Things we never finished!

A Name in the Rain

Edinburgh, Scotland. October.

The first thing Maya Nanda complained about when they stepped out of the café was the weather.

It was not an original complaint, nor was it particularly useful, considering that it had been raining since late afternoon and the forecast on her phone had promised another six hours of it, but Maya had never been particularly good at accepting things simply because they were beyond her control. She stood beneath the café’s striped awning, pulling the sleeves of her oversized hoodie over her hands while she watched Freya struggle with an umbrella that appeared to have developed a personal grievance against her.

“I am telling you, Freya, if we have to walk all the way to the car park in this weather, I am never coming out with you again.”

Freya looked up from the umbrella she was attempting to wrestle into submission. “You said that last Saturday.”

Maya glanced at the rain. “And I meant it then, too.”

Freya laughed. “You’re still here.”

Maya gave her a small, resigned look, then pulled her sleeves further over her hands. “Unfortunately.”

Freya laughed, finally managing to open the umbrella, although one of its metal spokes had bent at an angle that suggested it might not survive the journey. She was already several steps ahead of Maya by the time the latter had finished checking whether her phone had received any new messages, a habit that had become almost entirely pointless over the past few months, considering that most of her notifications were either work-related or reminders she had set for herself because she could no longer trust her memory to keep track of the things she was supposed to do.

Freya Sinclair had grown up in Edinburgh, lived in the same house on the same street for most of her life, and still referred to the neighbourhood bakery as though it were a member of her extended family. She knew which shops stayed open late, which streets flooded after heavy rain, and which cafés served coffee strong enough to revive the dead. She could navigate the city without a map, recognise half the people they passed on the street, and turn a quick coffee into a three-hour outing without ever appearing to notice that the original purpose of the meeting had long since been forgotten.

Maya had once told her that she suspected Freya could navigate Edinburgh blindfolded.

Freya had responded by pointing out that Maya could probably walk into a lamppost while reading an email.

It had been an irritatingly accurate observation.

Their friendship had begun at a professional networking event that Maya had attended under the mistaken impression that she might learn something useful about the local gaming industry. She had spent most of the evening standing near a table of untouched pastries, listening to conversations about innovation and market disruption while mentally revising a piece of code she had been unable to fix that afternoon. Freya, who had been there for an entirely different reason, had noticed the woman in the corner who looked as though she would rather be debugging a broken application than speaking to another human being.

Three months later, Freya had appointed herself Maya’s unofficial social coordinator.

Maya had objected to the appointment on the grounds that nobody had asked her permission.

Freya had informed her that she had been given ample opportunity to object and had chosen to do so in the form of a sarcastic remark, which was not legally binding.

It was, by most accounts, a perfectly good friendship.

Maya had not intended to acquire another one when she moved to Scotland, particularly not one that involved being dragged out for dinner on a Wednesday evening when she had a presentation due the following morning. She had been perfectly content with the arrangement she had established for herself: work, home, occasional grocery shopping, and the quiet satisfaction of spending an uninterrupted evening solving problems that other people had somehow managed to create.

Freya had gradually introduced small complications into this system, including spontaneous dinners, weekend walks, birthday parties, and an insistence that Maya could not reasonably consider her life complete if she had never tried the little bakery on the corner.

Maya had learned to complain and go anyway.

The street was busy with the last of the evening crowd, with taxis passing in wet streaks of white and red, people hurrying beneath dark umbrellas, and the warm yellow windows of old stone buildings throwing fractured reflections across the pavement. Somewhere down the street, a bus sighed to a halt. The air smelled of rain, roasted coffee, and the faint, comforting sweetness of something baking in a shop that had long since closed its doors to customers.

Maya was tired in the particular way that came from having spent an entire day making decisions on behalf of other people.

Her last meeting had run forty minutes over schedule. She had forgotten to eat lunch, survived the afternoon on coffee, and spent the better part of dinner explaining to Freya why the latest feature request from her studio’s creative team was not, in fact, a simple change that could be completed in an afternoon.

“It is not a small change,” she had explained for the third time, stabbing a fork into a piece of roasted potato. “It is an entirely new system disguised as a small change because somebody thought calling it a feature would make it sound less expensive.”

Freya had considered this with the seriousness of someone listening to a medical diagnosis.

