Neel Arora
Chapter 1.
The rain came early that morning, the kind that thudded against the glass panes like soft drumbeats played by invisible fingers, and the Mumbai skyline, always blurred by smog, looked gentler beneath the wash of monsoon grey. Inside the sleek glass-and-concrete confines of the Bandra Reclamation office, the world was dry, clinical, fluorescent-lit, and buzzing with the soft hum of deadlines. Aarav Mehta didn’t notice the rain at first. He barely noticed anything outside the four walls of his office anymore. At thirty-two, he had earned the corner space with the sea view, the massive teak desk, the awards stacked like modern art on a shelf behind him, and the phone that never stopped ringing. His assistant, Shalini, had already left for the evening when he finally turned off his laptop and leaned back, rubbing the ache out of his eyes. He was reaching for his phone when he saw it—an envelope lying on the floor just inside his glass door, slightly damp at the edges as though the wind had carried it in with the weather. No name, no stamp, no branding. Just cream-colored paper sealed with wax. Curious, and slightly amused, he picked it up, cracked it open, and read the line written in a looping, slanted hand—“Did you forget the rain that year?” That was all. Seven words. But they hit like thunder. For a full minute, he didn’t move. Then, slowly, deliberately, he sat back down and stared at the words again. He turned the paper over. Blank. Nothing else. But the handwriting—it was unmistakable. It couldn’t be. Could it? He hadn’t seen it in a decade, but every loop, every stroke, brought back a flood of memories, painful and warm, like pressing your palm against old bruises. Meher. Only she wrote like that. She always wrote like that. He had kept one of her letters once, a half-torn page from a notebook scribbled with a poem about Bandra rains and silence, tucked it into a book he could never bring himself to read again. She was a writer back then, or at least she dreamed of being one, back when they were both college students sharing a rented apartment in Colaba’s winding lanes, surviving on filter coffee, deadlines, and each other’s chaos. Meher Sharma had walked into his life with ink on her fingers and sea salt in her voice, and for two monsoons, they were inseparable. Until one day, she vanished. No fight. No warning. Just a letter left on the bench at Marine Drive where they used to sit every Sunday night. It said: “Don’t look for me. I’m choosing the silence this time.” He hadn’t heard from her since. No calls. No messages. Not even a rumor through friends. And now, ten years later, this letter. He stood up, walked over to the window, and looked at the sea. It was a darker shade of grey now, frothing and churning, as if it too remembered. He thought about all the times they sat together on the promenade, sharing a single umbrella, arguing over poetry and politics, dreaming of futures they were too naïve to build. He had become who he wanted to be—creative director at one of Mumbai’s top firms, the youngest in the company’s history, someone whose ideas shaped trends and sold fantasies. But beneath the polish, something had always remained unfinished. Meher. Her sudden departure had left a hole, one he covered with late nights, casual relationships, and deadlines that never let him feel. He told himself she wasn’t coming back. That whatever she had been running from had swallowed her whole. But now, this note. It made no sense. And yet, it made perfect sense. Only she could write something so simple and tear his carefully built world open again. He didn’t sleep that night. He poured himself two drinks and stared at the note under his desk lamp, waiting for logic to explain it away. Maybe someone found her old notebooks. Maybe it was a prank. But deep down, he knew. It was her. The next morning, he arrived early at the office, before anyone else. He asked the security guard if anyone had come by last evening. The old man shook his head. Aarav even checked the building CCTV footage—nothing. No one had entered after 7:45 p.m. He spent the rest of the day distracted, re-reading old emails from college days, scrolling through an archive of forgotten photos stored in a hard drive he hadn’t opened in years. Most of the photos were grainy, taken on a borrowed camera—smiling faces outside Kitab Khana, rain-washed selfies on the Gateway steps, her scribbling poems on napkins. His chest ached with a nostalgia that felt both exquisite and punishing. That night, he drove to Colaba. His old building still stood there, three floors of crumbling paint and broken window grills. The PG aunty was long gone, replaced by a family who ran a boutique from the ground floor. He wandered to the Asiatic Library steps, and then to Café Mondegar, which still had the same jukebox, the same waiters, only the prices had doubled. He sat at a corner booth and ordered their usual—cutting chai and cheese toast—and waited. For what, he didn’t know. He half-hoped she’d walk in, her hair tied in that messy bun, eyes flicking from people to pen as she muttered storylines to herself. But no one came. The rain outside drummed louder now, and the city lights blurred into the glass like oil paintings. He paid the bill, stepped outside, and felt something shift in the wind. It was like being seventeen again, heart open, world unsure. As he reached for his car, he noticed something wedged under the wiper. Another envelope. This time, sealed in plastic to keep the rain out. Inside, a note: “You once said the smell of old pages was better than perfume.” He gripped the paper, his fingers trembling now—not from cold, but from the growing certainty. This wasn’t coincidence. This was her. She was here. Somewhere. Watching. Testing. Or maybe remembering, like he was. He looked around the street, but it was empty except for a dog sleeping under a leaking awning and a rickshaw driver smoking silently in the shadows. His heart pounded. She was near. And yet just out of reach. He didn’t sleep again that night. He stayed up writing—something he hadn’t done in years. A letter, just like she used to write him. Full of raw honesty, questions, and confessions he never voiced. He didn’t know where to send it, so he folded it and put it inside the same book that held her last poem. It was called Salt and Monsoon. Fitting, he thought. By the third day, he began to wait for the letters. At work, on drives, during coffee runs—his eyes searched for the slightest clue. And then they came. One slipped into the bill folder at Yazdani Bakery. Another beneath his office cup coaster. Each note revealed another memory only she could have known—like the night they’d danced barefoot in the rain near the Kala Ghoda statue, or the poem she recited about drowning cities and unspoken goodbyes. But still, no explanation. No meeting. Just breadcrumbs of the past. Aarav was unraveling now. Not in a destructive way—but like old skin being shed, like someone he used to be was resurfacing. The person who once believed in letters. In love not defined by GPS coordinates or Instagram posts. In promises made over shared umbrellas. He began to follow the trail. Every letter seemed to lead him to the next place—a scavenger hunt of emotions. Until finally, one note came that said: “Stop running from the rain. You used to walk in it.” That night, he left his umbrella home and stepped into the monsoon like an invitation. The city was drenched, alive, electric. He walked from Bandra to Carter Road, every splash beneath his feet echoing her name. Somewhere, somehow, she was out there. Writing. Watching. Waiting. The last note came with a time and a place. Folded into a book at a Bandra bookstore: “Sunday. Nariman Point. 6:45 PM. No umbrella.” It was signed with a single line in small, italic script—“From who I was.” He read it twice. Then closed his eyes. The story hadn’t ended. It had just paused. And now, it was calling him back—with rain, with memory, with letters.
