Anaya did not sleep that night.
She lay in bed, eyes open, as the ceiling fan creaked like an old memory. The letter rested on her chest like a weightless ghost. She had read it twelve times. Each time slower. Each time feeling like she had opened a wound, not paper.
> “Maybe you weren’t done with me yet.”
But how could she not be?
He was her breath once — messy, unsure, alive. Aarav hadn’t just been a lover; he was her world before she ever found the courage to build one of her own.
And when he left, it wasn’t just silence she inherited — it was guilt.
There were things she never told anyone.
Not even herself.
---
Three winters ago, things weren’t just falling apart outside them. They were burning inside them too.
Aarav had started changing.
He laughed less. He smoked more. He stopped reading her poetry and started writing things in journals she was never allowed to touch.
She found him once in the attic, whispering to himself, drawing spirals on the walls in ink.
Another night, he screamed in his sleep. Called her by the wrong name.
And one evening… he looked at her and said:
> “Do you think I’m a monster?”
She had stared at him, frozen.
The man she loved — his eyes full of storms — was fading before her.
She didn’t know how to answer.
So the next morning, she said the words she still bleeds for:
> “You’re not the boy I loved anymore.”
And he left.
She didn’t follow.
---
Back then, the town said Aarav had drowned in the frozen lake.
But there were pieces that never fit.
No footprints in the snow.
No body under the ice.
No witness.
Just a scarf on a rusted nail… and a rumor turned into truth.
Anaya tried to believe it. She tried to mourn him the way death demands — with candles and flowers and stitched-up memories.
But the letters made that impossible now.
They weren’t just paper.
They were confessions.
And in them, she saw something terrifying:
He was still alive.
Or worse… someone wanted her to believe he was.
---
The next morning, she went into the attic.
She hadn’t been there since he disappeared.
It smelled of dust, ink, and something heavier — like secrets that had gone sour.
She pulled open a locked trunk where she had kept everything of his — clothes, sketches, and the black notebook she once wasn’t allowed to read.
Hands trembling, she opened it.
First page:
> “If something happens to me, it’s because I couldn’t carry it anymore. But don’t blame yourself, Anaya. I left to protect you.”
Second page:
A list of names. Cities. Symbols she didn’t understand. And beneath them, a sentence circled in red:
> “They’re watching me. If I vanish, it won’t be because I wanted to.”
Her breath stopped.
It wasn’t just heartbreak.
It wasn’t just grief.
It was danger.
Aarav hadn’t left her because he stopped loving her.
He left because someone was after him.
And now… someone wanted her to find him.
---
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