“Have you tried telling them to go away?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“They scheduled another meeting.”

“Monsters.”

“Honestly, at this point, I respect their commitment to making my life difficult.”

Freya had laughed hard enough to attract a look from the couple at the next table, which had been the first genuinely enjoyable moment of Maya’s evening.

She was good at her job. She was very good at it, in fact, and she had worked hard enough to become one of the senior developers at a studio whose games reached players across the world. She liked the work, liked the problems that required patience and imagination, and liked the quiet satisfaction of watching something she had helped build come alive on a screen.

There was a peculiar comfort in code. It could be complicated, frustrating, and occasionally unreasonable, but it was still a system. You could trace a problem to its source, test a solution, and keep working until something made sense. Even when a bug seemed determined to ruin your day, it was at least honest about being a problem.

People were less considerate.

Maya had spent years learning how to make herself useful, how to be reliable, and how to keep moving when there were things she did not particularly want to think about. Work had become the place where she could put everything aside without having to explain why. Somewhere along the way, the habit had become a lifestyle, and she had become so accustomed to being busy that she occasionally forgot what she might do with herself if she were not.

It was not that she had no happiness in her life. She had a career she was proud of, a handful of people she trusted, and a friend who appeared to have made it her personal mission to ensure that Maya occasionally left her flat for reasons unrelated to buying groceries.

She laughed. She made jokes. She sent Freya messages at unreasonable hours about terrible dialogue in video games and once spent an entire afternoon constructing an elaborate argument about why a particular fictional character was objectively the worst person ever written.

She was not unhappy all the time.

She had simply become very good at putting the things that hurt somewhere out of sight.

For the first time all week, however, she had nowhere to be for the next twenty minutes.

She intended to enjoy them.

“Freya!” she called, when her friend continued walking without looking back. “Will you slow down? Some of us have short legs!”

Freya lifted one hand in a thoroughly unrepentant wave.

Maya rolled her eyes, adjusted the strap of her bag, and stepped out from beneath the awning.

She made it exactly three steps.

The collision was not particularly dramatic. There was no scattering of papers, no spilled coffee, no cinematic stumble into a pair of waiting arms. Her shoulder struck someone coming from the opposite direction, her bag slipped halfway down her arm, and the sudden movement sent her phone sliding dangerously towards the pavement.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry!”

She caught the bag against her hip, but before she could reach for her phone, the stranger bent to pick it up. He straightened with the phone in his hand, turning towards her as though he were about to return it.

“Sorry, I wasn’t—”

He stopped.

She looked up.

And the rest of the sentence disappeared.

For one strange, impossible moment, Maya did not recognise the street around her. The rain continued to fall, the traffic continued to move, and someone brushed past them with an irritated mutter, but all of it seemed to recede behind the sudden, bewildering familiarity of the man standing in front of her.

Her phone lay forgotten in his hand.

Neither of them moved to return it.

They simply looked at each other, caught in the strange, unbearable stillness of recognising someone who belonged to a life they had both thought was over.

He wore a charcoal-grey hoodie beneath a dark jacket, the collar turned up against the cold, and a pair of black sweatpants that looked as though he had dressed for a quiet evening at home rather than a night out in the city. His hair was slightly longer than she remembered, and there was a faint shadow of stubble along his jaw. Ten years had passed, and neither of them had been spared the ordinary business of becoming someone else. There was a little more seriousness in the way he held himself, a steadiness that had not been there when they were seventeen, and something in his expression that belonged to a life she knew nothing about.

But his eyes were the same.

That was the terrible part.

She had forgotten the precise shape of his smile. She had forgotten the sound of his voice, or at least she had convinced herself she had, until some memory buried deep enough to have become almost unrecognisable stirred at the sight of him. She had forgotten the way he used to tilt his head when he was trying to understand something she had said, and how he would look at her for a second longer than necessary, as though there were always another conversation happening beneath the one they were having aloud.

She had forgotten so many things.

Apparently, her body had not.

His expression changed first. It was a small thing, barely more than the sudden stillness of his mouth, the almost imperceptible widening of his eyes, but she saw it happen. She watched recognition arrive in his face, watched him try to make sense of it, and then watched the effort fail entirely.

“Maya”

He said her name quietly.

Not as a question, exactly.

