They were eight years old when Siya made the promise.

It was raining, the kind of relentless monsoon evening that turned their colony's narrow lane into a river, and Ekansh had shown up at her door soaked to the bone because his parents were fighting again and he couldn't stand being in that house one more minute. Siya's mother had wrapped him in a towel and made him sit by the window with Siya while the thunder rattled the glass.

"You'll always be my best friend," Siya had told him that night, solemn as only a child can be. "My first friend. My first everything. I promise."

He'd looked at her like she'd handed him something precious and terrifying at once. "Everything?"

"Everything," she said. "First dance. First secret. First best friend forever. All of it. Only you."

He didn't smile, not exactly, but something in his face had settled, like a boy who'd finally found solid ground.

For the next six years, that promise held. They were inseparable, the kind of childhood friendship adults liked to call "sweet" without understanding how deep it actually ran. Then, three weeks before Siya turned fourteen, Ekansh stopped answering her calls.

He didn't explain. He didn't fight with her. He simply vanished from her life as completely as if he'd never been in it, and when she finally saw him again in the school corridor, he looked straight through her like she was made of glass.

She spent years wondering what she'd done wrong.

She never found the answer. Not then.

By the time Siya walked onto her college campus as a nervous, hopeful junior, she'd almost convinced herself that boy was a different person entirely, someone she used to know in another lifetime.

She was wrong. He was still there. He'd just learned how to make his silence sharp enough to cut.