His Favorite Verdict

The Truth They Buried

By the time Swasti stepped out of the elevator and into the hallway leading to her apartment, the city had almost disappeared beneath the storm. Rain hammered relentlessly against the glass walls of the building, turning the skyline into a blurred collection of lights and shadows. It had been one of the longest days of her life, and the exhaustion settled over her shoulders like a physical weight. Her head throbbed from lack of sleep, her muscles ached from tension, and every emotional wound she had spent years keeping under control felt raw again. The encounter with Rajveer had reopened scars she preferred pretending didn't exist, and although she hated admitting it, the panic attack had shaken her more than she wanted to acknowledge. She had spent years becoming someone strong enough to survive her past. Yet all it had taken was one unexpected meeting for that carefully constructed control to c***k.

The soft click of her apartment door unlocking echoed through the quiet hallway. As soon as she stepped inside, a familiar sense of relief washed over her. Home had always been her sanctuary. The one place where nobody expected anything from her. No clients. No judges. No reporters. No family drama. Just silence. Usually, that silence comforted her.

Tonight, it felt strange.

The apartment was dark except for the faint glow of city lights filtering through the floor-to-ceiling windows. She slipped off her heels near the entrance and dropped her handbag onto the console table without bothering to turn on the lights immediately. For several seconds she simply stood there, staring into the darkness, allowing herself to breathe. The events of the day replayed relentlessly inside her head. Rajveer's voice. His face. The way her chest had tightened the moment she saw him. The humiliation of losing control in front of strangers. And worst of all, the memory of Aarav watching it happen.

The thought irritated her immediately.

Not because he had judged her.

If anything, that was the problem.

He hadn't.

Most people would've asked questions. Most would've offered sympathy. Others would've treated her like she was fragile. Aarav had done none of those things. He had simply stood there when she needed someone to stand there and then acted as though it wasn't a big deal. For reasons she couldn't explain, that bothered her far more than pity ever could.

Shaking her head, she finally reached for the light switch. Warm golden light flooded the apartment, illuminating the modern interior she had spent years building for herself. Everything was exactly where she had left it that morning. The bookshelves lining one wall. The stack of legal files resting on the dining table. The framed photograph of her and Agastya taken years ago during one of his visits home. Nothing had changed.

At least, that was what she thought.

Then her eyes landed on the envelope.

For a moment, she didn't react. Her gaze simply settled on the large brown package resting neatly beside the entrance table as though her brain hadn't fully processed what she was seeing. The envelope looked ordinary enough. Plain. Unremarkable. Yet something about it immediately put her on edge.

Slowly, she stepped closer.

Her name had been typed across the front in black ink.

SWASTI CHAUDHARY.

No sender.

No return address.

No indication of where it had come from.

The unease that had been simmering quietly beneath her exhaustion immediately sharpened into suspicion.

As a criminal lawyer, anonymous packages were nothing new. Over the years she had received threats, fabricated evidence, attempts at intimidation, desperate pleas for help, and more conspiracy theories than she cared to remember. Most turned out to be useless. Some turned out to be dangerous. All of them demanded caution.

Without removing her coat, she picked up the envelope and carried it to the dining table. The weight surprised her. It was heavier than she expected. Thick enough to contain more than a few documents.

Outside, thunder rolled across the sky.

The sound echoed through the apartment.

For some reason, it made the room feel colder.

Swasti pulled out a chair and sat down. Her fingers lingered on the sealed edge for a moment. A strange feeling settled in her stomach. Not fear. Not yet. Instinct.

The same instinct that had helped her win cases.

The same instinct that warned her whenever something wasn't right.

Carefully, she opened the envelope.

Several photographs slid out immediately.

One landed face up.

And everything stopped.

Her heartbeat. Her breathing.

The noise of the storm.

All of it disappeared beneath a wave of shock so sudden and powerful that for a moment she genuinely forgot where she was.

The woman staring back at her from the photograph had been dead for seventeen years.

Yet Swasti recognized her instantly.

Every feature.