More like someone discovering that a place he had spent years believing no longer existed was still standing, untouched, at the end of a road he had not travelled in a very long time.

She stared at him.

Kaivalya Fraser.

For a moment, that was the only name she could remember.

Not the name that might appear on a professional profile, not the name that might be printed on a conference badge or attached to a photograph from some event she had never attended. The name she had known in school, the one she had called across corridors and whispered over the last pages of borrowed notebooks, the one that had belonged to a boy who used to sit two rows ahead of her and pretend not to notice when she was looking at him.

Kaivalya.

She had known him before he became a man who lived in another country, before his work involved advanced graphics systems and AI-assisted applications, before he had a life full of colleagues and meetings and friends who called him by a name she had never used.

She did not know what people called him now. She had never followed his life closely enough to learn the details, and whatever information might have existed about him in the world beyond their shared past had never found its way to her. She did not know that, years after leaving India, he had begun using Callum Fraser professionally, or that almost everyone in his present life knew him by that name.

To Maya, he was still Kaivalya.

She had known him when his entire world could fit inside a small town in Maharashtra, a school uniform, and the distance between their houses.

She had known him when loving him had seemed like the simplest thing in the world.

And then, somehow, it had become the most complicated.

His mother, Lata Deshmukh, had been born and raised in Maharashtra. After marrying his Scottish father, Alastor Fraser, she had become Lata Fraser, and the family had made their home in Nagpur for most of Kaivalya’s childhood. At school, he had simply been Kaivalya Fraser, a name his mother had chosen with care and one that sat naturally alongside the Fraser surname. The name had never been the complicated part of his life.

The change had come years later, when he moved to Scotland and began using Callum Fraser professionally, the name associated with his father’s family and the country in which he was establishing his adult life. It had started as a practical decision, a way of making introductions easier in a place where people frequently stumbled over Kaivalya, and eventually became the name by which his colleagues and friends knew him.

Callum Fraser was the man he had become.

Kaivalya was the boy Maya had known.

She had not thought of him in years. At least, not in any way she would have admitted to herself.

“Kaivalya”

She had not meant to say it aloud. It escaped her before she could decide whether she wanted him to hear it, a small, disbelieving sound that seemed to belong to someone much younger than the woman standing in front of him.

His face changed again.

For one brief moment, he looked almost relieved.

Then the expression was gone, replaced by something more guarded, and Maya found herself wondering whether she had imagined it.

There had been a time when she knew everything about this boy. She knew that he hated the last page of a book being folded, that he could never remember where he left his school ID card, that he preferred tea to coffee but drank coffee anyway when he was trying to impress someone. She knew that he would pretend not to be nervous before an examination and then tap his pen against the desk until someone threatened to throw it out of the window.

She knew that he was kinder than he wanted people to notice, and more afraid of disappointing his father than he would ever admit.

She knew that his sarcasm became sharper when he was embarrassed, that he could make an entire classroom laugh with one perfectly timed remark, and that he had a habit of fixing things for people without telling them he had done it. She knew he could spend an hour explaining a technical problem to a teacher and then struggle to tell a girl he liked that he wanted to spend time with her.

She had known him before he became Callum Fraser.

She had known him before either of them understood that two people could be close enough to know each other’s smallest habits and still be capable of misunderstanding one another so completely that they lost years they could never get back.

She had known him when he was the boy who showed her where the library was on her second day at school.

Nagpur had not been Maya’s home when she first arrived. Her father had been transferred there from Jaipur in the middle of an academic year, and she had spent the first few weeks wishing she could return to the familiar streets, the house with the neem tree outside her bedroom window, and the school where everyone already knew her name. Her new school had been larger than the one she had left, the corridors louder, and the girls in her class had seemed to possess an unspoken understanding of one another that she could not quite find her way into.

She had been quiet then, too, though not quite in the way she was now. She had been observant, stubborn, and reluctant to ask for help, preferring to spend her lunch breaks in the library rather than admit she had not yet figured out where she belonged.

Kaivalya had found her there.

He had been looking for a book he had returned to the wrong shelf, or so he claimed later. Maya had suspected that he had simply noticed the new girl sitting alone and decided to do something about it, but she had never asked him outright. He had shown her where to find the books she wanted, told her which teachers were likely to ask questions, and lent her a pen during mathematics when hers had stopped working.

