The girl was gone.
That much was true.
But Devendra did not feel free.
He sat on the edge of his bed in the hospital room, staring at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. His fingers moved on their own, tapping, twitching, stopping—then starting again.
His mouth opened.
No words came out.
When he tried to speak, only broken sounds escaped, like thoughts crashing into each other before reaching his tongue.
The nurse asked him a simple question.
"How are you feeling today?"
Devendra laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because he didn't know how else to respond.
Sometimes he answered questions that weren't asked.
Sometimes he stayed silent for hours.
Sometimes he spoke too fast, words overlapping, losing meaning halfway through.
Inside his head, the noise was still there.
Not her voice.
But the echo she left behind.
His mother watched from the doorway, her heart sinking every time Devendra smiled at nothing, every time his eyes drifted to empty corners of the room.
He behaved like someone who had returned from somewhere far away—
but forgot how this world worked.
The doctor wrote notes carefully.
"He is no longer hallucinating," he said.
"But his mind hasn't stabilized yet. The shock hasn't released him."
Devendra was present.
But not here.
At night, he sat by the window, watching the city lights flicker. Sometimes he whispered to himself, repeating the same sentence again and again, as if practicing how to be human.
"I'm okay… I'm okay… I'm okay…"
Yet his hands shook.
Days passed.
Slowly—very slowly—small things changed.
One day, he finished an entire sentence without stopping.
Another day, he answered a question correctly… then looked surprised, as if he didn't expect himself to succeed.
He started recognizing faces again.
His mother.
The nurse.
The doctor.
Reality came back in fragments, like broken glass being glued together piece by piece.
But the damage was still there.
Devendra knew it.
He could feel it in the pauses between his thoughts.
In the fear that returned whenever silence lasted too long.
She was gone.
Yet what she did to him remained.
And this—
This was only the beginning of the long road back.