Chapter 2.
The rain had softened by Sunday morning, but the streets of Mumbai still glistened like inked parchment, stained with puddles and stories. Aarav stood at the edge of Colaba Causeway, the letter folded tightly in his pocket, like a relic he couldn’t afford to lose. He hadn’t walked this route in years. Not since life had tilted northward toward glass towers and conference rooms. But the moment his shoes touched the cracked pavement in front of the old Leopold Café, something ancient stirred within him, as though time had stopped just for him to return to it. The city was alive, but this stretch of Colaba—chaotic, colorful, stubbornly timeless—still breathed the same rhythm. The rickshaw horns, the calls of street hawkers selling scarves and antique maps, the mix of perfumes and wet concrete—it was like stepping into a dream where nothing had aged, except him. He crossed the road and walked into the bylane where they used to live—an old, sea-worn building with wrought iron balconies and yellow paint that peeled like forgotten wallpaper. Meher had called it “our fading castle.” It still stood, surprisingly intact, though the small kirana store at the base had turned into a tattoo studio. The windows were closed now, the third floor empty. He stared up at it for a long moment, half-expecting her to lean out with messy hair and ink on her cheek, waving a half-written page and shouting, “I figured out the ending!” He smiled at the absurdity of the thought. But it didn’t leave him. He walked down the alley where they had once painted graffiti in the rain—a swirling blue spiral she said symbolized their story. The paint had washed off years ago. A rust stain remained, a ghost of color. He ran his fingers over the wall. Cold. Silent. He continued walking. The air was heavier here, laced with nostalgia and monsoon moisture. His feet instinctively led him to the place that held the weight of their beginnings—the Asiatic Library. Its white pillars loomed like watchful sentinels, and the steps were speckled with college students, lovers, and loners scribbling into notebooks under umbrellas. He climbed the stairs and sat exactly where they used to—four steps from the top, right under the chipped column with a pencil-heart still faintly carved. Inside, the reading room hadn’t changed. Still smelled of old paper, floor polish, and wisdom. The librarian, an older woman in a blue cotton sari and thick glasses, looked up briefly and nodded. Aarav remembered her. She used to let Meher stay past closing hours to “finish her thought.” He approached her desk hesitantly. “Excuse me. Do you happen to remember a girl named Meher Sharma? She used to come here a lot… about ten years ago.” The woman blinked, adjusted her glasses, and studied his face as if brushing off layers of memory. “Writer girl? Wrote on tissue papers and asked for extra ink pens?” Aarav’s breath hitched. “Yes, that’s her.” She leaned back, thoughtful. “She vanished one day. But she left something. Not for me. For a boy who never came back. I kept it, just in case.” She reached into a small wooden drawer and pulled out a faded envelope tied with red thread. “This stayed here for a decade. Maybe it’s time it finds the right hands.” Aarav took the envelope like it was sacred. He opened it slowly, carefully. Inside was a single page, yellow with age but still crisp. “If you ever come back here, you’re not just looking for me. You’re looking for who you used to be. You might hate what you find. Or love it more than you expected.” —M. He read the line twice. The emotion snuck up on him—sudden, raw, like a wave slamming against a seawall. For ten years he had buried her memory under work and ambition. But here it was again, uncurling itself into the corners of his heart, blooming without permission. He folded the letter back and looked up at the librarian. “Did you ever see her again?” The woman shook her head slowly. “She came a few times after she left that. Alone. Wrote pages and tore them up. She wasn’t the same.” Aarav stepped outside and stood at the top of the library steps, watching the city below shimmer in the wet haze. He felt young again. Vulnerable. Alive. He walked next to the Gateway of India where they once sat on the stone embankment and shared street chai while she told him her dreams of becoming a novelist. She said she wanted her first book to be a collection of letters never sent. She called it “The Rain That Stayed.” He never asked why the title sounded so sad. Now, perhaps, he knew. He wandered into the small bookstore next to Regal Cinema, a place they’d used as refuge during power cuts. The dusty owner, who hadn’t aged a day, didn’t recognize him, but when Aarav bought a copy of Letters to a Young Poet, the man handed him a slip of paper with the receipt. “Someone left this for you. Said a tall man with a tired face would show up one day. I thought it was nonsense. Maybe it’s not.” Aarav opened the slip. “Don’t chase me. Chase what we left unfinished. You always did skip the last chapter.” It had her handwriting again—gentle, slanted, unafraid. Was she watching him? Following his trail like he followed hers? The idea was both thrilling and maddening. He walked along the promenade near Radio Club, heart thudding, mind racing. He thought about her books, half-written and saved in messy folders on her old laptop. About the time she read him a story about a boy who could only feel in the rain. How she said, “You’re like that. You won’t admit it. But you are.” That night, back in his Bandra apartment, he opened his old college hard drive, dug through forgotten folders, and found a scanned letter from Meher written on a napkin. “Don’t become so successful that you forget how to fail. Or feel.” He read it aloud, over and over, until the rain outside matched the ache inside him. He knew what he had to do. He couldn’t ignore this. Not anymore. Meher was guiding him somewhere—not just to her, but to a part of himself long buried under ambition and armor. And now, that part was waking up. In the city where everyone is always moving, always climbing, always forgetting, someone was leaving him letters—reminding him how to remember. The past wasn’t a closed book. It was a letter he never finished reading. And maybe, just maybe, it had a reply waiting. Somewhere in Colaba, in Bandra, in the folds of wet paper and unwritten endings. He stood by the window, folded the latest note into a fresh journal, and began to write. Not copy, not draft—write. Words meant only for her. Not for closure. But for continuation. The rain fell heavier now. And he didn’t mind.
Chapter 3.
