# Chapter Nineteen: The Yellow Rose, Again

## As Told By Sneha

## One — The Week I Spent Being Insane

I want to open with the fact that I am not a nervous woman. I want that on the record before I tell you what I did on a Wednesday afternoon in the third-floor washroom of HRJ, because everything that follows is entirely his fault.

He started being strange on Monday. Not badly. Just — off. Answering things a beat late. Looking at his monitor like it owed him money.

By Wednesday I'd had enough.

Sneha: ur being strange
Sneha: vickey
Sneha: u've read my message and now ur pretending to look at ur monitor

Vickey: I'm working.

Sneha: ur not working. ur being strange. are u okay
Sneha: ok now im worried

And then the lies started. A deadline. His mother. Something at home. Three different stories in two days, and I'm a woman who has spent four months learning that man's face, and every single one of them was rubbish.

So I did the thing I do. I made it worse.

I wore the mustard kurta on Thursday. The long one, from his third day, the one he stared at for an entire afternoon in October thinking I didn't notice. I wore it to the coffee machine knowing full well what it does to him and I stood in the queue in front of him and let him suffer, and when he finally came over I turned round and said, "What's going on with you?"

"Nothing."

"You've been weird all week." I didn't move out of his way. "Vickey. Are you going to tell me or am I going to have to get it out of you?"

"Nothing's going on."

"Nothing," I said, and looked at him. He's a terrible liar. Not because he talks too much — because he goes completely quiet and his whole face does that thing like a man holding a door shut with his back. "Fine."

I went back to my desk and sat down and thought: he's going to end it.

That's where I went. Immediately. Everything at once. The whole cinema in my head — the calm voice, the you're lovely but, the taxi home — and I sat at my desk with a report open and did not read one word of it, and at half …