Chapter 1
It had been some years, and the city of Bangalore had finally begun to feel quiet. My morning shifts were a steady rhythm, a peaceful foundation I had built with my own hands. My screen was clean, the digital ghosts of my past locked away behind an invisible wall of self-respect.
Then, at 11:31 PM, the phone vibrated on the nightstand.
My thumb hovered over the screen, paralyzed by the sudden glare of his name. For a second, the ambient hum of the Bangalore traffic outside my window faded into absolute white noise. It is funny how a single notification can act like a time machine, violently pulling you out of the life you carefully built over two years and dropping you back into the exact spot you bled.
A name I hadn’t seen illuminated in white text for what felt like a lifetime. The message was bare, carrying none of the weight of the history we shared.
It simply read: "How are u?"
I stared at those three lowercase letters. My mind automatically spun backward, bypassing the years of silence, crashing straight into the memory of a midnight routine that used to consume my soul. My breathing turned shallow. I wasn't the girl who used to chase his answers anymore, but my body still remembered the adrenaline of his midnight game.
He didn't ask if I was still whole. He didn't apologize for leaving me hanging all those years ago with a dismissive goodbye. A normal friend would have asked if I was okay, but Vikram had never been a normal friend.
For nearly five years, we had shared a steady, platonic baseline—a comfortable friendship built on daytime coffee runs and shared history. But then came the shift. Four months of a dizzying, late-night detour where the boundaries blurred and he suddenly turned me into his personal emotional placeholder.
He was bleeding from his own past heartbreak, and he didn’t care that he was making me bleed in the process. He was just testing the waters, checking to see if the door to my emotional garden was still unlocked. To see if I would still act as his midnight painkiller.
A warmth prickled behind my eyelids, and before I could blink it away, a tear slipped down my cheek, catching the cold glare of the phone screen. The single droplet felt heavy, carrying the weight of a dam that had finally burst after two years of forced strength.
In an instant, the dark bedroom vanished, and my mind fell completely backward into the archives of us.
I remembered the version of Vikram from the safe years. The guy who knew exactly how I took my filter coffee, the friend who could look at my face for a split second across a crowded room in MG Road and know precisely when my social battery had run out. Our bond hadn’t been built on grand, dramatic gestures; it was forged in the quiet spaces. It was the comfort of knowing someone was simply there. We used to talk about everything and nothing until the early hours of the morning, sharing stupid inside jokes, venting about awful bosses, and mapping out futures that we assumed would always run parallel to each other.
He had been my safest anchor in a chaotic city. Back then, if I had told him my heart was hurting, he would have dropped everything to help me fix it.
Or at least, that was the version of him I had memorised.
My tear hit the screen, landing right over his text message, distorting those three lowercase letters into a blurred, messy smudge. The physical smudge on the glass mirrored the emotional smudge he had left on my life.
How could a bond that felt so pure, so built to last, mutate into a late-night rescue mission where only one of us survived? I remembered the exact transition point—the night the platonic baseline shattered, and the midnight shifts began.
