Rehan spent the first year being angry.
Not loudly. He was never loud. But there was something cold and precise in him that had settled after she left, a recalibration of some kind, and the person who came out the other side was both harder and more focused than the one who had walked her to that gate.
He poured it into work.
He'd had a plan — modest, practical, following his father into business in some form. He abandoned the modest version. He worked with a single-mindedness that alarmed the people around him and built something from scratch that shouldn't have been buildable, that required a kind of absolute commitment to a vision over years, through failures and recoveries and pivots. By twenty-eight he had a company. By thirty it was an empire — not the borrowed kind, not the inherited kind. The kind that had his fingerprints all over it.
He told himself, for a long time, that she had simply chosen to leave.
He was not entirely able to believe it.
There was something wrong about how she had looked that night at the café — the way she'd gathered her things, the not-quite-steadiness of her hands, the way she had not met his eyes for a single moment. He knew her. Not perfectly, no one knew anyone perfectly, but well enough. That was not a person making a casual exit. That was a person holding something together.
He spent more time than he would admit trying to find her. She had covered her tracks thoroughly. New city, new number, no social media trail. Priya and Sahil and Disha had lost contact with her too, and the bafflement and hurt in their voices told him they were not hiding anything.
He let it go eventually — the active searching. But he did not close the door.
Two years ago, someone had told him, casually, that a girl from their batch — you remember Kavya, right, quiet girl, bakery or something — had apparently had trouble with some guy during college. Stalker type. It had been mentioned in passing, the person moving on before Rehan could ask more.
He had sat with that for a long time.
He did not act on it impulsively — he never acted impulsively. But quietly, through his network, he arranged for someone to find her and verify she was safe. Not to contact her. Not to interfere. Just to know.
He found out about the bakery. About the life she had built.
He sat with that too. The relief of it was larger than he had expected, and the longing it opened up was larger still.
He waited. He wasn't entirely sure what he was waiting for.
Then the reunion invitation arrived.