She had a fortress. Its walls were self-restraint, its bolt was modesty, its gate was dignity. She built it herself, and she was proud of it. Then desire showed up with an axe. Over ten kurals, a woman watches her own defenses fall — not to an enemy, not to an army, but to a longing she cannot stop and a lover whose words she cannot resist. The chapter is not a lament. It is an autopsy of composure, performed by the patient while she is still alive. What makes it devastating is not that she loses her modesty but that she narrates each stage of the collapse with forensic precision: the axe at the gate, the midnight siege, the sneeze she cannot suppress, the public spectacle she cannot prevent, the embrace she swore she would not give. By the final kural, she has stopped pretending. Her heart is fat in fire. It was never going to hold its shape.