The next letter didn’t come for two days, and those two days stretched longer than they should have, as if time itself was holding its breath. Aarav spent them restlessly moving between work meetings and memories, between present routines and a past that had suddenly begun to beat again beneath his skin. He walked down the lanes of Bandra where they used to chase stray dogs during the monsoon, he sat alone in Chaayos scribbling on napkins like she used to, he even visited an old art supply store near Kala Ghoda where Meher once bought ink pens she swore were blessed by writers who died too young. But nothing came. No envelope tucked behind windshield wipers. No anonymous note slipped beneath doors. No coded scribble inside coffee bills. Just rain. Endless, whispering rain. On the third evening, the sky cracked open over Mumbai in a way it rarely did—lashing sheets of water, thunder that sounded like protest, and a storm surge that washed plastic and poetry alike into the gutters. It was then, as Aarav stepped into a small second-hand bookstore near Chapel Road to escape the downpour, that he found it again—an ink stain on a folded piece of recycled paper slipped inside the pages of a book titled “Missing Bombay.” The ink had bled a little from the rain, and yet the words were unmistakably hers: “Find the last letter you gave me. It’s still where I left it. In the red book, third shelf, second row, under ‘Untitled Manuscript.’” Aarav’s heart kicked against his ribs. This wasn’t a riddle. This was a message wrapped in time, waiting like a flame preserved in wax. He turned to the old Parsi bookseller, who recognized him with a tired, curious smile. “Still searching, young man?” the old man asked, wiping his glasses. “This shop remembers better than people do.” “I need to find a red book,” Aarav said, voice tight with urgency. “Third shelf, second row, under something marked ‘Untitled Manuscript.’” The old man scratched his stubbled chin. “That would be in the reading corner. We don’t sell from that shelf. But you’re welcome to look.” Aarav walked to the back of the dim-lit shop, past towers of unsorted novels and sepia maps of pre-independence Bombay, until he reached the shelf marked “UNSORTED DRAFTS AND ABANDONED STORIES.” His fingers ran quickly but carefully across the second row until he saw it—a red leather-bound book, its spine faded, but the paper still fragrant with old dust and older memories. Inside, tucked between two blank pages, was the letter. His letter. The one he had written her the night before she disappeared, never posted, never spoken, just left on the table near her typewriter with trembling hands. The words came back to him as he unfolded the page. “Meher, I’m scared you’ll leave before I find the right way to ask you to stay. I don’t know how to write the kind of promises you believe in. But I do know this—I’ve never felt more at home than I do with you. If this storm we’re in ever passes, I hope you’ll still be here. If not—then I’ll wait in every corner of the city where our laughter used to live.” Aarav exhaled. She had read it. Kept it. Hidden it where no one else would know but him. It wasn’t over back then. She hadn’t just run. She had been trying to speak in silence. Behind the letter, another page fluttered loose. This one wasn’t his. It was hers. A note written in that fluid, confident hand, only this time the letters trembled slightly: “I read it. I wanted to stay. But the storm wasn’t outside us. It was inside me. I couldn’t let you see it. I still don’t know if you can. But if you’re reading this, it means you haven’t forgotten. That means I haven’t failed completely.” The date on the note was from 2015. Almost nine years ago. The bookstore suddenly felt smaller, closer, as if the walls were listening. He looked up at the ceiling fan spinning slowly above, as if trying to remember the past too. “She used to sit right there,” the shopkeeper said, pointing to an armchair beneath a cracked skylight. “Wrote on odd papers, folded them like boats, said she was mailing stories to the sea.” “When was this?” Aarav asked. “Years ago. She’d come every Thursday. Then suddenly stopped. But once a year, during the first rain, she’d send a note to be placed in a book. Said it was for someone who might come looking.” Aarav felt the air shift. “She still sends them?” “Last one came two weeks ago,” the man replied, then hesitated. “Wait here.” He disappeared behind a curtain, and Aarav stood frozen among the dust and smell of old books. When the man returned, he handed over a small yellow envelope. It was still sealed. On the front: “To the one who left without turning around.” Inside was another letter. Short. “If you’ve found the red book, you’re closer now. But don’t look in the past too long. I’m not there anymore. I’ve moved on to stories about second chances. Meet me where the first one ended.” The Gateway. It had to be. The place where she had left the last note, the goodbye letter that shattered everything. But what did she mean by “second chances”? Was this a game? Or a lifeline? Aarav clutched the note and ran out into the storm. The city was glimmering like a silver web, buses crawling through floods, lovers huddling under shared tarps, and the ever-familiar chorus of honks, shouts, and splashes. When he reached the Gateway of India, the sky had turned indigo and the sea behind it thundered like applause. It was mostly deserted except for a few umbrella sellers and tourists taking blurry pictures. He stood near the stone bench where she had left the last goodbye. It was still there—worn, damp, lonely. He sat on it, soaked to the bone, letter in hand. And then he saw it—beneath the bench, taped carefully to the wood, a plastic envelope. His hands trembled as he peeled it open. “You came. You always followed the trail. You always believed a little more than I did. You probably want to ask why. Why I left. Why now. But maybe the better question is—can we meet again without trying to rewrite who we were?” No location this time. Just that question. Aarav looked around, his heart thudding. Someone was watching. Or had been. She was testing not his memory, but his willingness. His belief. He sat still for a long while, the waves crashing against the rocks behind him. And then, he took out his phone, opened his notes app, and typed: “Yes. We can.” He didn’t know where to send it. So he posted it on an old blog he hadn’t touched in a decade, titled LettersFromTheMonsoon. The last post was from the day she left. He added the date, the note, and hit publish. That night, back home, there was a new envelope waiting on his doorstep. No one had rung the bell. Inside: “Good. You still remember how to write like that. Let’s talk—out loud this time. Wednesday. 4:30 p.m. Prithvi Café. No letters. Just eyes.” Aarav laughed, actually laughed, the sound echoing off his apartment’s silent walls like music. She had picked their old meeting spot, where dreams were brewed stronger than coffee. She was ready. After all this time. And so was he. He stared at the envelope for a long time, then tucked it into his coat. He had no idea what he would say. But he knew the rain wouldn’t stop him now.
Chapter 4.
