The sky outside the office window was painted in hues of gray, a perfect mirror of how Mira felt. At 29, she had settled into what many would call a "stable" life. She worked in the compliance department of a mid-sized finance company, drank her coffee black, commuted via the 8:15 train, and returned home to her neatly organized one-bedroom apartment in Pune. Routine was her refuge, her fortress, her safety net.
She had long stopped believing in surprises. Surprises, after all, were rarely good in her world.
That is, until the message arrived.
It was a regular Tuesday, made even duller by back-to-back calls and the relentless pinging of emails. Mira was just about to shut her laptop for lunch when her phone buzzed. It wasn’t a notification from any of her usual apps or her work Slack.
It was a text.
From an unknown number.
“I’m sorry I left the way I did. I’ve thought of you every day since. —A.”
Mira stared at the screen, frozen.
There were only two people in her past whose messages could’ve shaken her this deeply. One was her father—who had walked out of their lives when she was sixteen, leaving behind nothing but debt and silence.
And the other… was Ayaan.
Ayaan Khurana.
Her first love. The boy who had appeared in her final year of college like a storm—loud laughter, unruly hair, those intense eyes that seemed to read her soul. They had been inseparable for two years, talking about dreams and stars and building a life somewhere by the sea.
Then, one day, he vanished.
No goodbye. No note. No explanation.
Just gone.
Mira had been gutted. For months, she oscillated between anger and grief, writing unsent letters, standing at places they used to go, hoping for closure. Eventually, she buried that chapter under work, success, and practicality.
But now, after six years of silence, a message.
One that tore through the walls she had spent years building.
Her fingers trembled as she typed a response.
Then deleted it.
Instead, she pushed the phone away and left her desk, pacing the rooftop of her office building with questions spinning inside her.
Why now? What did he want? And more importantly… did she want to open that door again?
That night, Mira lay in bed wide awake. The message glowed in the dark room like a siren. She tapped on the number. No WhatsApp profile picture. No name.
Her mind filled in the gaps.
Ayaan’s voice. His crooked smile when he teased her. The night they talked about travelling across Europe in a rusted van. The fight they had about his impulsiveness—the very thing that drew her to him but also scared her. The unanswered call she had made that final morning.
The next morning, she did something she never did.
She texted back.
“Why did you leave?”
Minutes passed. Then an hour. Nothing.
She felt foolish. But later that afternoon, just as she stepped out for coffee, her phone buzzed again.
“Because I was diagnosed with cancer. And I didn’t want you to watch me fade.”
Her breath caught.
Mira sat down on a bench outside the café, the air suddenly too thin. She reread the message a dozen times. Tears welled up. She hadn’t even realized she was crying until someone offered her tissues.
Ayaan… sick? That couldn’t be.
And then, as if a thousand dormant feelings had awakened, a different question arose:
What will you do next?
She took the weekend to think. She didn’t tell her friends. Didn’t talk to her mother. For the first time in years, Mira listened only to herself.
On Sunday morning, she typed one more message.
“Where are you now?”
This time, the reply was instant.
“Mumbai. I live near Shivaji Park. If you want to see me… I’d like that.”
The next day, Mira boarded a train to Mumbai.
The city was as chaotic and colorful as she remembered. She found herself at the gates of a modest old building nestled between bakeries and street vendors. When the door opened, she didn’t recognize the man at first.
Ayaan was thinner. His once-thick hair was cropped close. But his eyes—those stormy, searching eyes—were the same.
For a long moment, they just stared at each other.
Then, he smiled. A little hesitant. A little broken.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” he said softly.
Mira stepped forward, her voice a whisper.
“I didn’t think I would either.”
They sat by the window, sipping chai, letting the silence speak first. He told her everything—the diagnosis, the treatment in Delhi, the months of pain, the recovery, the guilt.
She told him about her job, the novel she’d tried to write once, the loneliness she never admitted to.
Time blurred around them.
And when he reached across the table and gently touched her fingers, Mira didn’t pull away.
The message had changed everything.
It didn’t fix the past. It didn’t erase the hurt. But it offered something she hadn’t dared to hope for.
A second chance.
And as she watched the sun dip behind the skyline, Mira realized something:
Sometimes, the question isn’t about what was.
It’s about what now.
And for once, she was ready to find out.
React
