"Mmmh~~ V-Vikram..."
The moan carried.
Not loud — not the open, unmanaged kind. The specific, suppressed kind that happened when a sound wanted to be large and was being held to a whisper by the closed door of a toilet stall in a Mumbai park, which was not the right acoustic environment for the kind of thing producing it.
Meera stood with her spine straight and her hand pressed flat against the cold tile wall and her ears doing the specific, involuntary work of ears that have registered something and cannot un-register it.
She was not going to the stall.
She was going to leave. She was a grown woman, five months pregnant, standing in the wrong bathroom, and she was going to leave right now and find her husband at the facilities exit and they were going to get the caramel popcorn and do the night light show at nine-thirty and she was going to forget every sound this room had produced in the last thirty seconds.
She did not leave.
She stood.
