It was Disha's birthday. Small celebration, someone's apartment, the kind of evening that started at eight and somehow became midnight without anyone's consent. By one-thirty, people had peeled away in twos and threes — Disha herself had been walked home by her boyfriend, Sahil had a morning class, Priya had fallen asleep in a corner and been gently escorted out by her roommate.
That left Kavya and Rehan, neither of whom had said I should go at the right moment, and now it was too late to say it without it meaning something.
They ended up on the balcony. Not by plan — she'd drifted there for air, he'd followed with two mugs of chai because it seemed like the right thing to do, and then they were sitting on the balcony floor with the city spread below them going amber and quiet, the particular quiet of a city that hasn't stopped, just slowed.
They talked about small things first.
The professor who read directly from slides. The film she'd watched twice — she wouldn't say which one, it's embarrassing — tell me — no — then I'll guess — a game that lasted twenty minutes and ended with her laughing properly, that silent full-face laugh, when he guessed correctly on the thirteenth try.
His habit of reading the last page first. She found this genuinely troubling.
"It's not about the ending,"* he said. *"It's about knowing the destination so I can pay attention to the journey."
"That is the most elaborate justification for a bad habit I have ever heard."
"It's a philosophy."
"It's a problem."
He smiled into his chai.
Somewhere around two o'clock the conversation turned, the way late night conversations did when the defences came down with the hour. She told him she was thinking about opening a bakery someday — not in the vague way people talked about someday things, but with a specificity that suggested she'd thought about it seriously. The kind of pastries the college canteen could never dream of. Something warm and real and entirely hers.
He listened without interrupting, which was the thing she needed most.
Then she said, quieter, "I sometimes feel like I'm living in a house where no one is happy to see me come home."
She hadn't planned to say it. It just came out the way true things did at 2am, sliding under the defences before you could stop them.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to look at her — not a glancing look but a direct one, the kind he usually kept carefully controlled — and said, "Then you should come home somewhere else."
She didn't know what to do with that.
She laughed, a small nervous thing, and looked away at the city. He didn't take it back. He didn't explain it or walk it forward or retreat from it. He just let it sit between them, open, unhurried. A door without pressure.
At some point her head drifted to his shoulder. She told herself it was tiredness. He stayed completely still, afraid that if he moved she would remember herself and pull away.
They sat like that for a while, the city going quiet below them, saying nothing because nothing needed saying, which was either the most comfortable thing in the world or the most terrifying.
She left at three. He walked her to the gate. They stood there in that specific way — the kind of pause that has a question in it — and then she said goodnight and he said text me when you're home and they went their separate ways.
He stood outside for another minute after she turned the corner.
That was three weeks before everything ended.