Kiran has stood in the doorway for ten years.

Thirty-two, in a brown saree that was chosen to make her invisible, holding a steel jug of water, holding a family's accounts. She came from a village forty kilometers from Phalodi with nothing but a debt and a failed medical. She learned to watch. To count. To not touch what isn't hers.

Roshni is twenty-three, and everything about her is color. Yellow saree with indigo on her thighs, sketches on the floor of a Delhi barsati, a one-arm mannequin held together with tape. She has a showcase at Milan Fashion Week and a forty percent scholarship from NABA. She is supposed to forget all of it and marry his son at eleven AM in red.

What began was never supposed to happen and has never happened!

A glance held too long over ledgers. A hand brushing while pinning a blouse. Indigo smudging onto brown. Haldi ceremony, ramp walks; the way Kiran looks at Roshni's mouth when she talks about Milan, and the way Roshni looks at Kiran's collarbone in the slow heat of the old wing.

It builds slowly, then all at once.

At eleven-thirty PM, they stop pretending.

By ten AM, they have a plan to escape. One year later, they do.