Page 50 of Scars and Crowns

She steps out first. I follow a second later. She simply stands there looking at the building across the road.

Cream-coloured walls. Freshly painted windows. The signboard above the entrance. She doesn't speak. Not immediately. Confusion crosses her face first. Then recognition. Slow. Almost hesitant. Like she doesn't trust the thought forming in her own mind. Then something else appears. Something frighteningly close to disbelief. She turns toward me slowly. "Yuvaan . . . " Her voice is barely above a whisper. "What is this?"

"A bookshop." I keep my own voice deliberately casual. "The market didn't really have one. So . . . " I shrug lightly. " . . . it seemed like a good idea."

She doesn't even look at me. Her eyes return to the building. "No." The word comes quietly. "You. . . " She shakes her head once. " . . . you didn't." I remain silent. She takes one slow step forward. Then another. Only now does she notice the tiny daisies painted carefully around the front windows.

Her breathing changes.

I see it happen.

Her eyes lift toward the signboard.

Daisy's Books.

She stares at the name for a long time. Long enough that I wonder if she's even breathing anymore. "You . . . " She turns back toward me. "Did you build this . . . "

" . . . for me?" There are moments in life where silence says more than explanation ever could. This is one of them. Because while she's looking at the sign . . . I'm looking somewhere else entirely.

Backwards.

Twelve years. She's sitting cross-legged on the old palace ramparts with one of my economics notebooks balanced across her knees. She'd stolen it. Again. Apparently blank pages belonged to whoever needed them most. I remember leaning over her shoulder. "What are you drawing?" She'd immediately tried hiding the page.

Then sighed dramatically. "You'll laugh."

"I won't."

She'd hesitated. Then slowly turned the notebook toward me. Cream walls. Bookshelves. Little flower boxes beneath the windows. A tiny reading corner. A hanging wooden sign.

Daisy's Bookshop.

Her handwriting had curled neatly beneath the drawing. "I want it to smell like old books," she'd said with complete seriousness. "And coffee. And rainy afternoons."

"I want people to come in because they're lonely . . . " A pause. " . . . and leave a little happier."

I'd watched her face while she spoke. Not the drawing. Her. She'd been smiling so brightly that afternoon. The kind of smile that makes other people start believing impossible things might actually happen.

I never forgot it. Not once. Even when everything else changed. Standing beside me now . . . She looks exactly the same. Older.

Wiser. More careful.

But that same hopeful girl is still there somewhere beneath all the years life placed on her shoulders. Her eyes shine as she looks back at the shop. Then at me. They're full now.

Not dramatically. Just quietly.

"Yes." My answer is almost a whisper. "I remembered." How do I tell her? How do I explain that when the rest of my world was dissolving into gray static, those years we had were the only color I had left? How do I tell her that I didn't just remember the big things—the day she tripped over the curb outside the bookstore, the furious way her eyebrows knit together when she was losing at cards, the sound of her laugh before she realized anyone was listening—I remembered the fractions of seconds in between?

If I tell her how deeply she anchored me, I am handing her the map to every single place inside me that is raw and bleeding. I am telling her that she was the architect of a recovery she never even knew I needed.

And if I say it out loud, the whisper won't be a whisper anymore. It will demand an answer to a question we aren't ready to ask: What do we do now that we're both standing in the wreckage of the time we lost?

She blinks quickly. "Yuvaan . . . " Her voice trembles. "You didn't have to."

I smile gently. "There you go again." She laughs through the tears threatening to fall. "I only helped build the place." I gesture toward the building. "The market genuinely needed a proper bookshop." That part is true. Just not all of it. The truth stands right in front of us.

Every shelf. Every window. Every daisy painted onto the walls.

The cream colour she'd once spent twenty minutes describing because ordinary white felt too cold. The reading corner tucked into one side of the shop. Low shelves. Soft cushions. A little space built specifically so Sara could curl up with books whenever she wanted. Every single detail began with a conversation she'd probably forgotten years ago. I never did. I couldn't.