Every expression.

Every detail.

Because no amount of time could erase a mother's face from a daughter's memory.

Her hands began to tremble.

Not violently.

Just enough for her to notice.

Slowly, almost afraid to look, she picked up the photograph.

Her mother looked young.

Beautiful.

Alive.

The image appeared old, the corners worn with age, but there was no mistaking who it was. For a brief moment, an ache settled deep inside her chest. The kind that never truly disappeared. The kind that simply learned how to hide.Then she noticed the bruise. The breath left her lungs.

A dark mark stretched across one side of her mother's cheek.

Another shadowed her jawline.

Swasti stared.

Her lawyer's mind immediately searched for explanations.

Lighting. Angle. Image quality. Anything.

But before she could convince herself otherwise, another photograph caught her attention.

Then another.

Each one worse than the last.

Hospital rooms.

Bandages.

Cuts.

Evidence of injuries she had never known existed.

Evidence nobody had ever shown her.

A cold knot tightened in her stomach.

Someone had hidden this.

For seventeen years, someone had buried it.

The realization sent a chill down her spine.

Slowly, she reached for the documents lying beneath the photographs. The emotional part of her wanted answers immediately. The lawyer inside her demanded evidence first.

And evidence, unlike emotions, had a way of exposing the truth.

Whatever truth waited inside that envelope, Swasti suddenly knew one thing with absolute certainty.

The story she had been told about her mother's death was no longer enough.

And for the first time in seventeen years, she was afraid of what she might discover if she started asking questions.

Yet she had never been the kind of woman who could leave a question unanswered. Even now, with her pulse hammering and her throat tight, she forced herself to spread the contents of the envelope across the table and examine each page with the same discipline she brought to a murder trial. The photographs were old but clear enough to show the pattern of injuries. The reports were photocopies, but the letterheads looked genuine. One hospital visit had been recorded three months before her mother's death, another six weeks later, another only days before. The injuries were not isolated. They were repeated. Systematic. Someone had been hurting her mother for a long time.

Swasti's stomach turned as she read the first medical report again, slower this time, forcing herself to focus on the language instead of the rising nausea in her chest. The doctor had noted swelling along the ribs, a split lip, and bruising on the inner arm. The second report mentioned anxiety, reluctance to speak, and a request for privacy that had apparently been ignored. The third was worse. It described signs of repeated trauma and a patient who appeared frightened of returning home. Swasti's fingers tightened around the paper until the edges bent beneath her grip. She had spent years believing her mother had died in an accident. A simple, tragic accident. That was what she had been told. That was what everyone had repeated until the words had become part of the family history. But accidents did not leave patterns like this. Accidents did not happen over and over again. Accidents did not make doctors write things like repeated trauma.

A memory surfaced then, unwanted and sharp, rising from some buried corner of her mind. Her mother standing in the kitchen with long sleeves pulled down even in summer. Her mother smiling too quickly when asked if she was hurt. Her mother saying she had fallen, that it was nothing, that children should not worry about grown-up things. Swasti had been eight years old. Too young to understand the difference between a lie and a shield. Too young to know that adults often said nothing because they were afraid. She remembered the smell of antiseptic once, faint and strange, when her mother had come home from somewhere with a bandage hidden beneath her dupatta. She remembered her father being in a bad mood that evening, his voice clipped and cold, the entire house feeling smaller than usual. At the time, none of it had seemed connected. Now every memory felt like a fragment of something she had been too young to see.

Her throat tightened painfully.

No.

She shook her head once, as if the movement could force the thought away.

No, that couldn't be right.

And yet the papers in front of her did not care what she wanted to believe.

At the bottom of the stack was a folded sheet of paper sealed inside a plastic sleeve, thinner than the rest, as though it had been handled more carefully than the medical records. Swasti hesitated before touching it. Her pulse had become a dull, heavy thud in her ears. She could feel the storm outside, hear the rain striking the windows, but the apartment itself seemed to have gone unnaturally still. Slowly, she unfolded the page.