He had once waited outside the classroom for twenty minutes because she had forgotten where the school bus stopped.

When she had asked him why he had not simply gone home, he had shrugged and said, “Because your sense of direction is a public safety concern, Nanda.”

She had laughed so suddenly that she had nearly dropped her bag.

It had been the beginning of something, though neither of them had known that at the time.

They had become friends in the unremarkable way that friendships often begin, through small kindnesses, familiar routines, and conversations that gradually grew longer than either person intended. He learned that Maya was funny when she felt comfortable enough to forget herself. She learned that his sarcasm was often a disguise for a tenderness he did not know how to express directly.

He began saving her a seat.

She began looking for him when she entered a room.

They shared notes, arguments, books, and the sort of private jokes that made no sense to anyone else. He teased her for being stubborn; she told him he was arrogant. He called her dramatic; she informed him that he had the emotional range of a malfunctioning calculator.

“That is deeply unfair,” he had told her once.

“Which part?”

“The calculator part. Calculators are useful.”

She had laughed until her eyes watered.

Somewhere between those ordinary days and the last summer of school, friendship became something else. It happened so gradually that neither of them could point to a single moment and say that was when it began. Perhaps it was the evening they stayed behind after an event at school and talked until the caretaker threatened to lock them inside. Perhaps it was the first time Kaivalya looked for Maya in a crowd and felt the strange, immediate disappointment of not finding her. Perhaps it was the afternoon she realised she could recognise his footsteps in the corridor.

Or perhaps it had been there all along, waiting for them to become old enough to recognise it.

Then came the date that neither of them would ever entirely forget.

Then came the misunderstanding.

Then came the silence.

Ten years since the last time Maya had stood in front of him and waited for him to explain himself. Ten years since she had decided that silence was an answer, that some people could care about you and still leave you standing alone in the middle of a story they had started together. Ten years since she had packed away the memories of their last summer, the evening that had almost changed everything, and the words she had never managed to say after the misunderstanding that followed.

“Maya!”

Freya’s voice came from somewhere ahead of them.

Maya blinked, though the movement did little to bring the world back into focus. She became aware of the rain collecting on her jacket, of her fingers tightening around the strap of her bag, of the stranger’s face being not a stranger’s face at all.

She had spent years convincing herself that she would know what to do if she ever saw him again. She had imagined the encounter in a dozen different ways, usually while she was doing something entirely unrelated, and in most of those imaginary versions she had been calm, composed, and entirely indifferent.

She had thought she might smile politely. Perhaps ask how he was. Perhaps discover that the years had done their work so thoroughly that she could look at him without feeling anything at all.

She had never imagined that the sight of him would make her forget how to speak.

“Sorry,” she said again.

It was an absurd thing to say, and she knew it even as the word left her mouth.

His eyes moved over her face, as if he were looking for something he had misplaced a long time ago and could not quite believe he might find here.

“No, I—”

He stopped.

For the first time since she had known him, she could not tell what he was going to say.

There had been a time when she could predict his reactions with ridiculous accuracy. She knew when he was about to make a joke, when he was annoyed but pretending otherwise, and when he was trying to work up the courage to say something important. She had once been so familiar with the small shifts in his expression that she could tell whether he had slept badly simply by looking at him across a classroom.

Now she could not tell whether he wanted to speak to her or wanted her to leave.

That uncertainty was somehow worse than the years of silence.

Freya called again, louder this time, and Maya turned her head towards the sound. The movement was small, but when she looked back at him, she had already begun the familiar, instinctive process of putting herself together. The brief confusion gave way to something more composed. Her shoulders straightened. Her fingers adjusted the strap of her bag. She drew in a breath that tasted of cold air and rain.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, offering him the faintest, most bewildered smile. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

Neither was I, he might have said.

She reached for her phone.

He was still holding it, his fingers curled around its edges, as though he had forgotten that he had picked it up in the first place. Maya took it from his hand a little too quickly, her fingertips brushing his for the briefest moment before she pulled away.

“Sorry,” she murmured once more.

Then she turned and hurried towards Freya.

For a fraction of a second, he remained where he was, watching her retreat with the stunned expression of someone who had recognised a voice from a dream and then awakened too suddenly to understand where he was.

He took a step forward.

