She got his message at 10:47pm.
It was a Friday. They had all been at a café near campus — their usual table, their usual noise, the comfortable ease of people who had stopped performing for each other. It had been a good evening. She had laughed more than usual. Rehan had been sitting across from her and she'd caught him looking at her twice, that direct undefended look, and both times she had looked away first with something warm and unsteady running through her chest.
She had excused herself to use the restroom.
He was waiting in the corridor outside.
Not Rehan. The other one.
Rohan Mehra. She knew him from campus — the way you knew certain people, not friends, not enemies, just present. He had spoken to her at a college event once, then twice, then he had started appearing in places she was. She had noticed it and told herself she was imagining it.
She wasn't.
He stepped in front of her in the corridor. Smiled — that smile she had begun to recognise as something other than warmth.
"Kavya," he said, like her name was something that belonged to him.
She tried to step around him. He caught her wrist.
It was brief — two seconds, maybe three. She pulled back and he let go, still smiling. But in those two seconds something cold and certain moved through her, the understanding that this was not going to stop.
He leaned in close enough that his voice was a murmur.
"You should be careful about who you spend your time with. I'd hate for someone to get hurt."
Then he stepped back, pressed his phone into her hand for a moment — the screen showed a photograph — and walked away.
She stood in the corridor shaking, looking at the photograph.
It was Rehan. Walking to his car in the campus parking lot. Taken from a distance, the angle low and deliberate. The kind of photograph someone took when they were showing you they could get close to a person without them knowing.
The message below it was brief. He doesn't need to be involved in this.
She stood there for a very long time.
She thought about going back to the table. About sitting back down in the warm noise of her friends and pretending this hadn't happened. About telling Rehan.
She thought about the photograph. The angle of it. How close he'd been. How easy it had been.
She thought about Rehan walking to his car every evening, and what it would mean if something happened to him because she had stayed.
She had no one to tell. She couldn't tell her mother — her mother had, she would find out much later, been the one to make this possible. She couldn't tell her friends without pulling them into it. She couldn't tell Rehan, because telling Rehan meant he would try to do something about it, and she had seen the photograph, and she couldn't let him do something about it.
She made her decision in that corridor in under a minute. Not because she was brave. Because she was terrified, and sometimes terror is very clarifying.
She walked back to the table. She gathered her bag. She said she wasn't feeling well, sorry, she had to go. She could feel Rehan watching her — that careful attention of his — and she didn't look at him because if she looked at him she would not be able to leave.
She left.
He came after her. She heard him call her name from the café doorway, then again from behind her on the road, and she kept walking, her hands shaking and her throat tight, until she reached the corner and turned it and he could no longer see her face.
She transferred colleges the following week. She moved to a different part of the city. She changed her number.
She did not say goodbye to anyone.