By the time Wednesday arrived, the city had dried just enough to allow sunbeams to sneak between buildings, glinting off glass windows and shop signs, but the roads still wore the scent of yesterday’s rain—wet earth, damp cloth, and something inexplicably romantic. Aarav stood outside Prithvi Café, his breath caught somewhere between memory and anticipation. It had been years since he’d stepped into the leafy courtyard, where college theatre students still rehearsed lines under banyan shade and the smell of masala chai filled the air like an old song you hadn’t heard since you were young. The place hadn’t changed—red-bricked walls wrapped in vines, uneven wooden tables beneath swaying cloth canopies, and the same hand-painted chalkboard listing ‘Today’s Special – Irish Coffee & Banana Cake’. The line at the counter moved slowly, as if the café itself demanded patience from its patrons. Aarav didn’t order. Not yet. His eyes scanned the tables, the corners, the tree. Always the tree. That enormous old peepal, rooted in the heart of the café like a silent narrator. And then he saw it—the table beneath the tree, the one where she used to write while chewing on her pen, hair tied in a careless bun, her notebook always tilted slightly to the left. The chair opposite hers was empty. And she was sitting there.
Meher.
She wasn’t writing. She was just sitting with a cup of coffee between her palms, half-steamed, untouched, her gaze resting on nothing and everything. The years had not stolen her, not really. She still wore the same kind of cotton kurti she had in college—indigo, soft, faded from many monsoons. Her hair was shorter now, curled just at the ends, and her eyes—those vast, expressive eyes that once held the weight of every character she ever wrote—looked tired, but alert. Like someone who’d fought her demons and negotiated a temporary truce.
Aarav walked up to her slowly, unsure whether to smile or stand still or just fall to his knees and beg time for mercy.
She looked up.
Their eyes met.
And in that moment, nothing else mattered.
Not the lost years.
Not the letters.
Not the storms.
“Hi,” she said simply.
“Hi,” he replied, voice breaking slightly under the weight of everything unsaid.
She gestured to the chair. “Sit. You’re early.”
He sat down, his hands unconsciously forming a nervous steeple on the table. “So are you.”
“I’ve been early for a while now,” she said, half-smiling. “Just didn’t know if you’d ever show up.”
“I almost didn’t,” he admitted. “Not because I didn’t want to. Because I didn’t think I’d have the right to.”
Meher nodded. “You always overthink things.”
“And you always ran when it got quiet.”
Her smile vanished. “I didn’t run.”
A beat passed. She looked down, fiddling with her coffee spoon. “I fractured. Quietly. Without an audience.”
Aarav leaned forward. “Then tell me now. We have an audience of two.”
She looked up again. “I left because I was becoming someone I couldn’t live with. The kind of person who waits for validation to feel real. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t sleep. And I was terrified you’d stay out of guilt, not love.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s how I felt.”
“But I loved you,” he said, the words heavier than expected, soaked in years. “I still—” he stopped himself. “—I didn’t know how to stop.”
She was silent.
Then, softly, “I loved you too. But love isn’t always a soft place to land. Sometimes it’s just another cliff.”
They sat there for a while, watching the young people around them—the laughter, the college bags, the fresh poetry rehearsed into mobile phones.
“I used to come here every year,” Meher said, voice drifting. “On this exact date. Our date. I told myself if you ever returned, it would be here.”
“I looked for you in books,” he said. “You left pieces of yourself in all the right places.”
“That’s what writers do,” she smiled gently. “We leave ink trails.”
“I followed them,” he whispered. “Each one reminded me of who I used to be.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “And who are you now?”
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “But for the first time in years, I want to find out. With you.”
The wind stirred the tree above them, and a few yellow leaves dropped onto the table like tiny agreements.
Meher reached into her bag and pulled out a slim notebook—the same blue leather-bound kind she used to write in. “I never stopped writing. I just stopped finishing.”
Aarav touched the edge of the notebook. “Why?”
“Because endings scared me. They always meant letting go.” She paused. “But lately… I’ve started believing in pauses instead. Maybe this isn’t an ending. Maybe it’s the next sentence.”
He swallowed hard. “Then maybe… we write it together?”
She looked unsure for a moment, like a deer uncertain whether the forest is friend or predator. Then slowly, she nodded. “One letter at a time.”
They ordered tea. Banana cake. Spoke about nothing and everything. They talked of books they’d read, people they’d lost, dreams they had buried and ones they were still digging for. The world shrank around them, not in the way that suffocates, but in the way that makes you feel warm, enclosed, chosen.
As the sun slipped behind the clouds and rain began its soft applause once again, Meher took his hand in hers and whispered, “You were the storm I left. But maybe you’re also the shelter I return to.”
Aarav smiled, his eyes wet but steady. “Then let’s build something out of this rain.”
And there, under the familiar tree at Prithvi Café, two people who once loved in the shadows of silence began again—not from scratch, but from memory. From longing. From words not lost, but waiting.
Chapter 5.
The days that followed weren’t wrapped in firework confessions or dramatic reunions, but instead bloomed slowly—like bougainvillaea curling over a rusted gate, hesitant yet inevitable. Meher and Aarav didn’t rush toward labels or answers. They simply returned to each other, one shared hour at a time. On Thursday evenings, they met at the sea-facing bench near Carter Road where Meher would read aloud fragments from half-finished short stories while Aarav recorded them on his phone. On Sunday mornings, they’d walk through the rain-glazed lanes of Fort, stealing glances from windows of secondhand bookstores and laughing at absurd poetry titles. But it was the visit to Kitab Mahal, their old haunt in Fort, that shifted everything. That bookstore, with its fading wallpaper and wooden ceiling fans, had once been their temple of stories. It was where they’d bought their first shared copy of A Room of One’s Own, written annotations in The Great Gatsby, and hidden torn notes in the margins of obscure novels, hoping some future reader would decode their secret conversations. On that Saturday afternoon, as Mumbai trembled under the weight of another monsoon, they ducked under a leaking tin awning and stepped into the musty haven of Kitab Mahal—now run by the original owner’s grandson, a bespectacled man with more ink on his fingers than in his register.
“You’re the ones who left love notes in The Bell Jar, right?” he said without looking up from his desk, flipping pages of a yellowed ledger.
Meher blinked. “You remember that?”
He chuckled. “You left an entire fight in the margins of page 184. Then made up on page 210.”
Aarav laughed, glancing at Meher. “I think we were training for marriage without realizing it.”
They wandered between the aisles—he in the poetry section, she in essays—and finally met at their old table by the window, dusty but untouched. Meher sat down, placing a thin Moleskine notebook on the table. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, not looking up. “About what we’re doing. What we’re rebuilding.”
Aarav pulled out a small book of Neruda’s poems. “Me too.”
She looked at him directly. “Let’s write a story together. Not a metaphorical one. A real one. A novel. You and me.”
He blinked. “You’re serious?”
