The train ride home had been peaceful.
Rinon stared out the window as winter-bare trees blurred past, his reflection superimposed over the landscape like a ghost.
Winter break should have been a reprieve.
He told himself, as he unpacked in his childhood bedroom, as he sat through family dinners where his mother kept asking why he never brought friends around anymore. The campus was hundreds of miles away.
Winter break had always promised silence. This time, it delivered too well.
Rinon spent the first few days back home doing what he told everyone he wanted to do, absolutely nothing. No readings, no group chats, no polite nods in seminar rooms. Just him, a black couch, a lukewarm cup of coffee, and the quiet hum of a ceiling fan he was starting to resent.
He didn't think of her.
Not at first.
Not directly.
He'd left campus to get space from everything. From deadlines. From fake smiles. From Saafia.
Saafia was presumably somewhere warm, probably ruining someone else's life.
He should have been free.
Instead, he caught himself checking his phone every morning, not for messages, but for the absence of them. The silence felt deliberate, like she'd left a vacuum just to watch what rushed in to fill it.
*No new messages.*
On the third day, he deleted her number.
On the fourth, he reconstructed it from memory.
He just kept opening his phone to check a news site that happened to feature campus updates. Kept scrolling past club photos, gallery shots, and faculty interviews until there. A student theater performance review. Her name buried halfway down, mentioned in passing as having consulted on the script.
That night, he dreamed of stage lights and static.
Rinon woke up annoyed.
He met up with friends. Normal ones. From before. They asked him about school, and he gave curated, distant answers.
"How's uni been treating you?" one of them asked over lunch.
He shrugged. "Survivable."
"Still writing those long philosophy essays?"
"Regrettably."
"Still dating that... What was her name?"
Rinon looked up sharply. "Nina."
It wasn't a loaded name. Not really. She was nice, sharp, considerate, with a dry wit he'd initially found grounding. They'd met during a group project in second year and drifted into dating not long after. It made sense on paper. And for a while, he liked how uncomplicated it was.
She didn't ask too many questions. She didn't hover. She didn't know what he looked like when he was angry, really angry, the kind of quiet fury only Saafia ever summoned. That should've been a good thing.
They broke things off three weeks before finals. No fight, no drama. Just a conversation that ended with mutual silences and a shared understanding: he wasn't really there. Not with her.
He remembered she'd said something kind as she left. Something gentle like, "You were trying. That counts for something."
And maybe it did. But try as he might, Rinon had never written a sentence with Nina in mind. He'd never been haunted by the idea of her just around the corner. Never looked for her reflection in a window, or smelled her perfume in a scarf that wasn't hers.
He thought about that as he stirred sugar into his coffee. The right kind, this time.
"Yeah," he said finally, "we're not together."
His friend nodded. "Shame. She seemed cool."
"She was."
The conversation moved on. He didn't.
It wasn't always this way.
It was different back then.
Back before they'd become campus lore.
Back when no one had read too much into Saafia's eye-rolls or Rinon's habit of finishing her sentences. Back when they were just rumors half-spoken between lectures.
That's when Rinon met her. Emma. Another freshman. Bright-eyed, sharp-witted, a Political Science major who laughed too loud and chewed on pens.
Emma liked him. Liked him honestly. With a kind of uncomplicated affection that made him feel, clean.
And for a while, Rinon let himself believe he could return that.
But then, halfway through February, Paul had burst into the library with a screenshot and the words:
"You seeing this?"
Saafia. With her hand tucked into the crook of some guy's arm. At an art exhibit downtown.
Caption: "Unexpectedly delightful company."
Rinon hadn't even realized he was gripping the table until a vein in his wrist popped.
That night, Emma had called him three times.
He hadn't picked up.
Because what could he say?
That he'd lost the ability to focus on her laugh when his mind was sketching the lines of another girl's smirk?
That even when she kissed him, he felt like he was betraying someone he wasn't even with?
Emma tried. God, she tried.
But eventually even she realized.
She was kissing a boy who kept looking over her shoulder.
Like he was searching for a ghost in the room.
Now, months later, sitting in his childhood bedroom with faded posters and cracked blinds, Rinon still found himself reaching for that ghost. Not in the obvious ways. Not in messages or photos. But in reflexes. In comparisons.
He swiped through a dating app once, and got bored in ten minutes. Every profile read like a sigh. No one looked at the camera like they were about to say something dangerous.
He went to a holiday party. A girl named Amina struck up a conversation. It was going fine. Then she laughed at something he said, really laughed, and something about it sounded familiar.
Wrong move. His chest tightened.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"Fine. Just remembered something."
She smiled. "Good or bad?"
He didn't know how to answer that.
The city was quiet.
Too quiet.
The kind of quiet that made you notice your own breathing. Your own thoughts. Every single thing you'd tried not to think about during the semester now sprawled across every free hour like an unwanted guest.
Rinon had returned home for break, but it didn't feel like home. The walls were unfamiliar now. The echo of silence too loud. No meetings. No campus politics. No Saafia.
And yet,
She was everywhere.
In the way he hesitated before opening Instagram, then scrolled like a man half-drowning in hope and disgust.
In the way someone mentioned "snowflake pins" at a bookstore, and he had to leave, fast, before his mouth betrayed him.
She haunted him the way certain songs do. You don't try to remember the lyrics. They just arrive. Unasked. Unstoppable.
On the third week of break, he opened a tab. Typed her name.
He didn't press enter.
Instead, he clicked on a playlist she'd once made during a group project. Played it through his headphones like it was an academic exercise.
Track three wrecked him. Quietly.
Not because it reminded him of her. But because he realized, this was how she'd get him. Not in dramatic moments. Not with declarations or tears.
But with that slow, deliberate invasion of his thoughts.
He'd wanted a clean break. But there was nothing clean about her. She lingered. Like the aftertaste of bitter tea. Like music that loops in your head long after it stops playing.
He closed his laptop. Sat in the dark. Listened to the silence.
It sounded a lot like her voice.