The bookstore smelled like old pages and quiet conversations. A comfort to most. But today, Raka felt the silence closing in, not wrapping him in peace, but pressing into his ribs like something unfinished.
He wandered aimlessly, the bell above the door still echoing faintly in his mind. The cashier gave him a polite nod. He nodded back, barely registering it.
It wasn't that she didn't show up.
It was why.
She had seemed excited—genuinely. The texts, the teasing, the way her smile lingered in his thoughts all week. He wasn't imagining it. Something was there. Wasn't it?
He paused by the poetry section. Her favorite.
He reached for a thin volume with a pale blue cover and turned it over in his hands. It was something she would have liked—simple, quiet, with soft words that said more between the lines.
She would have read the first page, then the last, then picked one at random in the middle. Always out of order. Always with care.
Raka sat on the small wooden bench nearby and flipped it open.
"There are people who disappear not because they want to,but because they don't know how to stay."
He stared at the words.
That was Nayla.
He knew it in his bones.
He wasn't angry at her. Just… tired of being the one who stayed. The one who waited. The one who tried. And yet even now he was here, in her favorite place, thinking of her, holding a book she might have loved.
He bought it.
No message. No explanation yet.
Still, he bought it.
Because some part of him believed she would come back.And when she did, he wanted something to give her.Proof that he hadn't stopped caring. Not yet. Not ever.