By morning the campus had a new rumor to chew on, and rumor always tasted better in small, repeated bites.
Meera first heard it as a ripple — a pair of girls in the cafeteria giggling too loudly, a barista smirking as he handed over her usual order, a professor clearing his throat with the polite curiosity of someone who collects gossip like stamps. The candle-lit photo from the storm had been posted overnight. It was everywhere: forwarded screenshots on group chats, whispered captions, a dozen captions that tried to be clever and none of which understood how corrosive the image felt to her.
In the photo she looked like a secret: candlelight soft on one cheek, hair mussed from wind, her profile honest and exposed. Someone had captured the moment and turned it into a headline. Someone had decided she would be talked about.
Priya found her outside the studio, phone already burning in her hand. "Oh my God, Meera. Look." She thrust the screen at her, eyes wide with that thrill-of-disaster expression friends get when they don't know whether to be proud or protective.
Meera read the caption: When the truth gets framed. Comments scrolled past — so romantic, are they together?, Malhotra x Meera? A few were crueler. One user had the gall to tag a meme.
"It's humiliating," Meera said, though her voice sounded flat, like a radio with bad reception. "Who would post—who would take that photo? I didn't authorize that."
Priya's jaw tightened. "Someone's messing with you. Or—" She hesitated, then forced a grin that didn't reach her eyes. "Or it's great press. Think about it—everyone's talking. Your exhibit will be packed."
"Packed because someone stole my privacy," Meera snapped. The words came sharper than she intended. She hated being grateful for attention that felt like theft.
Priya reached out and squeezed her hand. "Look, I know you hate it. But what do you want to do? Complain and draw more attention? Or use it? I hate that I'm saying this, but… maybe use it. Control the narrative."
Control. The word tasted like metal. She wanted to tell Priya that control had been pulled out from her hands weeks ago; that whatever narrative she tried to craft, something — someone — always threaded it with his ink.
"Don't," she muttered finally. "I don't want him fixing the story for me. I want the story to be mine."
Priya opened her mouth, started to protest, then closed it. She understood only enough to worry. "Okay. Then we find who posted it."
They spent the afternoon like detectives in a slow, suburban mystery: tracking message chains, asking the café crew, querying the gallery volunteers. Everything turned up shadows and polite denials. The person had apparently used an anonymous throwaway account and a VPN. The trace was a dead end. Whoever had posted the photo wanted only to be heard, not found.
That evening the darkroom smelled of chemicals and hot water, and Meera liked that — the ordinary precision of it steadied her. Developing prints was honest work; images revealed themselves in liquid, slow and inevitable. She set up trays, warmed the developer, and let Memory — not the person who had posted the photograph, not Aarav — guide her hands. The sound of water, the rhythm of dipping and lifting, calmed the edges of her.
Aarav arrived like a shadow stepping into lamplight. He didn't make a big entrance; he simply stood at the doorway, umbrella dripping, watching the soft ballet of her work. For all the campus chatter, he arrived with the exacting silence of someone who understood where to be and when.
"You didn't tell me you were coming in tonight," she said without looking up.
"You didn't tell me you'd need help," he said. His voice was close, measured, unobtrusive. "I thought you might appreciate an extra pair of hands."
She shouldn't have. "I can do it alone."
"You can," he agreed, moving beside her. His presence at her shoulder was a familiar pressure, a line of warmth that traced her spine. "But sometimes two people make fewer mistakes."
The first tray went into the developer. The image surfaced like a shy animal, shapes uncoiling. Meera's fingers trembled the tiniest amount; it wasn't the chemical fumes, or the cold — it was the knowledge that her life was now catalogued in other people's frames.
Aarav reached for a print, holding it with a gentleness that contradicted the rumors. He lifted it out and passed it to her. For a second their hands overlapped — a brush of skin across skin as natural as passing a cup — and the darkroom narrowed to the space around the trays.
"That corner is crooked," he murmured, not as critique but as help. His thumb smoothed the edge of a paper as if he could align the world by touch.
Meera felt something like a volcano — heat bright and immediate in the hollow behind her breastbone. She pulled her hand back reflexively, then paused. The reflex was old; the pause was new. In that pause there was a dangerous mix: part relief, part revulsion, part something she hadn't named.
"You shouldn't—" she began, but the sentence died. She didn't want to say it. Not the truth of you shouldn't be allowed to touch my work and not the other truth — you make this easier.
They worked in awkward cooperation, slipping into the rhythm of making images permanent while outside the world insisted on rewriting the images of them. Occasionally the red safelight threw their faces into cinematic relief: his jaw in shadow, her cheek catching the milky glow. Minutes bled into a quiet kind of intimacy where small shared tasks felt intimate because they were private and because privacy had become rare.
Between rinses, Aarav stood behind her, tracing the route of a print's wet drip with a finger. "If someone wanted to hurt you," he said quietly, "they could. If someone wanted to make you famous for the wrong reasons, they could."
"Thanks for the pep talk," she said dryly, though her voice lacked its usual bite.
"I mean it," he murmured. "You're not a story to be framed unless you choose the frame."
She wanted to believe it. She wanted to think — this time — he meant that and not the many other things he'd said that smoothed over consequences with intention.
The prints slid into the fixer, and she watched them become lightfast, permanent. Each image that emerged felt like a small reconciled theft: something private, made public on her terms. For a few minutes she allowed herself to imagine reclaiming the narrative.
When they finished, the darkroom smelled like wet paper and the memory of rain. Aarav handed her a towel for her hands, his fingers brushing the back of her knuckles in the smallest, most innocent gesture and yet not innocent at all. She tensed, then let go.
Outside, the campus lights glowed like small, indifferent moons. The rumor would change, mutate, find new gossip to feed on. But in the small chemistry of the darkroom, with prints drying and the whisper of steps in the corridor, Meera held a stubborn certitude: she would keep making images. Even if others tried to distribute her life across their frames, the act of creating was still hers.
They stepped out together. Under a sky that had cleared to something fragile and clean, Meera felt the weight of the posted photo at the back of her throat — a single, unhealed thing — and next to it, the odd pressure of his hand, the way his presence had steadied rather than smothered in those minutes. It complicated everything.
When they parted, she could not tell which feeling lingered longer: the sting of being watched or the small, brittle comfort of not being alone. The rumor would whisper. The mirror would reflect. The prints would dry. And somewhere in the flood of attention, she had to find a seam to hold onto.
At the edge of the quad, Priya met her with a frown. "We need to talk," she said, voice low. "There's another thing I saw—Aarav was at the law building an hour ago, talking to Dean Suri. I don't like this, Meera. I really don't."
Meera's jaw tightened. The night had given her small victories and small terrors, and neither was uncomplicated. The rumor would continue. The mirror would keep flipping back at her. And the question — who had taken the candle photo, and why — would not leave her alone.