[SilverArrow]

Chapter: The deadly suspicion


Rakesh woke to the quiet flat.

The afternoon light was already slanting through the curtains of his room. His mouth was dry. The residual weight of the fever sat behind his eyes. He lay still for a long time, listening. No voices. No movement from the kitchen or the living room. Monica had left for her meeting. Ranga had left with her, The apartment felt emptied out.

He needed water.

The prolonged days in bed had left his legs soft and unreliable, but the restlessness was worse. He pushed the blanket aside and swung his feet to the floor. The first attempt to stand sent a fine tremor through his knees. He caught the edge of the side table, breathed through it, and took one careful step, then another.

The hallway was longer than it should have been. He kept one hand on the wall. When he reached the master bedroom the door was not fully closed. He pushed it open with his fingertips.

The bed stopped him.

The large queen mattress still held the shape of recent use. Two pillows lay at the head, both clearly indented, both with the faint creases of heads that had rested there. The top sheet and the heavy blanket had been pulled into a disordered heap toward the centre, the kind of tangled mound. On the far side— the side Monica did not usually sleep on— the fitted sheet was badly crumpled, dragged loose from the corner, the fabric twisted as if someone had gripped it hard and repeatedly.

Rakesh stood in the doorway and felt the first cold drop of something that was not fever.

He moved closer, one slow step at a time. His hand reached out and touched the nearer pillow. The cotton was cool now, but the depression was unmistakable. He looked at the second pillow. Then at the centre of the bed where the sheets had been forced into that chaotic pile. It was not the neat, single-person disturbance Monica left when she slept alone. It was the aftermath of weight and movement shared across the mattress.

The question arrived fully formed and refused to leave.

Had they slept here last night? After the movie? On this bed?

A second, worse question followed immediately behind it.

Had they done more than sleep?

His pulse climbed in his throat. The room tilted once. He gripped the foot of the bed and forced himself to keep looking. The evidence did not change. Two pillows used. Sheets ruined in a way that single occupancy did not explain. The faint, ordinary scent of the room mixed with something else he could not name and did not want to name.

He turned to leave. His balance failed on the second step. His right foot caught the edge of the door frame with a dull, sickening impact. Pain flared white and immediate. He looked down. The toenail had split; blood was already welling and running along the side of his foot onto the floor. He made a small, involuntary sound and hobbled back toward his own room, leaving a thin trail of red dots across the hallway tiles.

By the time he reached his bed the fever had begun to climb again. He sat on the edge, breathing hard, the damaged toe throbbing in time with his heart. The image of the master bed stayed behind his eyes and would not dissolve.

The next days blurred into one long, low-grade ordeal.

The fever came and went in waves. Mornings offered brief windows of clarity; afternoons and nights took them away again. His legs remained unreliable. Standing without support was impossible for more than a few seconds. The doctor ordered fresh blood work. Twice Monica and Ranga helped him into the car and then into a wheelchair at the diagnostic centre. Ranga handled the forms and the payment. Monica sat beside Rakesh in the waiting area with the quiet, practical focus she brought to every crisis. Rakesh watched them from the corners of his vision— the easy way they moved around each other, the short exchanges of information, the absence of any visible awkwardness— and tried to decide whether what he was seeing was simply efficient cooperation or something else.

Ranga began appearing most evenings with a plastic basket of fruit— pomegranates, chikoos, the soft pears the doctor had said were easy to digest— and sometimes a paper bag of electrolyte sachets or protein supplements. He would set them on the dining table, ask after Rakesh’s temperature, and then settle into the living room with his laptop. Monica moved between the kitchen and the sick room. The three of them existed in the same small flat like pieces on a board that had been rearranged and not yet settled.

Rakesh said very little. When he did speak it was about the medicines or the water or the ache in his legs. Inside, the question from the master bedroom continued its slow, corrosive work. He studied Ranga’s face in the moments when the other man thought he was not being observed. He looked for triumph, for guilt, for the private knowledge of a shared bed and a shared night. The eyes gave him nothing certain. Only the same steady, practical calm Ranga had always carried.

At night, when the fever rose and the room felt too warm, the image returned: the two indented pillows, the sheets dragged into that impossible central heap, the crumpled far side of the mattress. He told himself it was the medicine. He told himself it was the fever inventing connections that did not exist. He told himself that Monica would never— that Ranga, for all his roughness, would not. The arguments were thin and grew thinner each time the temperature climbed.

By the end of the week the spikes had become less violent. He could stay awake for longer stretches. He could sit up against the pillows for twenty minutes at a time before the fatigue pulled him down again. The doctor, on a follow-up call, used the words “slight improvement.” The virus was still present, still active, but its grip had loosened by a fraction