Chapter 15: The Missing Frame

POV: Ira

The art studio smelled like turpentine and rainy evenings.
Fitting, Ira thought. That was exactly how Kiara’s name felt now �" sharp, stained, and wet with ghosts.

She hadn’t known where else to go, but Meera’s journal had mentioned “Ms. Indrani,” an art professor who once described Kiara’s sketchbook as “a landscape of warning signs.”

So Ira came.

Indrani looked like a woman carved from intuition. Long silver hair tied back. Glasses always perched on the tip of her nose, but never once adjusted.

She studied Ira as though trying to identify which medium she belonged to �" watercolour or charcoal.

> “You’re here about Kiara Roy,” she said, before Ira even asked.

Ira nodded. “Do you remember her?”

> “Yes. Most people don’t forget the sound of a silent scream.”

---

Indrani pulled out a box marked K. Roy �" Unsubmitted.

Inside: charcoal sketches. Some loose. Some torn. None of them ever displayed.

Ira flipped through them slowly.

One by one, the pieces came together:

A faceless man holding puppet strings.

A girl with a red thread tied around her wrist, fraying into ash.

A house with no doors. Just mirrors.

A bird in flight �" shadowed by a larger, unseen wing.

> “She never named names,” Indrani murmured. “But her art? It was louder than anything she could say.”

> “Did anyone report it? Ask questions?”

Indrani smiled bitterly. “You know how the world treats girls with ‘intense imaginations’? They lock the gallery before the painting’s even finished.”
---

Then Ira found it �" the sketch that stopped her heart.

A group portrait.

Three figures:

A girl with a flower. (Meera)

A girl with a sketchpad. (Kiara)

A boy with a broken clock for a face. (Aarav?)

Standing behind them, towering, holding an unmarked camera: a fourth figure, all in shadow, but drawn with deliberate detail.

His smile was razor-thin.
---

> “She submitted that the day before she vanished,” Indrani whispered. “The judges called it ‘disturbing.’ I called it ‘truth.’”
---

Back at her flat, Ira placed the sketch beside the last lines in Meera’s journal.

Both pages.
Different voices.
Same story.

> “He didn’t hurt me with fists. He did worse �" he made me question what I saw.”

---

And then it hit her.

Aarav’s first transcript.

> “I haven’t told anyone what happened in Shimla. Not even her.”

What if it wasn’t guilt he was protecting?

What if it was denial?
---

The page fluttered in the fan’s breeze.
Kiara’s girls stared back at her �" flowers wilting, sketches torn.

Ira finally saw it.

The story wasn’t about what Aarav did.

It was about what he let happen.