Maya sat in Divya's borrowed kitchen at seven a.m. on the fourth day and read the financial news item and thought about the seventy percent.
She had been thinking, over four days of sitting with things, about the quality of presence Atharva brought to problems. She had watched him in board calls and at dinner tables and across the study desk — had watched the specific, unapologetic totality of his attention when he was working on something he understood mattered. The empire was his in a way that was not merely financial — it was a project, the ongoing project of a person who had decided at twenty-four that the thing he'd inherited could become something better than what it was.
She had watched him care about it.
And she had watched the board meeting in the news item and she could read,
