The rain hadn’t stopped for three days. Ayan leaned against the bonnet of his vintage Chevy, the same one his father had driven in a different lifetime. In the distance, a church bell tolled. And then, faintly, from a roadside café’s crackling speaker, came that tune.
The violin hit its crescendo. And for the first time in five years, the rain felt warm.
He heard footsteps on the gravel. He didn’t turn. He knew the rhythm.
Ayan closed his eyes. The music shifted into its slower, melancholic version. The part that plays when two people who destroyed each other’s worlds stand ten feet apart, unable to close the distance.
