3 A.M
1150 Words
At two forty-seven, Maya Sharma stood at the terrace door and turned the handle.
It opened.
She exhaled once, quietly, as though sound could ruin it.
Forty floors below, Mumbai breathed and glittered, its nighttime heartbeat steady and indifferent. She was not planning to go down the outside of the building — she wasn't an i***t. But the terrace ran the full length of the penthouse's west face and she'd seen, during the mental map she'd been building for three hours, that it met a utility corridor door on the south end. Utility corridors, in her experience of living in buildings with far less money and far more workarounds, had service stairwells.
She'd changed back into her own clothes — the blue salwar, slightly wrinkled now, the dupatta discarded. She'd left the jewelry. She'd taken her phone, her small purse, and her sensible sandals, and she'd moved through the dark penthouse with careful, measured steps, clocking the camera positions she'd noted earlier. There were blind spots. She'd found two.
The terrace air was thick and warm, the way Mumbai air is at 3 a.m. — the heat of the day still bleeding out of the stone, the smell of sea somewhere beneath the petrol and the jasmine garlands still hanging off her own hair. She moved along the terrace wall, keeping close to the building's edge — not the railing edge, she wasn't suicidal — until she reached the south corner and, yes: a door, metal, flush against the building's face.
She tried the handle.
Locked.
She tried it again, which accomplished nothing and she knew accomplished nothing, but the body wants what it wants.
She stood in the dark and thought. The elevator was key-carded. The terrace service door was locked. The fire stairs from inside — she hadn't located them yet. The kitchen had a second entrance she hadn't fully investigated. There might be a—
"Looking for something?"
She spun around.
He was standing at the other terrace door — the one she'd come through, which he must have followed through, which meant he had been awake, which meant he had known — standing with one hand in the pocket of his pajama pants and his feet bare on the tile and no shirt, and Maya had approximately one second to register all of this before her instincts kicked in and she stepped backward.
Her back hit the railing.
She stopped. Forty stories. She stopped.
Atharva walked toward her. Unhurried. The city light caught his face — all planes and shadow — and his dark eyes, and he stopped two feet away from her and looked at her with something she would have called patience in another context and in this context called something else.
"The service door has been locked since nine p.m.," he said. "The stairwells require biometric access on every floor. The elevator panel in the foyer doesn't activate without my card or my handprint."
She stared at him. "How did you know I was out here?"
"I told you there were cameras."
"There are blind spots—"
"On the interior. Not on the terrace."
She should have checked the terrace cameras. She should have—
"Come inside," he said.
"No."
She said it the same way she'd said it at the mandap, with the same terrible clarity. No was the only coin she had left. She was going to spend it every time.
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite frustration — something more controlled than that, but edged. He reached out, and she pulled back against the railing again, automatic and sharp.
He went very still.
She realized she was breathing too fast. She made herself slow it down. She would not give him the satisfaction of visible fear. She had decided that in the bedroom and she was deciding it again here, in the dark, forty floors above everything.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. Not gently — he didn't seem to own gentle — but with a flatness that was somehow different from the rest of his flat statements. More direct.
"That's a very low bar," she said.
He looked at her. Something happened in his face — brief, fast, gone before she could name it. Then he stepped forward and put one hand against the terrace wall beside her shoulder, not touching her, just — there — and her breath did something involuntary and infuriating in her chest.
"You're not going anywhere tonight," he said. "Not this way."
"Or any other way, apparently."
"Come inside." A pause. "It's three in the morning. You haven't slept. You haven't eaten since—" he frowned, almost imperceptibly "—the cocktail hour. You had two samosas."
She blinked. "You were watching me."
He didn't answer.
"You were watching me."
"I was watching the room." He straightened up. "It's a different thing."
"It really is not."
He turned and walked back toward the interior door, and after a moment — after she'd stood at the railing in the dark and accepted the arithmetic of her situation one more time — she followed him inside.
She followed him through the living space and into the corridor, and he was moving toward the staircase, presumably back to the third floor, and she was turning toward the master bedroom, and they paused at the junction.
"There's no point trying again tonight," he said. Without turning around. "Every exit locks again at 3 a.m. They won't reset until six."
"And tomorrow?"
He was quiet.
"Does everything lock again tomorrow at 3 a.m.?" she pressed. "And the day after? And the day after—"
"I'll have a driver available to take you wherever you need to go." He paused. "Within reason."
"Within reason."
"During the day."
"During the day."
He finally turned and looked at her down the corridor's length. In the low nighttime light his face was stripped of its gala polish — just a man, she thought, in the dark of something he'd built. But then his expression closed again and he was back to being Atharva Raisinghani.
"Go to sleep, Maya."
She went to the bedroom.
She didn't sleep.
But she lay very still on the expensive bed and she let her heart slow down, and she pressed her palm flat against her own sternum, and she thought: I almost made it outside. I'll make it further next time.
And underneath that thought, deeper, a smaller one she didn't want to examine: the way the city light had caught his face. The way he had gone very still when she'd flinched.
The way he had said, flatly and with no warmth at all: I'm not going to hurt you.
Like it mattered to him that she know that.
She pressed the thought down and closed her eyes.
Focus, she told herself. This is a problem. Solve it.
- Writer
