The front door didn’t make a sound when he stepped back inside.

I was standing near the small kitchen counter, a stack of cotton sweaters clutched against my chest, when the sudden shift in the air made me look up. Veer was standing in the small entryway of my apartment. He didn’t cross the threshold into the living room this time. He just stood there, his large frame instantly making the low-ceilinged space feel incredibly cramped.

“I left my phone,” he said. His voice was completely flat, stripped of any emotion whatsoever. It was the same tone he used when addressing his drivers or answering brief business calls.

He didn’t wait for me to answer. His eyes scanned the small wooden dining table near the door, found the sleek black device sitting right next to a ceramic coaster, and picked it up. He slid it into the inside pocket of his tailored jacket, his movements clean and efficient.

But he didn’t turn around to leave immediately.

He stayed by the door, his gaze drifting over the small space. He looked at the row of mismatched mugs drying on the rack by the sink, the slightly faded green rug under the coffee table, and the massive ferns trailing down from the top shelves. To anyone else, it was just a cozy apartment. To Veer, it looked like a completely different planet. He stood there like an intruder who had accidentally stumbled into a private sanctuary and was trying to calculate exactly how he fit into the equation.

He didn't. That was the truth. The sharp, expensive lines of his designer clothing looked entirely out of place against the wild, untamed green of my home.

“Are you certain about this?” he asked suddenly.

The question was so quiet, so devoid of his usual commanding edge, that it took me a moment to process it. I lowered the sweaters slightly, my fingers tightening against the soft wool. “What do you mean?”

“The mansion,” Veer said, his eyes finally shifting to meet mine. They were completely unreadable—dark, steady, and cold as stone. There was no warmth in them, no hidden sign of affection. Just a heavy, scrutinizing stare. “The family. The noise. It’s an entirely different world from whatever it is you’ve built here. You lived alone. You had peace. Why jeopardize that to go back to a place that doesn't belong to you anymore?”

The words weren't cruel, but they had a blunt, clinical honesty to them that stung. He was looking at me the way a businessman looks at a bad investment—wondering why I was making a choice that seemed completely illogical.

I looked around the room, my eyes lingering on the small potted succulents lining the window sill. “I lived in an Orphanage until the day I turned eighteen, Veer,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as possible. “I didn’t have a room of my own. I didn’t have things that belonged just to me. On my eighteenth birthday, your Dadu brought me here. He handed me the keys and told me it was my sanctuary. He gave me a place to hide when I had nowhere else to go.”

Veer didn’t blink. His jaw remained tight, a faint muscle twitching near his cheekbone, but he didn't interrupt.

“But a sanctuary can start to feel like a cage if you stay in it too long just because you're afraid,” I continued, swallowing the lump in my throat. “Staying at the mansion… going back there… it isn’t about disrupting your family. I just need to remember who I was before everything changed. There is a version of me that existed before the accident, a version I can’t find in this apartment. I need to know her.”

The silence that followed was dense and heavy. The hum of the refrigerator felt incredibly loud in the small kitchen. Veer didn't offer a word of comfort. He didn't tell me he understood, and he certainly didn't step closer. He just watched me, analyzing my words, his posture as rigid as a statue.

“You’re still exactly the same,” he murmured after a long pause. His tone wasn't nostalgic; it was almost tired, as if he had predicted exactly what I would say. “Still trying to find deep, poetic meanings in things that are just practical reality. Potted plants don't hold memories, Inayat. They’re just dirt and leaves.”

A small, defensive laugh escaped my lips before I could stop it. “And you’re still exactly the same, too. Still convinced that if you acknowledge an emotion, it makes you weak.”

Veer’s expression didn't soften. If anything, his gaze hardened, the invisible distance between us lengthening by ten feet. “Emotions don't run a company,” he said coldly. “And they don't protect people from making stupid mistakes.”

We stood on opposite sides of the small room, the space between us charged with an old, unresolved friction.

I wanted to push past that wall of his, to see if the angry, stubborn boy I remembered was still trapped beneath that expensive suit, but the sheer coldness radiating from him made me freeze in my tracks.

He wasn't ice that was waiting to melt. He was a glacier, completely indifferent to the weather around him.

He took a slow breath, his eyes dropping to the small suitcase resting against the kitchen counter. “Are you done packing?”

“Yes,” I said quietly, setting the sweaters into the bag and pulling the zipper shut. The metallic click felt final, a sharp punctuation mark at the end of my time here. “I just need to grab my coat.”

As I turned toward the small closet near the hallway, Veer moved to pick up the suitcase. But as he shifted his weight, the heavy wool of his overcoat brushed against the edge of a small shelf near the counter.

CRAAACK.

The sound was sharp and sudden. A small, unbaked terracotta pot containing a tiny clover sprout tilted over, hit the edge of the counter, and shattered directly on the floorboards between us. A dark mound of loose, damp soil scattered across the clean white kitchen tiles, burying the tiny green roots under a mess of debris.

We both froze.