“Yes. And I don’t mean just scribbles in the margins or love letters disguised as fiction. A full book. Our story. Not just what happened—but what could have happened, what almost happened, what we wish we said.”
Aarav leaned back, absorbing the idea. “But we write so differently.”
“Exactly,” she smiled. “That’s the magic.”
“And what if we disagree?”
“Then we disagree in ink. That’s the pact.”
Aarav grinned. “A bookstore pact.”
She extended her hand. “Co-authors?”
He took it. “Co-conspirators.”
They decided on rules, because both of them had always been obsessive about structure. Rule One: they would write separately, one chapter each, then switch. No editing the other’s work. Rule Two: once a week, they would meet at the café or the bookstore or wherever the monsoon let them, and read the chapters aloud. Rule Three: no romantic involvement while the book was being written—emotions were allowed, but action would wait until the final page was typed.
It was maddeningly romantic and dangerously fragile. Perfect, in other words, for them.
The first few weeks were cautious. Meher wrote the prologue—a young woman boarding a local train with an envelope in her coat and a memory she couldn’t speak of. Aarav followed with Chapter One—a man obsessed with decoding graffiti left in train compartments, secretly believing they were written by someone he once knew. Their words danced around each other, tentative, flirtatious, at times awkwardly misaligned but always honest. They named the manuscript “What We Forgot to Say.”
But it wasn’t just a novel.
It became therapy. Excavation. Redemption.
One rainy evening, Aarav read aloud a chapter where his character sat in silence while his mother slowly lost her memory to Alzheimer’s. Meher didn’t say anything after he finished. She just touched his hand lightly and left a Post-it inside his bag later that night: “Your grief is a beautiful river. Let it flow. I’ll swim beside you.”
The next chapter Meher wrote revealed a woman terrified of the sea, having lost someone she loved to it. Aarav, who’d always assumed Meher loved monsoons without reservation, now realized why she sometimes fell silent at Marine Drive. He responded not in words, but by taking her to a quiet, shallow creek in Aarey the next week, where they sat with their feet in the water, watching dragonflies hover above puddles like prophets.
Week after week, chapter after chapter, the book grew. They scribbled on napkins, on ticket stubs, on the backs of theatre programs. Meher used blue ink. Aarav used black. The story, like their city, refused to follow a straight road. It wound through flashbacks, dream sequences, letters never sent, and scenes written from two perspectives. The characters bled into them, and they bled back into the characters.
By the third month, something had shifted. A tension neither of them acknowledged now lived between the lines of the manuscript. In one chapter, Aarav’s character almost kissed hers. In the next, Meher’s wrote a dream where he vanished into the mist, leaving only a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God on a park bench.
At their next reading session, she closed the manuscript slowly and asked, “Are we pretending this is fiction still?”
Aarav’s throat went dry. “It’s safer.”
Meher nodded. “And we’ve never been safe people.”
He looked out the window. “If we weren’t pretending, what would we say?”
She hesitated. “I’d say… you still look at me like you used to when I finished reading a good sentence.”
“And I’d say… I still feel like I’m part of a sentence you never finished writing.”
The bookstore was silent around them.
She smiled. “But we have a pact. No romance till the last page.”
He laughed quietly. “We’re not very good at rules.”
“That’s okay,” she whispered. “Maybe we write a chapter where they break.”
That night, under the yellow streetlight outside Kitab Mahal, Aarav kissed her—not with the hunger of years lost, but with the patience of someone who finally understood that love wasn’t a race. It was a paragraph. Sometimes long. Sometimes broken. But always, always waiting to be completed.
Chapter 6.
The rains took a gentler turn in the following weeks—no longer a reckless downpour, but a soft, secretive drizzle that tiptoed across windowpanes and whispered beneath umbrellas. Mumbai had entered that rare lull between chaos and calm, where every evening felt like an unfinished verse, and every morning arrived with the promise of something unsaid. It was during this hush that Meher returned to the old tin trunk beneath her bed.
She hadn’t opened it in nearly seven years.
The trunk was dented on one corner, the latches rusted but functional, and inside it lay the things she had refused to throw away—because forgetting was never her strength. She touched the brittle ribbon that once held her manuscript, the expired theatre passes from the NCPA, and the envelopes—over thirty of them. Each one addressed to Aarav Sharma. None ever posted.
They were letters she’d written across the years. After fights. After hope. After silence. She had written him on the night he’d missed her book launch, on the afternoon she left for Goa without telling him, on the day she heard his short film had won a festival award. These letters were confessions made in hiding, words she never believed she could say to his face. And yet they were the truest things she had ever written.
She stared at them now, laid across her bed like old ghosts called to trial.
Later that night, she packed them in her cloth bag and walked through the misty lanes of Bandra, her feet uncertain, her fingers trembling. Aarav was waiting at their spot near Chapel Road, where the graffiti spoke louder than any radio station and the walls changed with the seasons. He was standing near the mural of a boy holding a paper boat—her favorite one.
“You came,” he said, smiling.
“I brought something.”
She handed him the bundle of letters—no explanation, no ceremony. His eyes widened.
“These are…”
“Letters I wrote to you. But never sent.”
He looked at her, hesitant. “Why now?”
She met his gaze. “Because I’m ready to stop hiding inside fiction.”
They went to the café nearby, a quiet little place with yellow lamps and wooden floors that creaked with every step. Over lemon tea, Aarav began reading the letters one by one, silently, while Meher sat across from him, her hands clasped, watching him relive the years they had both tiptoed around.
The first letter was raw—written in anger the night they’d fought over the script Aarav had re-edited without telling her. The second was tender, from a day she’d walked past his apartment and paused outside his door but never knocked. The third was a confession of jealousy, an admission of how terrified she was of being forgotten.
Some letters made him smile. Others made him stop, hold his breath, and read the line again, as if disbelief needed a second glance. But the tenth letter… that one broke him.
It had been written on his birthday, the year after they stopped speaking. Meher had included a poem.
You were a sky I folded into paper
Trying to send across oceans in an envelope
But monsoons made everything soggy
Even the words I was too proud to say.
He closed his eyes, pressing the paper to his lips.
“I should’ve come back sooner,” he whispered.
Meher shook her head. “We both left in different ways.”
“But you waited.”
She smiled sadly. “Writers don’t move on. They just write around the silence.”
They didn’t speak for a while. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable—it was ceremonial. The kind of pause that belongs to things sacred.
