Six months later — Mumbai.
The sea was louder here.
It didn't whisper like Delhi's soft rain — it roared, restless, like it had secrets it never intended to keep.
Vihaan stood at Carter Road, headphones around his neck, the city lights reflecting in the waves. He had finished his third music project that week — the kind that paid well but didn't make him feel much.
Except empty.
Aanya hadn't written.
Not directly, anyway.
But every few weeks, he'd find a piece of her — in an Instagram story showing a brush-stroke that looked like his smile, or a chai cup doodle with "roz" scribbled in the corner.
Back in Delhi, Aanya had made peace with the idea of missing someone.
She painted more now — stars, cities, strangers. Her room had turned into a sky of its own.
She never told Vihaan that she'd kept his hoodie. That it still smelled like rain and unfinished songs.
She never told him about the chai stall guy asking every few days, "Aaj woh nahi aaya?"
("He didn't come today?")
She only smiled. Always.
They didn't talk.
But they wrote — not to each other, but to the silence.
Vihaan's journal, Page 42:
"Maybe this is what love is — not texting at 2 a.m., but looking at a sunset and wondering if she's seeing the same sky."
Aanya's sketchbook, between two painted clouds:
"He's not here. But he hasn't really left either."
Then came that one evening.
Vihaan walked into a tiny gallery in Bandra, invited by a friend who claimed to have "seen something that reminded him of him."
He didn't expect to see his own face.
Not literally.
But there it was — in a painting hung quietly in a corner:
A boy in a black hoodie, standing in the rain, under a shared umbrella.
Next to him — a girl with silver stars in her eyes.
Titled: "When the Sky Paused"
His heart stopped.
The curator told him the artist was from Delhi.
She had never attended the opening.
She had simply sent her art.
Vihaan wrote his number in the guestbook beneath her name.
Three days later, his phone buzzed.
Aanya:"The sky moved again. Want to walk with me this time?"
He flew to Delhi the next weekend.
No airport hugs.
No dramatic music.
Just two people who had waited through silence, rain, and different cities — and were finally ready to begin not from scratch, but from stillness.
They walked without words, hands brushing, the city once again pausing just long enough to let them catch up with everything unsaid.
"Tum waapas aaye," she whispered.
("You came back.")
"Mujhe aur kuch aata hi nahi," he smiled.
("I don't know how to do anything else.")
This time, when their fingers touched,
They held on.