I didn't sleep for three days.
Not really. I'd close my eyes and see his face. I'd drift off and hear his voice. "I'm the reason your mother died."
Three days of pacing my apartment. Three days of ignoring calls from my best friend, Kavya. Three days of staring at my mother's photograph—the one I kept on my nightstand, the one where she was laughing at something my father said, the one that had been my anchor for five years.
Three days of asking myself the same question:
What do I do now?
The answer, I knew, was nothing. I should do nothing. I should forget I ever met Aarav Ahuja. I should pretend the last three days hadn't happened. I should go back to my life—my boring, ordinary, grief-stained life—and let the truth stay buried.
But I couldn't.
Because every time I closed my eyes, I saw my mother's face. Not the way she looked at the end—pale, thin, connected to machines that beeped and hummed and kept her alive long after she'd stopped wanting to be. But the way she looked in that photograph. Laughing. Alive. Here.
She deserved the truth.
I deserved the truth.
So on the fourth day, I went back to Midnight Brew.
The bell chimed.
The coffee shop looked exactly the same—warm lights, soft jazz, the smell of cinnamon and espresso. But something felt different. Heavier. Like the air itself was waiting for something to happen.
He was there.
Of course he was there.
Same table by the window. Same black sweater. Same tired eyes that looked up the moment I walked in, like he'd been expecting me.
Like he'd been waiting.
I walked over and sat down across from him without asking. No greeting. No small talk. Just the sound of the chair scraping against the floor and the weight of everything unsaid between us.
"You lied to me," I said.
He didn't flinch. "About what?"
"About why you were in that hospital room. About why you had my mother's photograph. About—" I stopped. Took a breath. "About everything."
Aarav leaned back in his chair. His expression was unreadable, but his hands—his hands gave him away. They were clenched on the table, knuckles white, like he was holding onto something invisible.
"I haven't lied to you," he said. "I just haven't told you everything."
"Same thing."
"No." His voice was firm. Certain. "It's not."
I pulled out my phone. Opened the notes app. Turned it to face him.
On the screen was everything I'd found in the last three days. Every article. Every lawsuit. Every news report about Ahuja Industries and the clinical trial that had killed not just my mother, but seven other people.
"Seven deaths," I said. "Seven families. Seven lives destroyed because you wanted to prove something to your father."
Aarav looked at the screen. His jaw tightened. "Eight."
"What?"
"Eight deaths." He met my eyes. "They only reported seven. But there was an eighth. A woman named Meera. She died three months after the trial ended. The hospital listed it as complications from an unrelated condition. But it wasn't unrelated. It was the same thing. The same drug. The same..." He trailed off, shaking his head. "It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me."
"Why?"
"Because my mother's name was Meera."
The silence that followed was different from the others.
It wasn't heavy or tense or angry. It was something else entirely—something I didn't have a word for. Something that felt like the moment before a storm breaks, when the air goes still and the birds stop singing and you know something is coming, you just don't know what.
Aarav's face went pale. Not the dramatic kind of pale you see in movies—the subtle, terrifying kind that happens when someone realizes the ground beneath them isn't as solid as they thought.
"Your mother," he said slowly. "Meera. She was the eighth."
I nodded.
"How long have you known?"
"Known what? That my mother died because of a faulty drug trial? About twenty minutes. That she was the eighth? About ten seconds."
"But you came here anyway."
"Where else was I supposed to go?"
He stared at me. I stared back. Two strangers who should have been enemies, sitting across from each other in a coffee shop that smelled like cinnamon, trying to figure out who was supposed to hate whom.
"Why didn't you sue us?" Aarav asked. "Why didn't your family join the lawsuit?"
"Because we didn't know." My voice cracked. "We didn't know any of it. The hospital said it was her heart. The doctors said nothing could have saved her. We believed them. Why wouldn't we believe them?"
"Because they were lying."
"Yes." I blinked back tears. "They were."
Aarav reached across the table. His fingers brushed mine—just barely, just for a second. But I felt it everywhere. A spark. A shock. Something that made no sense given everything I'd just learned about him.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Sorry doesn't bring her back."
"I know."
"Sorry doesn't undo what you did."
"I know."
"Sorry doesn't—"
"I know." His voice broke on the second word. "I know, Maya. I know."
We sat there in silence. The jazz music played on. The espresso machine hissed. The world outside the window kept moving, indifferent to the earthquake happening at table four.
"Why did you come find me?" I asked finally. "After five years. Why now?"
Aarav pulled his hand back. Ran it through his hair. Looked out the window at the street, at the rain that had started falling again, at the people hurrying past with umbrellas and hoods and places to be.
"Because I couldn't live with it anymore," he said quietly. "The guilt. The secrets. The lies. Every night, I'd close my eyes and see her face. Your mother's face. And then one day..." He paused. Swallowed. "One day, I saw you."
"When?"
"That night in the rain. Outside your ex-boyfriend's building. You were standing there, soaking wet, holding a cardboard box, and you looked so... broken. So lost. And I realized—I did that to you. Me. My choices. My mistakes."
"That wasn't you," I said. "That was Rohan."
"No." He turned back to look at me. His eyes were wet again. "That was me. Rohan broke your heart, maybe. But I broke your life. Before you even knew I existed."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that my mother's death wasn't his fault, that he was just a twenty-two-year-old kid who'd made a terrible mistake.
But I couldn't.
Because he wasn't wrong.
He wasn't right either—not completely. But he wasn't wrong.
"What do you want from me?" I asked.
Aarav leaned forward. His knee brushed mine again—intentionally this time, I was sure of it. "I want you to help me expose the truth."
I laughed. It wasn't a happy sound. "You want me to help you destroy your own family's company?"
"I want to help you get justice for your mother."
"Same thing."
"No." His voice was steady again. Certain. "It's not."
CLIFFHANGER:
I was about to answer when the coffee shop door burst open.
Three men in dark suits. Sunglasses indoors. Earpieces. The kind of men you see in movies, not in real life.
They walked straight to our table.
"Mr. Ahuja," the tallest one said. "Your father requests your presence. Immediately."
Aarav didn't look surprised. He didn't look scared either. He just looked... tired.
"Tell him I'm busy."
"He said you'd say that." The man reached inside his jacket. "He also said to give you this."
He pulled out a photograph.
Another photograph of me.
But this one was different.
This one was taken yesterday.
Through my apartment window.