony. They said she did it to herself." She watched Nisha's face. "Why? What does his first wife have to do with my custody case?"

For just a moment the stillness in Nisha's face was not calm. It was the opposite of calm, held so tightly it looked like calm, the way still water can be a thing about to break. And in that moment Reya saw it clearly. The dead first wife, the thing that had nothing to do with Reya, was what her lawyer had been reaching for all along. The custody case was the shovel. Meher was the ground.

Then it passed, and Nisha squared the stack of forms with both hands, corner to corner, precise.

"Forget I asked," she said. "Don't ever say her name to me again. And never, ever say it to Vikram. Do you understand?"

"No, I don't understand, that's the whole problem, I don't understand any of it. Who was she to you? Why do you care about a woman who died before I even..."

"Do you understand," Nisha said. It was not a question. And there was something underneath it that was not cold at all. Something old and buried and close to grief. It silenced Reya completely.

And in that silence Reya finally let herself think the thing she'd been circling for weeks. She isn't fighting for me. She never was. She took my case because it gets her close to something of her own, and when she has it, she'll be finished with me. And I'll still have lost everything, and I'll have helped her do it.