It was late afternoon when the car stopped again — this time, not Nishanth's.
It was an old hatchback, the kind you could hear rattling from a hundred meters away. Its engine wheezed as it came to a dusty halt just outside the southern edge of Marigold Township — or rather, Solace, as it had been silently renamed. The driver, a tired man in his late sixties, stayed inside. But the passenger door opened.
She stepped out slowly, as if unsure the ground beneath her was real.
Revathi Ramachandran hadn't seen this place since the day her father was taken away in an ambulance ten years ago. The memories hadn't aged — they'd just stayed frozen. The same trees, now more skeletal. The same broken streetlights. The same silent school building where her mother once taught with chalk and borrowed hope.
But something felt different now. The stillness had changed.
It wasn't abandonment anymore.It was anticipation.