The sudden noise broke whatever lingering connection had been hanging in the air. The heavy, suffocating silence returned instantly, but this time it was awkward, marred by the mess on the floor.

“Don’t move,” I said quickly, my defensive instincts kicking in as I immediately dropped to my knees. “There might be sharp pieces. I’ll clean it.”

I began gathering the larger shards of terracotta, my fingers brushing against the cold tile. I didn’t look up at him, but I could see his polished leather shoes standing completely still just inches away from the dirt. I felt incredibly small in that moment—barefoot on the floor, sweeping up dirt with my hands, while he stood above me like an untouchable observer.

Veer let out a short, sharp breath through his nose. He didn't bend down to help. He didn't offer an apology for knocking it over. He simply stepped backward, away from the scattered soil, his shoes making a distinct clicking sound against the floor.

“I’ll wait in the car,” he said. His voice had returned to its absolute corporate chill, completely distant and entirely detached.

Before I could even look up from the floor, he turned on his heel. The front door opened and shut with a firm, decisive click that echoed through the quiet apartment.

I stayed on the floor for a long minute, a sharp piece of clay dug into my palm. He hadn't looked back. He hadn't hesitated. The fortress was completely back up, the walls thicker than they had ever been. By the time I stood up and looked down the narrow hallway, there was nothing left but the faint, fading scent of his expensive cologne and the cold, empty silence of my green kitchen.

I cleaned the rest of the dirt in a hurry, my heart thumping against my ribs for reasons I couldn't quite explain. I wasn't trying to impress him. I didn't care about his approval. But the absolute walls he kept up around himself made me feel an unsettling ache in my chest.

I grabbed my bag, took one last look at the quiet jungle that had protected me for three years, and pulled the door shut behind me.

The steering wheel felt cold under my palms.

I didn’t turn on the heater. I just sat there in the dark of the driver’s seat, my fingers curled loosely around the leather, staring straight ahead at the gray concrete wall of her apartment building. The digital clock on the dashboard glowed a faint, steady blue, ticking away the minutes in absolute silence.

I hated the apartment.

I hated the smell of damp earth, the cluttered shelves, and the way the entire place seemed designed to make a person lower their guard. It was soft. It was fragile. It was exactly the kind of environment that made people weak, that made them think they could survive on nothing but metaphors and memories.

My hand tightened slightly against the wheel as the image of her standing in that kitchen flashed through my mind. Barefoot. Defiant. Looking at me with those wide, questioning eyes as if she had the right to demand answers from me. She thought she could just walk back into the mansion and find some lost version of herself, like picking up a book she had left behind years ago. She had no idea what that house was actually like now. She didn't understand the weight of the Singhania's, or the silent, suffocating expectations that came with the name.

She was an outsider playing with fire, and she didn't even realize she was about to get burned.

I closed my eyes for a brief second, leaning my head back against the headrest. The steady, quiet idle of the engine did nothing to calm the irritation brewing under my skin.

Every time I looked at her, the boundaries I had spent years constructing felt a little more strained. It wasn't because of who she was now. It was because of the shadow she carried with her—the persistent, irritating ghost of the little girl in the yellow frock who used to ruin my clothes and disrupt my quiet.

The memory hit me before I could suppress it, sharp and uninvited.

The mansion's garden had been much larger back then. Or maybe it just felt that way because we hadn't learned how small the world actually was.

I was nine years old, already wearing the stiff, uncomfortable collars my father insisted on, trying to show Mahir how to properly clear the weeds from Dadu’s patch of soil.

Mahir was seven, easily distracted, his hands covered in mud as he tried to catch a grasshopper.

And then, she had arrived.

She didn't walk into the garden; she exploded into it. We heard her before we saw her—the frantic, uneven thud of her small sneakers hitting the gravel path, her voice carrying across the entire lawn.

“Veer! Mahi bhaiii!”

I had looked up, wiping a streak of sweat from my forehead, fully prepared to tell her to go back inside. But there she was—the tiniest, most chaotic thing I had ever seen, wearing a bright yellow frock that was already wrinkled, her hair a complete disaster of loose braids, and her face flushed bright red from running. In her tiny hands, she was clutching a crumpled, dirt-stained paper packet like it was made of solid gold.

Mahir had dropped his handful of dirt immediately, a massive grin splitting his face. “Inu! You came!”

“Cupcake,” I had called out, leaning back on the wooden handle of my small spade, trying to sound as grown-up and indifferent as my father. “You’re early. You’re not supposed to be allowed out here until the adults are finished with tea.”

She hadn't even looked at me. She ignored my teasing with that absolute, fierce focus she always had when she thought she had an important task to fulfill.

“Look what I got!” she gasped, her breath short as she held the crumpled packet right above her head. “The gardener uncle at the gate gave it to me! He said these will grow into a biiig neem tree if we are nice to it and tell it secrets!”

The words had tumbled out of her mouth so fast they practically tripped over each other.

