Years passed differently when you were afraid.
Kavya spent the first year looking over her shoulder. Rohan Mehra had been connected through her mother — she didn't know this yet, wouldn't know for years — and when she moved cities she found to her desperate relief that he seemed to retreat. Perhaps he'd found another target. Perhaps the distance satisfied whatever need she had represented. She would never understand men like him entirely, would never be able to predict them with certainty, and so she lived in that uncertainty quietly, the way you lived with a recurring headache: managed, not cured.
She finished her degree at a new college, with no close friends, head down, careful.
Then she opened the bakery.
It started as a cart, then a stall at a weekend market, then a small shopfront in a lane near her flat that she repainted herself on three consecutive Sundays, getting more paint on herself than the walls the first two times. She called it Atta — flour, the beginning of everything.
The bakery was the truest version of herself she had ever put into the world.
She made bread that had weight and crust and honesty. She made pastries that were technically imperfect and humanly wonderful. She made a chai cake that a food blogger described as what your warmest memory would taste like if it were baked, and that description made her sit in the back kitchen for five minutes with her head in her hands, overwhelmed in a way she couldn't have explained.
She lived alone with her mother, because her mother's health had declined and leaving her wasn't something Kavya was able to do regardless of how little warmth came back. She was her mother's daughter in this way — she showed up. She made sure the medicines were there, the meals were made, the appointments were kept. Her mother received all of this with the same cool distance she had always maintained.
Some wounds, Kavya had decided, you simply stopped hoping would heal.
She was twenty-five. She had her bakery, her flour-dusted aprons, her 5am mornings and her late nights experimenting with laminated doughs. She had a small life that was entirely and precisely her own.
She was, in the way of people who had built their happiness with their own hands, cautiously content.
She did not think about Rehan every day. That was the truth. She thought about him in the way you thought about certain rooms — not often, but when you entered them, they were exactly as you had left them.
She had not forgotten a single thing about that balcony night. She suspected she never would.