The rain over the university was relentless, a grey, drumming weight that seemed to press the very air out of the campus. Inside the central library, the atmosphere was usually one of hushed intellectual pursuit, but for Rohini Sharma, it had become a labyrinth of anxiety. She sat in the deepest corner of the engineering archives, a place where the shelves were packed with dusty volumes on structural integrity and fluid dynamics—subjects that felt cruelly ironic given how quickly her own life was collapsing.

She was wearing a thick, oversized woolen shawl, draped heavily over her shoulders despite the humidity. Beneath it, her fingers were constantly checking the safety pins that held the torn seam of her kurta together—the jagged physical proof of Aarav’s rage from the night before. Her neck was stiff from the effort of keeping her collar high, her eyes burning with a lack of sleep that no amount of caffeine could remedy. She was trying to focus on a complex set of equations for her mid-term, but the numbers on the page kept blurring into the shape of dark, accusing eyes.