“You weren’t supposed to find it,” Girish said, and those five words landed in the warm, crowded air between us like a stone dropped into still water.
I hadn’t seen him in three years. Not since the last week of our postgraduate year at Cambridge, when everything between us had quietly, catastrophically unravelled. And now here he was, standing at the edge of a lantern stall in the Hoi An night market, holding a paper bag of sticky rice he’d clearly just bought and looking at me like I was a problem he’d already solved once and couldn’t believe he had to solve again.
“Well,” I said, “I did find it.”
The market hummed around us — the low percussion of a vendor’s wooden drum, the smell of grilled lemongrass and something sweet frying in oil, silk lanterns in amber and rose swaying overhead like slow fire. I’d come to Hoi An for a conference on postcolonial literature, solo, deliberately. The last place I’d expected was him.
His name was Girish Khanna, and he had been, for one long luminous year, the person I trusted most in the world.
The letter had surfaced four months ago. I’d been helping my flatmate Preeti pack up her storage unit in London when I found a box she’d accidentally taken from my old Cambridge room during the chaotic end-of-year move. Inside, beneath a stack of annotated novels and a broken umbrella, was an envelope in Girish’s handwriting. My name on the front, no postage. Never sent. Somehow packed away in the wrong box and carried three years into the future without either of us knowing.
I’d read it standing in a cold storage corridor in Hackney while Preeti pretended to be very interested in bubble wrap.
The letter said everything he hadn’t said to my face. That he’d been afraid. That he’d convinced himself I was already moving toward someone else — toward Bruno, his old rival from the literature department, who had made no secret of his interest in me and who I had, in fact, felt nothing for. That Girish had written the letter the night before our final seminar and then decided not to give it to me because he thought I deserved someone who wasn’t terrified of being needed.
I’d folded it back into the envelope and not known what to do with it for four months.
Now he was here, in the lantern light, and I still didn’t know.
“Preeti told me you’d be at the conference,” he said quietly. “I almost didn’t come.”
“But you did.”
“I did.” He set the paper bag down on the low ledge of the stall beside him. A vendor nearby was threading jasmine onto a string, not paying us any attention. “Morag.” He said my name like it cost him something. “How much of it did you read?”
“All of it.”
He exhaled. Not quite a wince, not quite relief. Something suspended between the two.
I’d spent four months being angry — not at the letter, but at the version of him who’d decided for me. Who’d looked at what we had and concluded, without asking, that I’d be better off without it. That was the thing that had sat in my chest like a splinter: not that he’d been afraid, but that he’d been so certain his fear was the right answer for both of us.
“You should have given it to me,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. Around us a group of tourists drifted past with lit lanterns cupped in their palms, setting them gently onto the river that ran alongside the market, tiny warm lights floating away into the dark.
“I know that now.”
“You decided I’d choose Bruno. I wouldn’t have.”
“I know that now too.”
The lanterns on the river were almost out of sight. I watched them go.
Here was the thing I’d understood only recently, standing in my flat at two in the morning with the letter on the kitchen table: I’d been afraid too. I’d seen Girish pulling back in those last weeks and told myself it meant he didn’t want me, because it was easier than asking. I’d matched his silence with my own. We had both stood at the edge of something and waited for the other person to jump first, and then we’d both walked away and spent three years pretending we’d made a sensible decision.
WhatsApp
Telegram
Email
Categories
- AI & Technology
- Contemporary
- Corporate Control
- Creepypasta
- Crime Thriller
- Cyberpunk
- Dark Fantasy
- Enemies to Lovers
- Fairy Tale Retelling
- Fantasy
- First Contact
- Forbidden
- Genetic/Body Horror
- High Fantasy
- Monster Hunter
- Mythic/Folklore
- Paranormal
- Portal/Otherworld
- Post-Apo
- Post-Collapse Society
- Psychological Thriller
- Romances
- SCI-FI
- Second Chance
- Slow Burn
- Space Combat
- Spacepunk
- Surveillance State
- Survival Thriller
- Thrillers
- Time Travel
- Treasure Hunter
- Urban Fantasy
- Witchcraft/Curses
Tags
10min stories atmospheric atmospheric fantasy atmospheric fiction contemporary romance Creepy creepypasta crime thriller dark fantasy debt dystopia emotional fiction enemies to lovers ensemble cast epistolary fantasy female protagonist first person forbidden romance framed narrative high fantasy love story magic Memory mystery Paranormal psychological horror psychological thriller romance sci-fi second chance second chance romance short fiction short story slow burn space station speculative fiction supernatural Survival survival thriller suspense thriller travel romance witchcraft workplace romance
Leave a Reply