Seven years ago

The moment Meera understood she was in trouble had nothing to do with a sunset, or a slow song, or any of the things she'd have expected from the two decades of films that had trained her to expect drama with her own heart. It happened on a Tuesday afternoon, in the photocopy room of their college's fourth floor, over a printer that had jammed for the third time that week.

She was twenty-two. Final year, a portfolio review due in nine days, and she'd come to print forty pages of layout comps because the design lab's better printer was booked solid by the seniors who'd figured out the booking system a semester before everyone else. Vikram was there for something unrelated — a lab report, probably, something with numbers in it, he was always printing something with numbers in it — and the machine had eaten both their jobs at once, a single furious jam of two different students' futures tangled in the same feed tray.

"Don't," he said, when she reached in to yank the paper free. "You'll tear it and it'll jam worse. There's a release lever, give me a second."

He crouched in front of the machine with the particular, focused patience he brought to broken things — she'd noticed this about him before, distantly, the way you notice a stranger's habit, but this was the first time she watched it up close, watched him talk to himself under his breath, okay, okay, not that one, this one, while he worked a lever she hadn't even seen, and freed both their print jobs in one smooth, satisfied motion, not a single sheet torn.

"There." He handed her stack back to her, squared at the corners without her asking, the way you'd hand someone a passport at immigration — careful, exact, no drama attached to the care.

"You didn't have to fix the whole thing. I would've just gone downstairs to the other printer eventually."

"I know. But then you'd have been annoyed for twenty minutes first, and this took ninety seconds." He said it so plainly, so entirely without expecting credit for it, that she laughed before she could stop herself — an actual laugh, surprised out of her — and he looked up at that, pleased in a way he clearly hadn't planned to show, and something in Meera's chest simply, quietly, rearranged itself.

That was it. That was the whole moment. A jammed printer and a boy who'd rather spend ninety seconds fixing a small thing properly than let someone else be inconvenienced by it, who fixed her stack of paper as carefully as his own without being asked, without making it a performance of chivalry, just — doing the thing that needed doing, because it needed doing.

She thought about it the whole walk home. She thought about it that night, lying on her hostel bed with her portfolio comps spread across the floor, unable to concentrate on a single one of them. She thought: oh. Oh, no.

She did not think about it for very long before she decided what to do about it, because Meera, even at twenty-two, was a person who solved problems quickly once she'd named them, and the problem, as she understood it, was this: Ananya had mentioned Vikram's name four times in the last two weeks, in the specific, careless-sounding, entirely unspontaneous way people mention someone they've started noticing. Meera had not thought anything of it, because Ananya mentioned people constantly, effusively, the way she did everything — but if there was even a chance, even a small one, Meera needed to say the true thing out loud before it calcified into something she'd have to carry alone. That was the rule she'd built her whole friendship with Ananya on: you did not let a true thing sit in you long enough to become a secret. You said it early, while it was still small enough to say lightly.

So she drove — borrowed her hostel-mate's scooter, actually, weaving through evening traffic with her dupatta wound twice around her throat against the exhaust — to Ananya's PG, a rented room above a stationery shop that always smelled faintly of new pencils and photocopier toner, and climbed the two flights of stairs already rehearsing it. So, this is going to sound sudden, but I think I might be developing a thing for Vikram, and I wanted you to hear it from me before it's a whole thing, because you mentioned him too and I didn't want it to be weird between us. Simple. Early. Light enough to laugh about, if it turned out to be nothing.

Ananya opened the door before Meera even knocked, phone in hand, face lit up in a way Meera had seen maybe three times in four years of friendship — the specific, helpless radiance of someone who has just discovered something about themselves and cannot yet hold it quietly.

"Oh my god, I was literally about to call you," Ananya said, pulling her inside by the wrist, shutting the door with her foot. "Sit, sit, I need to tell you something and I need you to not make it weird."

"I would never make it weird," Meera said, sitting on the narrow bed, the rehearsed sentence still sitting whole and ready behind her teeth.

"So. Okay. This is going to sound insane because it's been, what, three weeks of us actually hanging out properly, but—" Ananya sat cross-legged across from her, knees almost touching Meera's, and took both of Meera's hands in hers, which she did only when something mattered, an old habit from their first year, when Ananya had held Meera's hands like this the night her father moved out, and Meera had learned that this particular gesture from Ananya meant this is real, hold still with me.

