The house had become a prison.Every door clicked locked behind her, every window checked, every step she took measured by the watchful eyes of her parents. Ananya had never known silence could weigh this heavy—her phone confiscated, her laptop sealed away, her college leave extended with a forged note about her "illness."
But silence couldn't chain her heart.
She found small rebellions—tiny cracks in the fortress they'd built around her. A diary page ripped into strips, tucked behind her pillow with words that whispered her pain. A lipstick stain on the corner of a tissue, folded neatly into a book she knew her cousin borrowed. Every act was a signal, a flare sent into the dark, hoping somehow, someday, Riyan would see it.
At night, when the house finally slept, she'd press her forehead against the cool glass of her window. In the distance, beyond the colony walls, the city lights shimmered. Is he out there? Thinking of me? Fighting for me?
Her chest ached with the weight of the unspoken. But beneath that ache, something burned brighter than fear: defiance.
Riyan had never felt so helpless in his life. The girl who had turned his arrogance into fire and his solitude into meaning was locked away, erased from the campus, from the world. Days stretched into weeks, and still no glimpse, no message. But he refused to believe in walls.
So he made his first move.
One evening, a childhood friend of Ananya's—a girl who still had free entry into her house—found a folded sheet slipped between the pages of her borrowed book. No name, just a single line scrawled in bold strokes:
The moon doesn't disappear when clouds hide it. I'll find you.
It was his handwriting.
And that night, when Ananya pressed her face against her barred window again, she froze. Across the street, on the rooftop of an abandoned house, a shadow stood tall against the skyline. He didn't wave. He didn't shout. He simply lifted his phone, its flashlight cutting through the dark, blinking once. Twice. Three times.
A code. I'm here.
Ananya's breath hitched, her palm flattening on the glass as though she could reach him through it. The chains around her tightened, but so did her resolve.
If they thought walls could keep them apart, they hadn't seen what love could do when pushed into a corner.