It was Sunday morning.

Mia woke before the sun, as she often did.

A few rounds of breathing steadied her before she slipped into her chores.

Her small apartment hummed with Tibetan healing music. The scent of detergent lingered as she folded laundry; the floor gleamed under her mop. She worked briskly, as if movement could hush the restlessness inside her.

The week had been heavy. Three publishers, three proposals—no replies. The uncertainty trailed her like a shadow.

Every morning she would wake up to check her mailbox, slim through unopen chats on her WhatsApp just to find any text from any publishing house.

Today wasn't any different.

Or maybe it was.

Because when she was rinsing yesterday's used plates, her phone buzzed. Wiping her hands, she checked the screen.

A message flashed from an unknown number, tagged with a publishing house:

We'd like you to come in with a sample chapter.

Her breath caught. She stared, disbelieving. Then warmth spread through her chest. She pressed the phone to her forehead.

'Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,' she mumbled.

Then with an exhale, her fingers hovered on her phone, typing into another chat.

"Mam, I got a response from them. I owe you a treat."

"Will you ever stop calling me mam? Just Malvika, okay?"

Mia smiled. "I can try 😬"

The reply came quick.

"Good girl. Lunch at my place. I'll ask Radha to make Thai green curry 🥂"

Mia grinned. "Sure."

Then another notification popped up.

Anand. The message was short.

"Hey?"

Her hand tightened around the phone.

So thoughtful.

Rage simmered under her ribs. After everything he'd said—after humiliating her, dismissing her, abandoning her—this was it? Just a hey?

Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. Logic screamed to delete, to block, to move on.

But the foolish, aching part of her—the one that still remembered his touch, his laughter, the ease of his company—betrayed her.

She swallowed hard. Typed two words.

"Hi, Anand."

The typing bubble appeared. It lingered. A long pause that made her chest constrict, as if she were waiting for something—an apology, an explanation, a plea for forgiveness. Something that might make the pain worthwhile.

The reply came.

"Hey, Mia, remember that sushi we had at that Korean place? Do you recall the name of the dish? I totally can't remember—"

Her breath stilled. Heat rose—not blush, but fury.

Three months of silence, and this was why he reached out? Not to say sorry. Not to say he missed her. Just to ask about damn sushi.

Her jaw clenched. She pressed a fist to her mouth, but the sobs came anyway—raw, quiet, relentless.

For weeks she'd held herself together, convincing herself she was stronger. But now, in the stillness of her apartment, Mia broke.

When the tears finally stopped, she rose, wiped her face, and returned to her chores. Each small task steadied her breath.

A hot shower followed. The water beat against her skin, washing away the sting in her eyes and the heaviness in her chest.

By the time she stepped out, wrapped in a towel, her reflection looked clearer. Tired, yes, but alive.

She had a lunch date with Malvika Menon.

Malvika Menon, in her fifties now, was a painter the world revered. Her art breathed in black and white—charcoal was her soul, her weapon, her language. The stark strokes, raw and imperfect, carried a depth that critics across the globe called "unforgiving truth."

Mia had met her by chance, though she liked to think of it as fate. It was a year and a half ago, and desperation had hung over her like a second skin.

She had left her house, quit the proofreading-job she was doing for a magazine, rented a single bedroom apartment at the cheapest rent.

She needed a job, any job, and Paperhouse Publishers had finally offered her one—writing a biography of Malvika Menon.

At first, their meetings were stiff, polite. Malvika's silence could stretch across hours, broken only by the scrape of her charcoal stick on paper.

But slowly, seating after seating, something shifted. Malvika began to open up—not in floods, but in trickles.

A story from her youth here, an observation about the world there. Enough for Mia to see the shadows that lived behind the woman's genius.

Malvika took time, and time was the only thing Mia had enough. So she dived in. One session per week, that's how Malvika prefered.

By the end of a year, the book was finished.

The Shadow Walker hit the shelves and stormed its way into the bestseller list, becoming one of the crown jewels of the Kolkata International Book Fair.

Readers were entranced by Malvika's life, and critics praised Mia's sensitive yet unflinching prose as her pen-name, Aurora.

But Malvika didn't let her go. She held her close.

Even after the manuscript was long done, Malvika would call Mia over. Sometimes for coffee, sometimes for an idle conversation that drifted nowhere, sometimes just to hold up a half-finished canvas and ask what Mia saw in it.

Mia never understood why Malvika kept her around—why this towering figure, celebrated by the art world, sought the company of a young, struggling writer.

Until one evening.

Her twenty fifth birthday party. She wasn't hoping for Miss Menon to step into her middle class struggling apartment, yet she invited her anyway. And for some strange reason, she did come.

She introduced her to Sanvi, and by the time Malvika moved towards the photographs hung from her wall behind the couch, her eyes were fixed on one of the family photographs.

"That's my mom." She muttered.

"Rohini, the brightest of all students..." A sigh left Malvika's lips.

Mia's jaws dropped, "How did you know my mother?" She couldn't help but ask.

Malvika hold her gaze for a moment, then chuckled, "She was my classmate, in school."

Mia sighed, "The world is small isn't it?"

Malvika Menon smirked, "Indeed."

She was six when her mother passed away.

Cancer, it was. She was already in stage three when they diagnosed. As if her cancer grew on her sadness faster than a wildfire.

Her last few years of life had been traumatic. Daily fights, her dad's anger, her bruised wrist, quiet mention of names she didn't know — now she wondered if she knew her own mother at all.

Other than what her dad had portrayed, liar, cheater, ungrateful...

When she was a kid, she believed her dad. But soon after her mother's death, an unknown lady came. He remarried.

Kavitha was kind. Soft. Motherly in her every attempt. Mia never call her Mother, she was always Kavitha. A sweet lady who was living with her short-tempered dad.

Growing up, she had always searched for the warmth, the feeling of closeness that could fill the void in her heart her mother had left.

That subtle mention of her from Malvika made her heart ache. She wished she had more time with her.

The world was indeed very small. Otherwise, who would have imagined, Malvika recognise her mother just from an old worn-out photograph?

And now that Malvika Menon had entered in her life in a way she barely imagined, she was equally proud to be one of the very few people who got access to Malvika's world.

As she got ready for the lunch, the remnant of morning's bitterness was long gone, now replaced by the warmth of July sun.