The Night She Asked | Ira Sen

Ira Sen had always lived on edge, but never without control. Born in Siliguri, at the cusp of where cities ended and forests began, she was raised in the staff quarters of a modest tea estate where her mother worked as a nurse and her father—once a forest officer—vanished after a disagreement with men more powerful than he was. Being a cop wasn't about pride or service. It was about clarity. The law gave her structure. The uniform gave her distance. The pistol gave her silence in a world where men spoke too much, too loudly, and always over others. She never dated seriously, never let anyone get close enough to say "I love you". Until the night they brought in a man whose arrest didn't add up. He wasn't angry, drunk, or entitled. Just still. And that calm disturbed her more than rage ever could. One reckless decision later, he was living in her spare room. Not a relationship. Not friendship. Not nothing, either. Until one day she saw him laughing with a woman outside a café, and something sharp caught in her throat—a feeling she couldn't name and didn't want to acknowledge.

The Night She Asked | Ira Sen

Ira Sen had always lived on edge, but never without control. Born in Siliguri, at the cusp of where cities ended and forests began, she was raised in the staff quarters of a modest tea estate where her mother worked as a nurse and her father—once a forest officer—vanished after a disagreement with men more powerful than he was. Being a cop wasn't about pride or service. It was about clarity. The law gave her structure. The uniform gave her distance. The pistol gave her silence in a world where men spoke too much, too loudly, and always over others. She never dated seriously, never let anyone get close enough to say "I love you". Until the night they brought in a man whose arrest didn't add up. He wasn't angry, drunk, or entitled. Just still. And that calm disturbed her more than rage ever could. One reckless decision later, he was living in her spare room. Not a relationship. Not friendship. Not nothing, either. Until one day she saw him laughing with a woman outside a café, and something sharp caught in her throat—a feeling she couldn't name and didn't want to acknowledge.

She hadn't meant to see him.

It was just another shift, another sweep past Central Avenue—a stretch she could patrol in her sleep. Ira Sen didn't slow down for cafés, or lunch-hour chatter, or office-goers with too much perfume and too many opinions.

But her eyes paused before her hands did.

There he was.

Sitting at a corner table outside a café she'd never noticed. The sunlight touched his shoulders the same way it touched strangers, and yet, it made her pulse trip.

He was leaning forward. Listening.

The woman across from him wore tailored sleeves and careful lipstick. She said something—nothing, probably—and he laughed.

Not a smirk. Not polite amusement.

A real laugh. The kind he hadn't once offered her, not even in passing. And it landed like a punch she didn't see coming.

She didn't stop the bike. She didn't approach. She didn't blink.

She simply... drifted by.

But that image—him, smiling for someone else—clung to her skin like sweat under the Kevlar.

Later, the silence in her apartment felt like surveillance.

She tried to cook. The knife bit too deep into the tomatoes. She tried to clean. The cloth stayed dry. Every click of a door hinge, every step across the hall, made her ears ring louder than sirens ever could.

She knew she was being irrational.

She hated being irrational.

But this wasn't the first time he'd unsettled her.

She remembered the day they processed his intake—muggy, overworked, forgettable. He wasn't loud. Wasn't combative. Wasn't trembling like most men would've been.

He just sat there.

Unmoving. Unfazed.

"Got a name?" she had asked.

He'd looked at her like he already knew her voice. Like he'd been waiting.

He gave his name—softly, calmly. No hesitation. No flair.

And something about it stuck.

The next few days she watched his case stall. No visitors. No lawyer. No record worth scanning. Just silence in a file-shaped shell.

And God help her. she vouched for him.

She signed her name on paper where it didn't belong.

"Temporary supervision," she told herself. "Observation."

Not kindness. Never kindness.

Now here she was—standing outside his room again.

Not for a file. Not for a report.

For answers

Not because she had the right.

Because she couldn't not ask.

She knocked once. Not tentative—never that—but not aggressive either.

When he opened the door, the hallway light caught his collarbone before it caught his eyes.

And she said it flatly, the way she did at crime scenes:

"Who was that woman today? The one at lunch? Are you seeing her? Because if I'm responsible for you, I need to know what I'm dealing with."

That should've been it.

Closed. Contained.

But her jaw locked mid-sentence, and her spine—always straight—didn't feel like steel anymore. Her voice didn't waver. But her breath was off Slower. Lower.

She didn't wait for a reply.

Not yet.

She just stood there—in the uniform that always kept her distant, in the body that never flinched—and told herself she was gathering data

Not... aching.

Because what she hadn't said, what kept crawling under her ribs as the seconds dragged, was this:

"Because when I saw her laugh at something you said—something you didn't say to me—it felt like a warning. That I let something in I can't get back out."

She didn't want to care.

She just did.

And it made her furious