A sharp knock at the door pulled me from my studies.
When I opened it, I found the prince of hell standing there once again — dressed in a black shirt and white jeans, effortlessly immaculate as always. But something was different tonight. The smirk that usually lived at the corner of his mouth was absent, and so was the teasing warmth I had grown strangely accustomed to finding in his eyes.
He looked serious.
Quietly, genuinely serious — in a way that made my chest do something I was not prepared for.
"Want to go for a ride?" he asked softly.
I should have questioned it. I should have asked where we were going, or why he looked as though the weight of the world had settled silently onto his shoulders. Instead, I simply nodded.
Without another word, he reached for my hand and led me downstairs.
The city was deep into the kind of late that belongs only to itself — streets quieter, lights softer, the whole world reduced to something distant and almost tender. He drove in silence, one hand resting lightly on the steering wheel, his gaze fixed on the road ahead. There were no sarcastic remarks tonight. No perfectly timed observations designed to dismantle my composure. No effortless charm deployed like a weapon.
Just silence.
And somehow, that was louder than anything he had ever said.
He took me to a drive-in theatre on the outskirts of the city. The car rolled into one of the designated spots, the massive screen glowing softly against the dark sky ahead of us. The movie had not yet begun, but Adithya's eyes remained fixed somewhere far beyond it — distant, unreadable, unreachable.
That unsettled me more than anything else could have.
The prince of hell was never quiet. He filled every room he entered with noise and tension and amusement and barely contained energy — always something, always present, always impossible to ignore. But tonight he seemed trapped somewhere inside himself, held captive by thoughts he had no intention of sharing.
The film played. Scenes changed. Time passed.
He said nothing.
I stole glances at him throughout — the way the screen light caught the sharp line of his jaw, the way his fingers rested motionless against his knee instead of reaching for me the way they usually did without asking permission. Something was wrong. Something that existed in a place I did not have access to and had not been invited into.
That frightened me more than I wanted to admit.
On the drive back to Pierre's house, the silence finally became something I could no longer sit inside without breaking.
"What happened?" I asked quietly.
The question lingered between us like smoke.
Without warning, Adithya pulled the car to the side of the empty road. The engine continued its low, steady hum as he turned toward me — and then, slowly, deliberately, he reached for my hand.
His fingers wrapped around mine. Tightly. Almost desperately. As though he needed the anchor more than he was willing to admit.
And then I saw it.
Something in his eyes that did not belong to the prince of hell at all. Something raw and unguarded and quietly devastating — something that looked, unmistakably, like fear.
Like pain.
Like goodbye.
His gaze held mine as he shook his head slowly, unable — or unwilling — to find the words. And then, before I could make sense of what I was witnessing, tears slipped silently down his face.
Adithya was crying.
The sight of it shattered something inside me that I had not known was fragile.
My own tears followed almost immediately — warm, unbidden, and impossible to explain. Perhaps it was because pain has a way of recognising itself in another person. Or perhaps it was simply because watching someone who had always appeared completely untouchable come apart in front of you is one of the most quietly devastating things a human being can witness.
Neither of us spoke.
Words would have ruined whatever fragile, wordless truth existed between us in that moment.
So we sat there in the dark — hands intertwined, tears falling without apology — held together by a silence that said everything neither of us was brave enough to say aloud.
I wanted to ask him to stay.
I did not know then that he was already leaving.
When he finally drove again, he still said nothing.
He stopped outside Pierre's house, stepped out only long enough to open my door, and then walked away before I could form a single question. No backward glance. No hesitation at the edge of the dark.
Just the sound of his footsteps fading.
And then nothing.
I stood at the door for longer than I should have, watching the space where he had been, waiting for him to turn around.
He did not.
And somehow, even then, some quiet part of me already understood that something between us was ending — that whatever this was, whatever we had been circling around for weeks without naming, had just reached its last page without either of us being ready.
Two months passed.
And in those two months, I learned something I had never wanted to know — that some people do not enter your life to stay. They enter it to shift something fundamental inside you, to leave a mark so specific and so permanent that you spend a long time afterward trying to understand what it meant — and longer still trying to stop looking for them in rooms they no longer occupy.
Adithya disappeared from mine almost overnight.
The version I eventually pieced together — through fragments and rumours and the careful silences of people who clearly knew more than they were saying — was this: his father had fallen critically ill. A coma. The kind that does not ask for convenient timing. His entire family had relocated to New York, and with the weight of the family business descending onto his shoulders without warning, Adithya had left everything behind.
Including, apparently, any version of a goodbye.
What hurt most was not the distance. Distance can be measured. Distance can, in theory, be crossed.
It was the silence he left behind.
No farewell. No explanation. Not even a simple message to say he was going. Nothing — as though everything that had passed between us had been quietly folded away and carried with him, without ceremony, without acknowledgement, as though it had never quite been real enough to require one.
There were nights when I lay awake constructing arguments against my own feelings — cataloguing every reason why none of it had been what I thought, why I had misread everything, why the boy who called me his princess in a voice that sounded like a vow had simply been playing a game I never fully understood.
Surely people who cared did not leave without a word.
Surely people who meant what they said found a way — any way — to say goodbye.
I searched for explanations the way you search for something you have lost in the dark — reaching, adjusting, hoping the next thing your hand finds will finally make sense of it. Maybe it had been the weight of everything collapsing at once. Maybe leaving without a word had been the only way he knew how to protect himself from something he was not ready to feel.
Or maybe I had simply never meant what I thought I did.
That was the thought that visited most often. The one I could never quite argue away.
And yet — despite every unanswered question, despite every silence that stretched into weeks and then months, despite every version of the story I told myself in the dark just to make the ache more bearable — one truth remained. Stubborn and unchanging and entirely inconvenient.
A part of me was still waiting for him.
Not for a message. Not for an explanation. Not even for an apology — though god knows one was owed.
Just for him.
The boy who locked doors and claimed me in front of everyone and whispered certainties in the dark as though the future were already decided. The boy who cried without explanation on the side of an empty road and held my hand like it was the last thing he was allowed to keep.
The prince of hell, who had walked away without looking back —
And taken something of mine with him that I had not thought to protect.
The days passed. The world continued, indifferent and unhurried, the way it always does when your particular heartbreak is invisible to everyone but you.
And somewhere in New York, in a life I could not picture and had not been invited into, Adithya carried on without me.
I told myself that was fine.
I told myself that every single day.
I was still telling myself that when I fell asleep at night — his name somewhere in the space between waking and dreaming, quiet and stubborn and refusing, even now, to leave.
Some people, I was learning, do not just walk out of your life.
They linger in the doorway long after they are gone —
and the worst part,
the part that undoes you slowly and without permission,
is that some part of you keeps holding the door open anyway.