It was a photocopy of a handwritten note.

The handwriting was familiar enough to make her chest ache.

Her mother's.

Swasti stared at the page for several seconds before she could bring herself to read it. The letters were slightly slanted, the ink faded in places, but the words were unmistakable.

"If anything happens to me, do not let them tell you I was careless."

Her breath caught.

"Do not let them tell you I fell."

Her vision blurred almost immediately.

"I have tried to keep this from the children for as long as I could."

The sentence beneath it was smudged, as though the writer's hand had trembled while finishing it.

"I am afraid."

Swasti's hand flew to her mouth.

For a moment she could not breathe.

The room tilted slightly around her, not enough to make her fall, but enough to remind her that she was still sitting at the table, still in her apartment, still staring at proof that her entire childhood might have been built on a lie. Her mother had written this. Her mother had known. Or at least she had feared enough to leave behind a warning. Swasti pressed the paper flat against the table and read it again, slower this time, as if the words might change if she looked at them long enough. They did not. They remained exactly what they were. A confession. A warning. A plea.

Her eyes burned.

She hated that.

She hated the tears more than the truth.

Because tears meant the part of her that had spent years surviving was beginning to c***k.

And she could not afford that now.

Not yet.

Not when there was still so much she did not understand.

Who had kept these documents hidden?

Who had sent them now?

Why now, after all these years?

And why had the note specifically named Rajveer?

The question sat in her mind like a blade.

She looked back at the photographs spread across the table. Her mother in a hospital bed. Her mother with bruises on her face. Her mother looking tired in a way Swasti had never noticed when she was a child. The images were unbearable, not because they were graphic, but because they were intimate. Private. They belonged to a life Swasti had never been allowed to see. A life that had been hidden from her with deliberate care.

Her father had always been a difficult man. Strict. Controlled. Emotionally distant. She had accepted that as his nature because children did not question the people who raised them. They adapted. They learned where not to ask. They learned which silences were safer than answers. But this was different. This was not distance. This was something darker. Something that made the air in her lungs feel too thin.

She reached for her phone without fully deciding to do so.

Her thumb hovered over Agastya's name.

For a second she almost called him.

Then she stopped.

If she spoke to him now, she would hear the same shock she felt, or worse, the careful hesitation of someone who already knew more than he had ever admitted. Agastya had always been the one person in the family who could read her moods before she spoke. He would know immediately that something was wrong. He would ask questions. He would worry. And if he knew anything at all, he would not be able to hide it from her for long.

Still, she needed to hear another human voice.

She pressed call.

The phone rang twice before he answered, his voice rough with sleep. "Swasti?"

She closed her eyes briefly, steadying herself. "Did I wake you?"

There was a pause on the other end, the kind that told her he had already heard the strain in her voice. "It's almost midnight. Of course you woke me. What's wrong?"

Swasti looked down at the papers again, her fingers curling around the edge of the table. She could hear the rain through the glass, could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator, could hear her own breathing trying and failing to remain even. "Did you ever know anything about Mom being in the hospital?"

Silence.

Not long.

But long enough.

Her grip tightened on the phone. "Agastya."

"Where is this coming from?" he asked carefully.

She swallowed. "Someone sent me something."

Another pause, this one heavier than the first. "What kind of something?"

Swasti glanced at the photographs, then at the note in her mother's handwriting. Her voice came out quieter than she intended. "Proof."

He said nothing for a moment, and that silence told her more than words ever could. When he finally spoke, his voice had changed. It was no longer sleepy. No longer casual. It was alert in a way that made her stomach twist. "Swasti, listen to me very carefully. Don't do anything tonight."

Her laugh was short and humorless. "You think I was planning to sleep?"

"Don't go to him tonight."

The words landed hard.

She stared at the note again, at the name written in the final line of the anonymous message. Ask Rajveer Chaudhary what happened the night she died.

Her jaw tightened. "So you do know something."

"No," Agastya said immediately, too quickly. Then, after a beat, more quietly, "I know enough to be worried."

That answer was worse than a confession.