His hand lifted instinctively, reaching towards her as though he could somehow call her back simply by wanting it badly enough, but his mouth remained closed. Whatever he might have said stayed somewhere behind his teeth, caught between the shock of seeing her and the unbearable realisation that she was already leaving.

Maya did not turn around. Not when she reached Freya. Not when her friend slipped an arm through hers and pulled her beneath the umbrella. Not when they crossed the road and disappeared into the moving crowd, their figures dissolving into the rain and the scattered lights of the city.

He lowered his hand slowly, watching her disappear beneath Freya’s small umbrella, her shoulders hunched against the cold as she hurried to catch up with her friend.

He might have asked her how she was, where she lived, what she was doing in Edinburgh, whether she still lived in the little house with the green gate, whether she remembered the last time they had spoken, whether she had ever wondered what would have happened if either of them had been brave enough to ask one more question.

He might have asked her why she had never called.

He might have told her that he had tried.

Instead, he stood beneath the rain-darkened streetlights with his hands hanging uselessly at his sides, watching the woman he had once loved, look at him as though he were both a miracle and an inconvenience.

Her name sounded different in his voice now. Older, somehow. As though the years between them had settled into the spaces between its syllables.

Callum remained where he was.

“Mate, are you coming or what?”

The voice came from behind him, accompanied by the familiar sound of someone shaking rain off a jacket.

Callum did not turn.

“Callum?”

This time it was Oliver Bennett, who had known him long enough to recognise when his friend was pretending to listen and when he had genuinely stopped hearing the world around him.

Aidan Campbell, standing beside Oliver, followed his line of sight towards the corner of the street, but there was nothing there except a passing taxi and a couple hurrying beneath an umbrella.

“What’s happened to you?” Aidan asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think he has,” said Isla MacLeod, who had been walking a few paces behind them and had finally caught up. “Either that or he’s forgotten how roads work.”

Under ordinary circumstances, Callum would have had something to say about that. He would have rolled his eyes, reminded Isla that she was the one who had walked into a glass door at the hotel that afternoon, and allowed Oliver to spend the next ten minutes recounting the incident in increasingly exaggerated detail.

Tonight, he could not seem to find the energy.

“Callum,” Oliver said again, more quietly. “You all right?”

Callum looked at him at last.

“Yeah.”

Oliver studied him for a moment. “You don’t look all right.”

“That’s because your concern is making me uncomfortable.”

There it was: the familiar dry edge, delivered with a straight face and just enough timing to make Aidan snort.

“Ah, good,” Aidan said. “He’s still capable of being unpleasant. We can take him home.”

Callum almost smiled.

Almost.

Oliver, however, was not so easily distracted. “Someone you know?”

Callum looked towards the corner again.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Someone we know?”

“No.”

“Someone you want us to know?”

Callum let out a breath that might, under different circumstances, have become a laugh.

“No, Aidan.”

“All right, then.” Aidan lifted both hands in surrender. “God forbid we show an interest in your mysterious personal life.”

Isla gave Callum a long, assessing look but, for once, did not make a joke. She had known him since university, had seen him through a difficult breakup and two professional relocations, and had developed a fairly accurate sense of when he needed to be left alone. She touched Oliver’s arm and nodded towards the street.

“Come on. The taxi’s waiting.”

Oliver hesitated before following them, then turned back once more.

“You coming?”

“In a minute.”

Callum heard the faint exasperation in Oliver’s sigh, the shuffle of shoes against wet pavement, and the three of them continuing towards the waiting car. He knew they would ask him about it tomorrow. Oliver would probably make an entire breakfast out of it, Aidan would invent at least four increasingly ridiculous explanations, and Isla would wait until they were alone before asking him the one question he would find hardest to answer.

He would deal with them later.

For now, he was looking at the corner where she had disappeared, at the empty stretch of pavement where she had been standing only moments ago, and at the small, ridiculous space between the place where they had collided and the place where she had chosen to leave him.

Ten years.

He had imagined seeing her again, though he had never quite admitted it was something he imagined. Sometimes, in the early years, he had thought he might run into her at a railway station, or outside a bookstore, or in some crowded airport where neither of them would have enough time to prepare for the encounter. Later, the possibilities had become less frequent, less vivid, until they were no more than a passing thought when he heard a familiar name or came across an old photograph.

