Chapter 14: The Lockbox

POV: Aarav

There was a strange smell in his childhood home �" not decay, not dust, but something more clinical.

Memory, sterilized.

Aarav walked past the photo wall without pausing. His mother had rearranged the frames again �" his brother, Vivaan, grinning on mountain peaks and gala stages, while his own face always seemed... caught in the corners. A supporting character in his own life.

His footsteps led him to Vivaan’s old study.

The room hadn’t been touched in years, and yet it felt curated. A perfect still life. As if Vivaan expected to walk back in at any moment and resume playing the role of genius and ghost.

But something was off. A book on the shelf �" Metaphors of Persuasion �" stuck out by exactly 2 mm. Aarav pulled it.

Click.

A drawer slid open in the desk. Hidden. Locked.

Aarav stared at it.

He hadn’t been searching for anything specific, but now that he’d found this, he knew whatever was inside wasn’t meant for him �" or anyone.

He picked the lock with quiet fingers. When it opened, the air around him shifted. A cold draft that didn’t belong in this summer afternoon.

Inside: an old, weathered SD card, a folded letter, and a single polaroid photograph.
---

He opened the letter first.

It was addressed simply:

> To whoever thinks Aarav knows the truth.

> Let me be clear: he doesn’t. He saw the surface. He was too soft to dig beneath it. That’s why they came to him. That’s why they thought they’d be safe. They weren’t.
No one was.
�" V.
---

The photograph was worse.

Meera and Kiara �" sitting on a bench in Shimla. Smiling. But in the reflection behind them, in a mirror on the café wall, a figure stood.

Vivaan.

Watching them.

Aarav stared at the image until the edges blurred.

---

Finally, he loaded the SD card into his laptop.

There were three video files.

KRM_1

KRM_2

KRM_13
He opened the last one.

Static. Then Kiara’s voice.

> “If you’re watching this, I didn’t leave because of Aarav.”

The screen shook as she adjusted the camera.

> “I left because of Vivaan. And because Aarav wouldn’t believe me if I stayed.”

Aarav paused the video. Closed the lid.

He couldn’t breathe.
---

He sat in the dark of that study for what felt like hours, his hands in his lap, shaking.

He had gone to therapy to forget.
But this?

This was something you couldn’t un-remember.
---

Outside, the sunlight shifted.

And inside the drawer, beneath the false bottom, another object waited: a wristwatch �" shattered. Meera’s.

The time frozen at 3:13 PM.

The same hour she vanished.