Swasti leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling as if it might offer her some kind of mercy. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you were eight."

The simplicity of the answer made her chest ache.

"I was eight," she repeated, her voice barely above a whisper.

"And I was old enough to know something was wrong," he said, the guilt in his tone unmistakable now. "But not old enough to know what to do with it."

Swasti closed her eyes.

For a moment she could not speak.

The storm outside seemed louder now, or perhaps it was only the blood rushing in her ears. She had spent years believing that the silence around her mother's death had been grief. Now she was beginning to understand that some of it had been fear. Some of it had been protection. And some of it, perhaps, had been cowardice.

"Did he hurt her?" she asked finally.

Agastya did not answer immediately.

That was answer enough.

Swasti's throat tightened so sharply it hurt. "Agastya."

"I don't know everything," he said, and now his voice sounded strained, almost raw. "I know there were fights. I know she was scared sometimes. I know she tried to hide it from us. I know he made sure nobody asked questions after she died. That's all I know."

Her fingers went numb around the phone.

Made sure nobody asked questions.

The phrase echoed in her mind with sickening clarity.

She looked back at the envelope, at the photographs, at the note in her mother's handwriting. Seventeen years. Seventeen years of believing a story that might have been designed to keep her quiet. Seventeen years of trusting the version of events her family had handed her because she had been too young to challenge it.

And now the truth, or something dangerously close to it, was sitting on her dining table.

"Swasti," Agastya said softly, "whatever that envelope contains, don't confront him alone."

She gave a small, bitter smile that he could not see. "You think I was planning to ask politely?"

"That's not funny."

"No," she said, her voice suddenly steadier than it had been all night. "It isn't."

There was another pause, and when he spoke again, his tone had shifted into something gentler, more careful. "Let me come over."

She looked around the apartment, at the rain-streaked windows, at the papers spread across the table like evidence in a case she had never been allowed to open. The idea of company was tempting. The idea of being alone with her thoughts was worse. But she also knew that if Agastya came, she would have to explain everything, and she was not ready to say the words out loud yet.

"Not tonight," she said.

"Swasti—"

"I said not tonight."

He exhaled slowly, and she could imagine him rubbing a hand over his face the way he always did when he was trying not to argue with her. "Then at least promise me you won't go to him until morning."

She did not answer immediately.

Because she could not promise that.

Not honestly.

Not yet.

"I'll call you tomorrow," she said instead.

"That is not the same thing."

"No," she replied, her gaze fixed on the note in front of her. "It isn't."

When the call ended, the apartment fell silent again, but it was no longer the same silence she had walked into earlier. This one was heavier. Charged. Full of things she could no longer unsee. Swasti set the phone down slowly and stared at the papers for a long time, her mind moving with the cold precision she usually reserved for cross-examinations and closing arguments. She needed dates. Names. Hospitals. Doctors. Anything that could be verified. Anything that could be traced. Anonymous evidence was not enough. Not for her. Not when the stakes were this high.

She reached for her laptop and opened it with deliberate calm, though her hands still trembled slightly. One by one, she typed in the names from the reports. The first hospital had closed years ago. The second still existed, though the records would likely be archived. The third was a private clinic she had never heard of. She wrote everything down in a legal pad beside her, her handwriting sharper than usual, almost aggressive. If someone had gone to the trouble of preserving these documents, then there had to be a trail somewhere. A nurse. A doctor. A clerk. Someone who remembered. Someone who had been afraid enough to keep quiet until now.

Her eyes drifted once more to the final line of the anonymous note.

Ask Rajveer Chaudhary what happened the night she died.

The words no longer felt like a threat.

They felt like a challenge.

Swasti sat very still for a long moment, the storm continuing to rage outside while the apartment around her remained unnaturally calm. Then, with the same controlled determination she brought to every case she had ever won, she closed the envelope, placed it carefully beside her laptop, and whispered into the empty room, "All right. Let's see what you buried."

And for the first time in seventeen years, she was no longer willing to let the dead stay silent.