It happened two years into her new city.
She had come home late from the bakery — a private order that had run over, the kitchen still warm, her hands smelling of cardamom. She had been tired and happy the way you were after good work, the specific satisfaction of craft.
She pushed open the door of her flat and knew immediately.
Not because there was noise. There wasn't. Because there were candles.
The flat was lit with candles, placed along the windowsill and the shelf above the television and the kitchen counter, small flames throwing warm shadows across a room that was hers and suddenly, terribly, wasn't. There were flowers — white ones, she would not be able to remember the type, her brain had refused to store that detail. Arranged on her dining table. A card propped against them.
And Rohan Mehra sitting on her sofa. Patient. Smiling.
"I found you," he said, like it was a gift.
What followed was twenty minutes that she would spend years trying to forget and never quite manage. He talked — that was the most surreal part, that he simply talked, calmly, like this was a normal conversation, like he was entitled to be in her home, in her space, in her life. He told her what he wanted. He told her what would happen if she didn't give it to him. He was never loud, never physically threatening in the way that would have been easier to name and report. He was precise and quiet and completely certain of himself, which was in some ways worse.
She held herself together through all of it with a kind of dissociated steadiness — something in her had learned years ago how to get through these moments by stepping slightly to one side of them.
She didn't scream. She didn't run. She asked him to leave. He smiled and said he would, this time, and he picked up his jacket and walked out the door like a guest who had overstayed politely.
She locked the door. Put her back against it. Slid to the floor.
She called the police the next morning. Filed a report that went nowhere — no forced entry, no physical harm, his word against hers. She changed the locks, added a bolt, moved to a different flat three weeks later.
The white flowers, the candles, the feeling of her space being entered and rearranged and claimed — that image lived in the back of her mind the way certain images did. Quietly. Persistently. Like something waiting for a trigger.