By the time this particular week rolled around, Sadhana had reached a kind of tiredness that didn't have a single cause anymore, which was, in its own way, worse than the kind that did.

The fights at home had not slowed down since that ordinary, unremarkable night months ago — if anything, they had simply become more frequent, the way a leaking tap doesn't announce itself getting worse so much as you simply notice, one day, that the bucket underneath needs emptying twice as often as it used to. Her mother and father had found new variations of the same old argument, the way people married nearly three decades sometimes do, cycling through grievances so familiar by now that Sadhana could often predict the next line before either of them said it. She had stopped, somewhere in the last few months, even bothering to ask "what happened" every single time — some nights she simply came downstairs, stood in the doorway until the volume dropped, and went back up again without a single word exchanged, because the question had started to feel less like genuine curiosity and more like a ritual neither side actually needed her to complete anymore.