“I wanna put it right here! Please, please, please—right in the middle! And when it gets huge, we can put a giant rope on it and all swing together, okay?” She had spread her small arms as wide as they could possibly go, nearly losing her balance on the uneven grass as she tried to demonstrate the scale of her imagination. “It’ll be our secret tree. Just me, Mahi bhai, and Veer. No grown-ups allowed near it ever!”

Mahir had laughed, stepping forward to rub his muddy hand directly over her hair, which only made the braids messier. “Okay, Inu. Let’s do it. But it’s your tree, so you have to water it every single day without failing.”

“Pinky pwomise,” she had said instantly, locking her tiny little pinky finger into Mahir's mud-caked one with an expression of absolute, terrifying sincerity.

I had stood there watching them, an unfamiliar, heavy feeling settling in my nine-year-old chest. She was younger than us, half our size, and entirely too loud, but she had walked onto that patch of land as if her roots had been buried deep in the Singhania soil long before any of us had even noticed. She didn't ask for permission to belong. She just decided she did.

She had dropped to her knees right next to my spade, completely ignoring the dark mud that immediately ruined the hem of her yellow frock. She started scratching at the earth with her bare fingers, her small eyebrows knitting together in intense concentration as she tried to hollow out a space for her seed.

“Veer,” she had mumbled, her focus entirely on the dirt. “You have to help too. You’re the tallest, so when the tree gets all the way up to the sky, you’re the one who has to lift me up so I can reach the swing.”

I remember let out a sharp laugh, trying to mask how much her request actually mattered to me. “What if I don’t want to share the swing? What if I keep it all for myself and let the monkeys stay on the ground?”

She had stopped digging, snapping her head up to look at me, her cheeks puffing out until she looked like an angry little pufferfish. “Then I’ll tell Aunty that you didn't finish your milk this morning and you hid it behind the sofa!”

I had stared at her in mock horror, genuinely surprised by her tactical genius. “You wouldn’t dare.”

She had just grinned—a wide, gap-toothed, entirely victorious smile. “I would.”

We had planted that seed together. My father would have been furious if he had seen the state of my clothes, but for two hours, I hadn't cared. Our fingers were caked in black dirt, our knees were bruised from the small stones in the soil, and our voices had echoed across the garden until the sun sank below the horizon, painting the sky in deep shades of orange and purple.

When the dirt was finally smoothed over the spot, she had pressed her small hands together, closed her eyes tightly, and moved her lips in a silent whisper.

“What are you doing now, Inu?” Mahir had asked, shifting his weight impatiently.

“I’m telling the seed to grow fast-fast,” she had whispered back, her eyes still squeezed shut with an intensity that only a child could manage. “So we can swing on it before I have to grow up.”

Mahir had rolled his eyes, practical as always. “Trees take years, Inu. It won’t happen tomorrow.”

But I remember looking at her small, determined face under the fading light and thinking… maybe it would. Maybe her sheer, stubborn belief was enough to force the earth to move faster.

The digital clock on the dashboard clicked, changing from 5:14 to 5:15.

The mud under my fingernails had been washed away over a decade ago. My father was gone, Dadu was old, and the boy who used to dig in the dirt had been replaced by a man who wore thousands of rupees on his wrist and didn't have time for childhood games. But that memory? It remained entirely untouched, clinging to the back of my mind like rain on stone, refusing to be eroded by time or logic.

The neem tree in the mansion's backyard had grown. It was massive now, its thick branches casting long shadows over the brick walls.

We had grown too. But we hadn't grown together. We had grown apart, hardened by the years and the silence that followed her departure.

“Veer, you’re the tallest… you gotta help me climb the swing.”

I stared out the windshield, my jaw tightening until it ached. I would have given every single asset under my control to hear that specific tone again—not the words themselves, but the absolute, unwavering certainty behind them. The complete belief that I was strong enough to protect her, that I would always be there to lift her up when the ground was too far away.

Now, she looked at me like I was an adversary. Like I was a threat she had to navigate.

Click.

The sharp sound of the passenger door opening broke my train of thought.

Inayat slid into the seat, her movements slightly hurried. Her hair was a bit disheveled from the wind outside, and her cheeks were faintly pink from the rush of carrying her things down the narrow stairwell. She pulled her small coat tightly around herself, her shoulder brushing against the leather of the seat as she settled in.

She reached for the seatbelt, her fingers struggling for a brief second with the metal latch before it clicked into place with a sharp, heavy thud.

She didn't look at me. She just turned her head toward the side window, staring out at the flickering streetlights of the city.

I didn't turn to look at her either. I shifted the car into drive, my movements smooth and deliberate, and pressed my foot down on the accelerator. The vehicle glided away from the curb, leaving the small, plant-filled sanctuary behind as we turned onto the main road.

The silence inside the vehicle didn't just exist; it felt alive. It was thick, suffocating, and loaded with the weight of twelve years of missing pieces. It roared louder than any engine ever could, a constant reminder of the massive chasm that now lay between the children who had planted a seed and the adults who couldn't even look each other in the eye.

Some memories didn't need words to cause damage. They lived entirely in the empty spaces we refused to fill.