Then Aarav did something unexpected. He took out a notebook from his bag—the same one he’d been using for their novel—and removed a folded sheet from the back.
“I wrote you something too,” he said. “But I never sent it either.”
Meher’s breath caught.
He unfolded the page and began to read aloud.
> “Dear Meher,
I walked past the banyan tree today, the one outside Prithvi, and for a second I could hear your laughter. I turned around instinctively, like memory had grown legs and chased me into the present. You weren’t there. But the air felt different—like something had just been said and I’d arrived too late.
I miss how you smell of ink and mint. I miss the way you always leave the last sip of chai in your cup. I miss the silence between your sentences—how it always said more than your words.
If I could rewrite the past, I wouldn’t change what we said. I’d only add what we didn’t.
Come back. Not to me. To the story we never finished.”
Meher reached out and touched his wrist. “We’re back now.”
He nodded. “Then let’s keep writing. But without secrets this time.”
That night, as the rain gently tapped against the café windows and the city dissolved into fog, they made a second pact.
This one wasn’t about writing.
It was about truth.
They would keep writing the book, but with everything they were afraid to say. Every page would hold a confession, a wound, a dream. And when it was done, they wouldn’t just publish it. They would read it together, one last time, aloud, and then decide who they truly were—not as characters, but as Meher and Aarav.
And if they found love there, still intact between the chapters, they would keep it.
No conditions.
No delays.
No envelopes left unmailed.
Outside, the mist had thickened. But as they stepped into it, side by side, the city didn’t feel so uncertain anymore.
Because even when visibility was low, they knew the direction. Forward. Together.
Chapter 7.
In the weeks that followed their bookstore pact and the unveiling of unsent letters, Meher and Aarav fell into a rhythm that resembled not quite a relationship, not quite a collaboration—but something far more delicate. They called it “a shared storm.” Each week, they churned through drafts like rain-soaked laundry strung across a skyline. Pages were written in the backs of rickshaws, in the hush of library corners, on napkins at Prithvi Café, on Meher’s typewriter during long electricity cuts. They no longer called it a novel—it had become the story now. Singular. Sacred.
The story’s protagonists—Leela and Vihaan—were reflections of them, but slightly braver, slightly more reckless. Leela once told Vihaan, “Some loves don’t fall apart—they dissolve, quietly, like sugar in black tea.” Aarav had written that line. Meher had underlined it and added a note in the margin: And some loves re-form. Like vapor into rain.
They fought, too. Not over petty things, but over words, metaphors, the integrity of a sentence. One rainy afternoon in a cramped Versova café, they argued over whether a pivotal chapter should end with Leela walking away or staying to confront Vihaan. Meher insisted on confrontation. Aarav said walking away was more powerful. The conversation, low and intense, became personal too quickly.
“So you still think I walked away too early?” he asked.
She paused. “I think… you walked away before asking if I wanted you to stay.”
Silence. Long. Measured.
Then he said, “In the story, she stays. Let’s give her what we didn’t get.”
It was healing, this surrender to narrative. They became safer with each other because their truths now lived in the story first. And somehow, reading them aloud made them less frightening in real life.
One Saturday, Meher invited Aarav over to her grandmother’s old flat in Dadar, where she now lived alone. It was a cluttered home with walls filled with oil paintings and old clocks that never told the right time. Aarav loved it immediately. It smelled of sandalwood and old stories. As they sat on the floor with coffee and a pile of printed chapters between them, Aarav asked, “When did you first know you loved me?”
Meher didn’t hesitate. “The night you returned my umbrella with your initials etched on the handle. You didn’t say anything. Just placed it outside my door. That silence was louder than any apology.”
Aarav chuckled. “I etched those initials because I wanted you to know it was me.”
“I knew.”
He looked at her. “And you? When did I fall for you?”
Meher raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking me to guess your feelings now?”
“I’m asking you to finish the sentence I started seven years ago.”
She took a deep breath. “You fell for me the day I quoted Neruda without realizing it was from one of your favorite poems.”
Aarav was silent. Then: “That was the moment.”
They smiled at each other across the papers scattered like raindrops between them.
But even in moments of closeness, there were ghosts.
One evening, Aarav received a call from Tanvi, his ex-girlfriend from a brief relationship during his New York years. She was visiting Mumbai and wanted to catch up. Meher found out—not from him, but from a mutual friend—and though Aarav later explained it had been a coffee and nothing more, the wound had reopened a tender scar.
“You didn’t tell me,” Meher said, voice soft but firm.
“I didn’t think it mattered.”
“But it does. Because every omission feels like déjà vu.”
Aarav exhaled. “I’m not hiding things. I’m just… still learning how to be vulnerable in real time.”
“I don’t need perfection, Aarav. I just need presence.”
The air between them grew heavy—not with anger, but with the ache of near-loss.
Later that night, he dropped a note into her draft folder, scribbled on the back of an old script page:
> We forget that even healing hearts carry the instinct to flinch.
But I’m here. I’m staying. Teach me how to be the version you can count on.
She didn’t reply. But in the next chapter she wrote, Leela forgave Vihaan—not in words, but in an action as simple as handing him a cup of chai in silence.
The manuscript passed the 200-page mark. They had written themselves into their past, their pain, their hope. But something was missing—an ending.
Every version they tried felt dishonest. One draft had the lovers part ways on a rainy train platform, eyes soaked but hearts clear. Another had them elope to Himachal, opening a bookstore in the hills. Both felt performative. Too cinematic or too cautious.
Until Aarav, one night in October, suggested something different.
“What if,” he said, “we end the story at the café? The same café where they began writing the book. Full circle. But instead of declaring love or making promises, they just sit together. Two coffees. One silence. A smile.”
Meher frowned. “That’s not an ending.”
“It is,” he replied. “For people like us. Endings aren’t explosions. They’re closures. Quiet, powerful closures.”
She nodded slowly. “Then let’s leave them with rain. And an open notebook.”
They decided that chapter would be co-written. Paragraph by paragraph. No names. Just alternating voices.
The final scene would mirror their real lives—sitting at their café in Bandra, reading the final lines of a manuscript born from wounds and stitched together with monsoon ink.
As they began the final chapter that night, thunder cracked above the Arabian Sea, and the power flickered. But they kept writing, candlelight stretching their shadows across the room like pages yet to be filled.