"It's Vikram," Ananya said, and laughed at herself, a startled, delighted sound. "God, saying it out loud. It's Vikram. I don't — Meera, I don't think I've ever actually liked someone like this. Not in the way where it's fun and you tell your friends and it's a whole bit. This is different. I keep thinking about the dumbest things — the way he explains stuff, he explained supply curves to me for forty minutes last week because I asked one question and I didn't even care about the answer, I just wanted him to keep talking. I've never wanted anyone to keep talking before." She squeezed Meera's hands, hard, the particular pressure of someone checking that the ground under her was real. "I wanted you to be the first person I told. Actually the first. I haven't even told my sister yet."

Meera sat very still.

She would think about this moment for years afterward — would replay it in the shower, in traffic, in the particular insomniac hours of three and four a.m. — and what she'd remember most specifically was not what she said, because she said almost nothing, but what she did with her face and her hands. She made her eyes go wide and delighted, an expression she had practiced a thousand times for a thousand smaller occasions and had never once, until this moment, used as a wall. She let go of one of Ananya's hands to press her own to her mouth, the universal gesture of I'm so happy for you I can't even speak, which bought her a full two seconds of not having to arrange words, two seconds in which the sentence she'd driven here to say — I think I might be developing a thing for Vikram too — folded itself up, quietly, methodically, the way her mother folded difficult truths into pockets, and went somewhere Meera would not be able to find it again for a very long time.

"Ananya," she said instead, and her voice came out warm, genuinely warm, because some competent, terrified part of her understood immediately that warmth was the only currency that would get her out of this room without either of them noticing anything wrong. "That's — I'm so happy for you. Vikram's one of the good ones. Truly."

"Right?" Ananya's whole face had gone soft with relief, the relief of a secret successfully placed into safe hands. "I was scared to say it out loud, I don't know why. Maybe because it feels like the kind of thing where if I say it and it goes wrong I'll have made it a whole Thing. But I had to tell you first. You're my person, you know that? You're always the one I want to tell things to first."

"Always," Meera said, and meant it, in the specific, splitting way a person can mean two entirely true things at once and have them cancel each other out somewhere in the chest.

They talked for another hour. Meera asked questions — good ones, the kind a best friend asks, when did you know, has he said anything, what do you think his type usually is — and heard herself ask them in a voice that did not shake, and felt, underneath the performance, something small and vital quietly closing its own door and turning the lock from the inside.

She rode the scooter back to her hostel in the dark with her dupatta come loose, not bothering to fix it, letting the cold air hit her throat the whole way, as if the physical discomfort of it might account for the sensation sitting under her ribs, might give it a location she could point to and say: there, that's it, that's just the wind.

It was not the wind.

She did not tell anyone, that night or any night after. Not Ananya, obviously — the window for that had closed the second she'd pressed her hand to her mouth and manufactured delight. Not her mother, who would have asked follow-up questions Meera didn't have safe answers for. Not, eventually, her therapist, four years later, when she'd gone twice and stopped, because the one time it had come close to the surface — the therapist had asked, gently, is there anyone you've never told the whole truth to, even yourself — Meera had said not that I can think of, and the lie had come so easily, so completely without the ache the compound would one day give her for lies exactly this size, that she'd left the session almost proud of herself, mistaking the absence of pain for the absence of a wound.

She had never, in seven years, said the sentence out loud. Not to a friend, not to a diary, not to the dark of her own room at three in the morning. She had gotten so good at not saying it that some days she nearly believed there was nothing there to say — that the printer room had been just a printer room, that the warmth in her chest that Tuesday had been about nothing more specific than a stranger's unexpected kindness.

But her body remembered what her mouth had agreed never to say. She felt it every time Vikram fixed something for someone without being asked. Every time Ananya said his name in that same specific register of certainty, seven years unbroken. She felt it in small, deniable places — a held breath at a wedding when he'd danced with his cousin's daughter and lifted her, laughing, over a puddle; a familiar tightening low in her stomach every single time he looked up from something and found her already watching, and smiled like it was nothing, because to him, for seven years, it had been exactly that. Nothing. A friend, watching a friend.

She had built a whole life on top of the folded-up sentence, the way you build a house on a fault line you've decided not to think about. Most days it held. Most days she genuinely did not think about it, the way you don't think about your own skeleton until something makes you feel its shape from the inside.

She thought about it that Tuesday in the photocopy room every single year, on some anniversary she never marked on a calendar and never needed to, because her body kept the date better than any calendar could.