The rain was relentless the day they moved back.
Arjun had vowed never to return to the old house on Dey Lane—a crumbling two-story with ivy choking its stone walls, and windows that creaked even without the wind. But life had turned, and with a toddler in tow, fleeing city chaos, the family needed refuge.
Two-year-old Veer took to the place oddly fast. By the second night, he was giggling in corners. “Baba, Nandini Mausi plays hide and seek!”
Arjun froze.
Nandini.
A name buried like glass in memory—his childhood friend, the girl with short brown hair and muddy feet, who vanished the night of the village fair. A night soaked in panic, sirens, and whispered prayers. He was thirteen. No one ever found her.
"The Paperboat Girl"
A boy played in silence,
where laughter once echoed.
She taught him to fold dreams—
paperboats, afloat on muddy puddles.
Water slipped through the cracks,
just like her promises.
He waited.
One boat. Two.
Until the puddles dried.
She never came back.
But he still sails those boats,
each one carrying
the weight of goodbye."
And now, in a home he abandoned to forget, his son was laughing with a ghost.
The power cuts began. The mirrors cracked without touch. Old photographs—faded and forgotten—fell face-down from the walls. One of them bore Nandini’s face, and in that dim, flickering light, the glass shards reflected her smile. But behind the smile was something else—rage, loss, betrayal.
Veer kept drawing chalk circles on the floor. Arjun recognized the pattern. It was the same as that night—the very symbols found scratched behind the garden shed when she disappeared.
His wife, Meera, wanted to leave. Arjun couldn't. Not now. Not after the clues started to surface. A rusted locket behind a loose floorboard. A page torn from his old diary. And that photograph—where his teen self stood smiling beside Nandini… but the shadow behind them didn’t match the light.
He finally entered the locked attic.
Dust. Decay. And beneath an old trunk—bones wrapped in what once was red satin. Nandini's ribbon.
The spirit didn’t want revenge. She wanted justice. Arjun remembered now—the way his father had beaten him the night Nandini vanished. The way his uncle had left the house that same night and never returned.
What happened wasn’t an accident. It was a cover-up.
And now, it was unravelling.
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