And in that flickering moment, something shifted—not on paper, but in the space between their real hands, touching just slightly over the edge of the typewriter.
Aarav whispered, “When this is done—when we close the file and print the last word—what then?”
Meher didn’t look up. “Then we stop pretending we need a story to love each other.”
Outside, it began to rain again—soft, consistent, like applause from the skies.
Chapter 8.
The café hadn’t changed. Same creaking chairs, same chalkboard specials, same faded mural of a crow flying off a power line. But for Meher and Aarav, it felt entirely new—like walking into a story that had been waiting for them to catch up. The air smelled of roasted coffee beans and wet earth, the kind of scent that settles into your clothes and memory. It was the first Sunday of November, and the monsoon was finally retreating from Mumbai, leaving behind puddles and the bittersweet chill of endings.
They had chosen this day deliberately. After seven months of writing, arguing, reminiscing, healing—they were ready to read the final chapter aloud.
Meher arrived first. She carried a printed manuscript wrapped in brown paper and tied with a red thread. Her fingers trembled as she placed it on the table they always used—third from the back, near the window that overlooked a gulmohar tree stripped bare by the rains. She ordered two chais, then unwrapped the manuscript like a sacred relic, smoothing the pages.
Aarav arrived moments later, a folded umbrella in one hand, a book in the other. He smiled when he saw her, the kind of smile that no longer needed rehearsals. “You beat me,” he said.
“I always do when it matters.”
They both sat down, facing each other, the manuscript between them like a sleeping child. The café was half-full, filled with the quiet hum of conversation and the occasional hiss of steamed milk. But to Meher and Aarav, the world had shrunk to two voices and the sound of pages turning.
“Shall we?” he asked.
She nodded.
They began reading aloud—alternating lines, switching voices like dancers trading steps. The final chapter opened in a fictional version of this very café, where Leela and Vihaan met again after years of silence. They didn’t fall into each other’s arms. They didn’t shout or weep. They just sat down, shared tea, and spoke in the way only people who’ve truly broken and forgiven can.
“So… how have you been?”
“Lost. But not in a bad way.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m found. But still figuring out the coordinates.”
Laughter. Not forced. Not literary. Just honest.
They read about Leela’s new poetry project and Vihaan’s decision to leave filmmaking for teaching. They read about how neither had found new love that lasted, but both had carried each other in different ways: bookmarks, playlists, unfinished voicemails. They read about the quiet joy of finding closure not in passion, but in shared silence.
When the last line arrived, it was Meher’s to read.
And as the rain began once more—gentle, uncertain, like a memory tiptoeing home—they smiled, not at what had been lost, but at what had survived.
She closed the manuscript. Aarav leaned back, eyes closed.
Silence. Again.
But this time, it was full. Like a page that didn’t need more words.
“I think,” Meher said softly, “that’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”
“No,” Aarav replied. “It’s the best thing we’ve ever lived.”
They sipped chai. Outside, people hurried past, stepping over puddles and tugging at scarves. But inside, time held still.
After some moments, Aarav reached into his satchel and pulled out an envelope. Not yellowed with time, but crisp and new. He slid it across the table.
“What’s this?”
“A letter,” he said. “One I wrote last night. The only one that matters now.”
Meher hesitated, then opened it.
Dear Meher,
This story began as fiction. But somewhere along the way, it became our truth. You once said writers don’t move on—they write around the silence. But I think we’ve finally written through it.
So here’s my final submission:
I love you.
Not the you from our twenties, or the you who wrote letters she never posted. But the you who came back with an open heart, with chai and scars and a typewriter full of courage.
I want a life where we finish stories and start again. Where cafés are our homes and rains are our reminders. Where even our silences are co-authored.
If you still want this too—no drama, no epilogues, just the now—meet me on Marine Drive. Tonight. Just after the lights come on.
We’ll walk. And this time, I won’t let go.
—A
She folded the letter, tucked it back into the envelope, and placed it beside the manuscript.
“Do I get to respond?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you coming?”
Meher smiled. “Only if you promise we won’t write about it.”
Aarav grinned. “We won’t need to. Some stories aren’t meant for paper.”
As the sun dipped into the Arabian Sea, Mumbai exhaled its golden light over damp rooftops and honking taxis. The sky cleared for the first time in months.
That night, on Marine Drive, beneath a flickering streetlamp, Meher arrived in a red kurta and windswept hair. Aarav was already waiting, holding two kulfis and grinning like a boy who had been given a second ending.
No words. Just a walk. A shared quiet. And the sound of waves applauding gently against the edge of a city that had, at last, given their story a beginning worth staying in.
Chapter 9.
The monsoon was gone.
The air in Mumbai had turned crisp, touched with the scent of drying earth and freshly ironed cotton. Streets no longer glistened with puddles, and the clouds had made room for stars. With the rains went their metaphors, and with the metaphors, something shifted inside Meher and Aarav—not a conclusion, but a quiet descent into the ordinary. And oddly, it felt like the most intimate season yet.
After that walk on Marine Drive—kulfis melting, hands brushing, no dramatic declarations—they simply began to exist in each other’s lives like a well-worn bookmark: unremarkable but necessary.
Aarav moved into a rented room in Pali Hill, not far from Meher’s flat. He had one suitcase, his laptop, and a stack of their manuscript copies. Every Sunday, they met at her place for coffee and a shared crossword. Sometimes they didn’t talk at all—just wrote, read, or listened to old Asha Bhosle vinyls that belonged to Meher’s grandmother. One evening, they fell asleep while reading each other’s lines, heads tilted in opposite directions on the couch, mouths slightly open, pages splayed like petals between them.
They had never defined what they were now. They didn’t call it dating. Didn’t ask for labels. But there was a toothbrush beside the mirror, and one cup in the kitchen that was always left for the other. There was intimacy in every routine. In the way Aarav refilled Meher’s water bottle without asking. In how she pressed his shirt collars flat with her palm before interviews. In how he always made space on his calendar for her silence.
They submitted the manuscript to four publishers. Three responded within two weeks. Offers. Meetings. Praise. One editor called it “Mumbai’s answer to Normal People, but wetter and more honest.” Another said, “You’ve turned heartbreak into pilgrimage.” They nodded politely, accepted an advance, signed a modest deal with a publisher they both liked—the one who didn’t ask for changes.
But with the book finished, something unexpected crept in: restlessness.
