The police station hadn't changed.
Same flickering fluorescent lights. Same faint smell of old coffee and mildew. Same photograph of Mayor Birendra from 1997 hanging crooked above the front desk.
Maya sat stiffly in the interview room, a gray blanket draped around her shoulders. Her tea had gone cold. Across from her, Officer Sagar Dahal stood flipping through a thin folder. He was younger than she remembered—maybe just out of academy when she left town. His uniform still looked new, pressed too sharp.
He cleared his throat.
"So, let me get this straight. You saw a man dragging a child—"
"Yes."
"—found a shoe—"
"I showed the officer where I dropped it. It was gone when we came back."
"And then... you heard your mother's voice?"
Maya's eyes flicked up to his. "I didn't just hear it. I saw her. She spoke to me."
Sagar hesitated, pen hovering over his notepad. "Miss Khanal, your mother—"
"Died two years ago. I know." Maya's voice was dry. "But I'm telling you what I saw. What I felt."
He nodded, though the twitch in his jaw said otherwise.
"We've had no missing child reports that match the description. No parents calling in. And other than the scream—there's no trace of anyone in those woods."
Maya leaned forward. "Something's happening out there. Something wrong. I know what I saw. That child... she's real."
Sagar sat back, arms crossed. "You haven't been back in Deurali long, have you?"
"Three weeks."
"Well, maybe you forgot how this place works. Weird things have always happened near Deurali. People hear voices, see things in the fog, talk about ghosts. But there's never proof."
"Maybe you've just stopped looking."
He said nothing.
She stood, wrapping the blanket tighter. "I know what I saw. And I'm going back."
"That's not a good idea."
She paused at the door. "Then stop me."
He didn't.
That night, Maya couldn't sleep.
She sat on her childhood bed, surrounded by boxes she hadn't yet unpacked. The old wallpaper still bore faint outlines of stars she'd stuck up when she was twelve. Her mother's books lined the shelf by the window, untouched since the funeral.
She pulled one out at random: "The Folklore of Forgotten Places."
Inside, a bookmark. Not hers.
She opened to the marked page and read aloud:
"Places once marked by grief remember. Especially when the living forget. In woods where silence stretches too long, memories grow roots and rise again."
Below it, in her mother's handwriting:
"Deurali was never just a place. It's a wound."
Maya sat back, heart pounding. A memory surfaced—half-formed, blurry.
She was a child. Running through Deurali woods. Chasing something… or being chased. Her mother calling her name.
And then—her mother crying. Cradling something small. Something wrapped in white.
A girl.
Not Maya.
Someone else.
Someone her mother never spoke of.
Maya closed the book.
Tomorrow, she would go back.
Not just to find the girl.
But to find the truth her mother had buried among the trees—and the dream she herself had long forgotten.
The one that had never come true.