"It wasn't her silence that broke me.
It was Meera's voice, finally speaking the things
Sia never had the courage to."
It happened on a weekend.
A warm, quiet evening. The kind of evening that pretends everything is fine - until one conversation turns it all inside out.
I was in the library, headphones on, pretending to study. Pages open, eyes glazed. Trying to read the same line over and over like somehow repetition would make it mean something.
Then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
I turned.
It was Meera.
She looked... tense. Not angry. Just carrying something heavy. The kind of heavy that had been building for a long time.
"We need to talk," she said.
We went outside.
Under the trees near the old staircase where the light barely reached. It felt like the right place for the kind of conversation that shouldn't be loud.
I waited.
She didn't speak right away. Just crossed her arms, glanced down, then back at me.
"I shouldn't be here," she said first. "But I'm tired of watching this mess ruin everything."
I frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"You," she said. "And Sia. And the stories you've both been spinning."
I stayed silent. I didn't know what to say.
Then she exhaled sharply, like she'd just decided to throw the truth like a knife.
"You want the truth, Aarin? Fine. Sia cared. She really did. But she was scared. Not of you. Of herself."
I blinked. "Scared of what?"
"Of hurting you more than she already had. Of saying yes when she wasn't sure she could love you the way you deserved. She didn't reject you because she didn't feel anything. She rejected you because she didn't feel enough."
That hit like ice down my spine.
"She didn't tell me that."
"She wouldn't," Meera said. "Because you always looked at her like she was the sun, Aarin. And it crushed her to know she wasn't ready to be anyone's sky."
I swallowed hard. "Then why did she stop talking to me?"
Meera looked away. "Because of me."
That caught me off guard. "You?"
She nodded. "I told her to. I told her to keep distance. That the way you looked at her... it would never let you heal. And I thought I was protecting you both."
The wind felt louder somehow.
"You hated me," I said quietly.
She shook her head. "No. I was mad at you. Because you were hurting, and I didn't know how to watch that. But I never hated you, Aarin."
A pause.
"Until the night you told Sia she was selfish."
My heart stopped.
"I didn't - "
"You didn't mean to. I know. But it broke her. And she didn't cry in front of you. She did it in our room, with the lights off, pretending she was sleeping."
I stepped back.
Everything was unraveling. The version of Sia I carried in my mind - the cold, indifferent one - started to blur. Shift. Soften.
Maybe she did care.
Maybe I was too hurt to see it.
Maybe I broke her too.
"I'm sorry," I whispered. Not to Meera. Not to myself. To the memory of a girl I misunderstood.
Meera nodded. "I know you are."
She turned to go, but stopped.
"One more thing," she said, without turning back. "If you want to fix anything now, stop writing her in your pain. Start writing her in your healing. That's what she would've wanted."
And with that, Meera walked away.
Leaving me with a truth I never expected, and a silence that didn't hurt anymore - it just ached.
That night, I sat alone and wrote:
"Maybe she wasn't cruel.
Maybe she was just human -
and I forgot how heavy that is to be."