He had never stopped thinking about Maya, but he had stopped expecting the world to return her to him.

There was a difference, and he had learned to live with it.

He had built a life in Scotland. He had a career he was proud of, a flat that felt like home, friends who had become family, and work that occupied enough of his attention to leave little room for the things he could not change. He spent his days developing graphics systems and AI-assisted tools for applications, solving problems that required patience and precision, and leading teams through projects that could become complicated enough to make even the most experienced engineers question their life choices.

He was good at what he did. He was dependable, technically minded, and often the person people turned to when a problem had resisted everyone else’s attempts to solve it. He could build systems that worked across hundreds of different conditions.

He had never figured out how to repair the one conversation he and Maya had never finished. He had assumed that if they ever met again, he would have something to say. He had spent years building a life in which he was rarely at a loss for words.

Tonight, he had managed three words, one of them was her name. Maya.

A faint, humourless smile crossed his face.

Then he looked down at his hands, pushed them into the pockets of his jacket, and started walking.

He had a car waiting two streets away. An early meeting in the morning. An unfinished presentation on his laptop and a dozen messages he had not answered. He had a life that was full, a career he had worked hard for, people who depended on him, and a flat overlooking a city that had slowly become home.

He had everything he had once promised himself he would have.

And yet, as he turned into the next street, he found himself remembering a summer evening in Nagpur, ten years ago, when a girl with ink on her fingers had looked at him across a table and asked him what he wanted to do with his life.

He had told her the truth.

He had wanted to leave.

He had wanted to become someone she could be proud of.

He had wanted, more than anything, to take her with him.

He had never told her that last part.

The rain fell harder, blurring the lights along the street.

For the first time in years, he wondered whether she had ever known.

Somewhere on the other side of the city, beneath the yellow light of a taxi and the reflection of rain against the window, Maya sat with her hands tucked into her sleeves and listened to Freya talk about something that had happened at work.

She even laughed in the right places.

She answered a question about the weekend, complained about an upcoming deadline, and promised to send Freya the name of a restaurant she had been asking about. She watched the old buildings pass outside, their windows glowing against the dark, and told herself that she was tired, that the evening had been long, that seeing someone from school after so many years was bound to be strange.

Freya was saying something about a colleague who had apparently decided that a meeting could have been an email, and Maya managed a suitably sympathetic noise.

Then Freya turned to her.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes.”

“What did I just say?”

“That your colleague is a menace to society and should be prohibited from using a calendar.”

Freya narrowed her eyes. “I said he should be prohibited from using PowerPoint.”

“Same principle.”

Freya laughed, but her attention lingered on Maya for another moment.

“You okay?”

Maya looked out of the window. “Of course.”

It was a perfectly ordinary answer, delivered in the same tone she used when someone asked whether she had finished a task, whether she had seen an email, or whether she could take a look at a bug that had apparently appeared out of nowhere.

Freya knew her well enough to recognise that the conversation was over.

She did not press.

Maya was grateful for that. She was also irritated with herself for being grateful, because it meant Freya had noticed something, and Maya had spent a considerable amount of time becoming the sort of person whose feelings were not immediately apparent to other people.

She had not mentioned his name.

She had not asked Freya to turn around.

She had not told her that for a few seconds on a rainy pavement, she had been seventeen again, standing in a school corridor in Nagpur, waiting for a boy named Kaivalya Fraser to say something that might have changed everything.

She had not told her that when he took a step forward, she had wanted to ask him how he was. She had not told her that she was frightened by how much she still wanted to know did he ever miss her? Did he even remember her!?

And when she finally reached home, she hung her damp jacket by the door, put her bag on the kitchen counter, and stood in the quiet of her flat for a long time without switching on the lights.

Her laptop sat open on the dining table, the unfinished work waiting patiently on the screen. There were messages she needed to answer, a feature she needed to review, and a meeting in the morning for which she had not yet prepared her notes.

She could sit down and work.

She could open the project, trace the bug she had been avoiding all afternoon, and spend the next three hours immersed in a problem that would not ask her to explain herself.

It was what she usually did.

Instead, she stood by the window and watched the rain slip down the glass.

Then, almost against her will, she whispered the name she had not said aloud in ten years.

“Kaivalya.”

And the room, of course, gave nothing back.