Aarav noticed it first. Meher would get up in the middle of the night to rearrange her bookshelves or start typing pages that didn’t belong to any project. She started walking again—early morning walks through Shivaji Park or up to Mount Mary’s steps, always alone, returning with sweat-slicked cheeks and unsaid thoughts.
One morning, he found a page tucked into her typewriter:
What do writers do when the story no longer needs them?
Where do lovers go when they’re no longer broken?
She caught him reading it and didn’t flinch. “It’s not about us,” she said quickly.
“But it could be,” he replied.
She looked down. “Maybe I don’t know how to be in something that doesn’t require fixing.”
He stepped closer. “Then let’s not fix anything. Let’s just live.”
But that’s not how Meher operated. Her entire life had been stitched together with things she could rewrite. Losses turned into essays. Betrayals shaped into characters. But now—now there was nothing broken to repair. Only the unfiltered, terrifying task of showing up, day after day, with no drama to prop up love.
A week later, Aarav was offered a short residency in Dharamshala—a film institute workshop where he’d mentor students on narrative structure and emotional truth in visual writing. It was for six weeks. He almost declined. But Meher surprised him.
“You should go,” she said. “Teach them how to do what we just did.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be here,” she said. “Learning how to be okay with pauses.”
He kissed her forehead before he left. No promises. No countdowns. Just a quiet confidence that they would write through this too.
While he was gone, Meher began a new story—not a novel, not a memoir, but something in between. She didn’t tell Aarav much about it, only that it started with a woman on a rooftop watching an empty sky. She wrote at odd hours, made friends with a stray cat, and met her editor once a week to discuss the book tour for Monsoon Letters.
The book was gaining attention. Pre-orders spiked. Literary pages wrote glowing previews. Someone from Netflix India asked about screen rights. And in every interview, Meher gave credit to “a story that was co-written not just on paper, but in life.”
But when Aarav returned—sun-burned, peaceful, changed—something was off.
He noticed it in how Meher hugged him. Warm, but cautious. As if holding something back.
Later that evening, on her balcony as the city buzzed with winter festivals and distant fireworks, she confessed.
“I think I’m scared,” she said.
“Of what?”
“That we only work when we’re writing.”
He frowned. “You think we’re a creative partnership, not a… real one?”
“I don’t know. Maybe both. Maybe one fuels the other.”
He nodded, slowly. “So let’s find out.”
“How?”
“Let’s stop writing. For a while. You and me. No stories. No edits. No notebooks.”
Meher went silent. The idea of not writing was like asking her to stop breathing.
But then she looked at him—and realized he wasn’t suggesting an end.
He was inviting her to trust.
They agreed. No fiction between them for two months. Only dinners. Movies. Walks. Conversations. Laughter. Disagreements. Real life, raw and unrecorded.
And something strange happened.
They thrived.
They began to discover each other not as reflections of characters, but as flawed, charming, wildly different humans. Aarav hated pineapple on pizza. Meher was afraid of elevators. He snored slightly when he was too tired. She talked in her sleep. They fought over grocery lists. They kissed in elevators. They held hands in public without dramatics.
And for the first time, fiction slept.
In its place, something softer emerged: presence.
They didn’t need to write about love anymore.
Because they were finally living it.
Chapter 10.
The first printed copy of Monsoon Letters arrived on a Thursday morning, wrapped in bubble sheet and delivered by a sleepy courier boy who had no idea he was holding a storm. Meher stood at her doorway, barefoot, still in her pajamas, staring at the parcel in her hands as if it might disappear. She didn’t open it right away. She placed it gently on her writing desk, made herself a cup of ginger tea, and watched the city stir through her window before she touched it.
When she finally did tear it open, the world tilted. The cover—cream with a single sketch of two teacups under an umbrella—felt like a whispered truth. Her name and Aarav’s appeared below it in crisp typeface. By Meher Joshi & Aarav Mehta. Not a love story, not a memoir. Just a book that carried the weight of everything they once were and everything they had dared to become.
She called Aarav.
“It’s here,” she said, her voice small.
“I’m already outside your building,” he replied.
When she opened the door, he was holding a small bouquet of champa flowers and grinning like a child who had just seen snow for the first time. “You didn’t think I’d miss this, did you?”
They sat together on the floor of her living room, flipping through the book, pausing at lines that once took hours to get right. They didn’t speak much. Every sentence they’d ever needed to say to each other had been said across those pages.
Later that evening, their publisher hosted a modest launch event at a rooftop cafe in Fort. String lights hung between railings. A jazz trio played in the background. Friends, writers, critics, and a few quietly weeping strangers held copies in their hands. The city below flickered with headlights and slow-moving taxis, as if Mumbai itself had paused to eavesdrop.
Meher spoke first.
“When we started writing this book,” she said into the microphone, “we didn’t know we were writing ourselves out of a time capsule. Or that heartbreak could become cartography. This book isn’t just about rain or memory. It’s about the courage to rewrite endings, and sometimes… the courage to stop writing altogether.”
The applause was soft, respectful, like the final clap after a long monsoon concert.
Aarav stepped up next, holding his own marked-up copy. “This story began with a letter I never received. And it ends with a letter I never needed—because somewhere between chai, bookstores, and silence, I found the only narrative that mattered. Not redemption. Not revenge. Just return.”
They stood side by side for the photos, for the book signings, for the quiet nods from people who had seen fragments of their own lives mirrored in the pages. And for the first time, they didn’t feel like characters. They felt real.
When the launch was over and the crowd had thinned, Meher and Aarav walked the length of Marine Drive again. But this time, there was no unresolved silence. No expectations. Just a kind of peace that felt earned.
He turned to her as the waves whispered along the sea wall. “You know we’ll write again, right?”
She smiled. “Only if the story demands us.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we’ll be enough.”
They didn’t need to hold hands. They didn’t need declarations. The city knew. The sea knew. And somewhere in the invisible folds of time, the younger versions of themselves—twenty, hopeful, bruised—looked on in quiet awe, knowing that not all loves crash like waves.
Some loves stay. Like the scent of rain long after it has passed.
Weeks later, Meher found a note tucked into the back of their first edition. It was Aarav’s handwriting. One line only:
Some stories never end. They just become home.
She placed the book on her shelf, between Neruda and Gibran. Then she went to her desk, opened a new notebook, and on the first page, wrote:
Chapter One.
Because this time, fiction could wait.
But life—life had just begun.
—
The End.
