The next morning, the gallery buzzed with soft chaos — the kind of sound that came from too many people pretending they weren't panicking. Printers hummed, paint fumes clung to the air, and cords snaked across the floor like lazy veins.
Meera tried to keep her head down, to focus on her task — lining up the final prints for approval. She'd been at it for hours when her laptop froze mid-scroll. The file she clicked wasn't one of hers.
At first, she thought it was a system error.Until the image loaded.
A photo — not hers — filled the screen.
It was her reflection.Through glass.
Not posed, not planned — captured from across a café window, her face half-turned toward the light, a faint smile she didn't remember making. The background blurred into shadows, and behind the glass, she could just make out another figure — tall, still, almost out of focus.
Her heart hammered.
She hadn't taken this. She would never include something like this.
The metadata showed it had been added yesterday.
Someone had slipped it into her exhibit folder.
She marched out of the lab, adrenaline burning through her veins, and found Aarav near the main hall, leaning against a pillar, scrolling through his phone.
He looked up immediately — that small, unreadable curve of calm at the edge of his mouth.
"Did you put it there?" she asked, breath sharp.
His brows furrowed. "Put what where?"
"The photo. My face, through the café window. You added it."
He blinked once, twice — slow, controlled. "Show me."
She hesitated.
He took the phone gently, looked at the screen. His expression didn't shift, but something in his jaw tightened for just a second. "That's not mine," he said.
"You're lying."
"I would have done it better," he said simply.
The arrogance of it — calm, factual — made her chest ache. "You think this is funny?"
"No," he said, eyes meeting hers. "I think someone else is watching you now."
Her stomach dropped. "What do you mean?"
He stepped closer, close enough that she could smell the faint trace of rain on his collar. "I told you before — the world isn't kind when it looks too closely." His hand lifted, fingertips brushing the camera strap around her neck. "But you keep making it watch."
She flinched, stepping back. "Don't touch me."
He lowered his hand immediately — not angry, not mocking. Just still. "Then protect yourself," he said quietly. "Or let me do it."
That night, she sat at her desk, staring at the photo again.The composition was perfect — artistic, intimate, unsettling. Whoever took it knew her timing, her angles.
Her skin prickled with unease.
Her phone buzzed.
Aarav: I found the timestamp. It's not from me. Check who else was there that day.
She typed back, You think this helps?
He replied almost instantly:
Aarav: No. But I don't like sharing what's mine.
Her breath caught.She wanted to scream at him, to tell him she wasn't his — but her fingers hovered uselessly over the keyboard.
The photo glowed on her screen, a haunting echo of herself through someone else's eyes.
And for the first time, she realized there might be another shadow in the story — one that didn't belong to Aarav at all.