Chapter 7: A Storm Rewritten

There are places in your life that stop being real after a while.

Shimla was one of those for Aarav Verma.

He remembered the way the snow tasted in the air. Sharp. Metallic. Like the aftermath of something you couldn’t name.

It had been five years. But the images returned easily �" like photographs he hadn’t filed away properly.

The cottage.
The laughter.
Her voice.

Then the silence that swallowed it all.
---

He hadn’t told Ira the truth. Not really.
Because he still hadn’t told it to himself.

Sanya Kapoor.

The name used to sound like a melody. Now it echoed like footsteps in an empty room. Too loud. Too long.

He hadn’t spoken to her since that day �" since the avalanche that wasn’t entirely about snow.

---

They were supposed to be there for a week. A group trip. Old friends. Him, Sanya, Rehan, two others whose names he barely remembered now.

But from day one, he and Sanya had slipped into something neither of them dared define. Not quite love. Not quite survival.

She saw things in him. Asked things he didn’t want to answer.

> “You’re always half here,” she’d said once, wrapping a scarf around her neck. “Like you’re waiting for something awful to happen. So you’re already grieving it in advance.”

He’d laughed.

He shouldn’t have.
---

The avalanche came two days later.

Minor, by rescue reports. But something changed that night.

They were walking back from town. Snow began to fall harder. The mountain groaned like something ancient was shifting beneath the surface. Then �" a crash. Ice. White. Fear.

They weren’t trapped. Not physically.

But they got separated for just long enough to realize how alone they could be �" even right next to each other.

When they found each other again, huddled in the dark lobby of the half-buried inn, she had looked at him with eyes full of water, and said:

> “I thought I was going to die, Aarav. And all I could think about was how I still didn’t know who you are.”

---

He hadn’t answered.
He couldn’t.
Not then.

The next morning, she packed her bag before sunrise.

She didn’t slam the door. She didn’t cry.
She just walked out into the snow and disappeared between trees like a ghost who finally gave up haunting.

---

Back in the present, Aarav sat alone in his apartment. Laptop open. The email from Ira still unread again.

She had followed the trail. Of course she had.
Writers always do.

What disturbed him wasn’t that she knew about Sanya.
It was how little she knew �" and still felt so close to the center.

> “Maybe you’re still the middle,” she had said.

Middle of what?

The spiral? The storm? The story he’d never finish writing?

He didn’t know.

But something about her unnerved him. Not in a way that frightened him �" in a way that threatened his version of himself.

---

He closed the laptop and stood.

Walked to the window.

Kolkata thundered below, a city always three degrees too loud. He stared out, watching lights blink across apartment buildings.

Somewhere, Ira was probably writing again. Making notes. Guessing at truths. Turning him into fiction.

And maybe that was the part that scared him the most:

How much fiction had already replaced the facts inside him?

And how much longer before someone got too close to the original draft?

---

In the reflection of the window, he didn’t look like a man grieving a lost love.
He looked like a man waiting for a secret to rot through the floorboards.

And Sanya?

Sanya hadn’t even been the real beginning.

She’d just been the first one to leave before the worst part started.