Morning arrived like it always did — too bright, too loud, pretending nothing had changed.
Shoes thudded against cabin floors. Someone complained about the cold water. Someone else laughed at a shirt worn inside out. Normal things. Except Aaron noticed no one sat beside him at breakfast. Not deliberately. Just… eventually.
Ishaan noticed phones face down on tables. Isabella noticed her name spoken like it needed permission. Estella noticed people smiling a second too late.
If you weren't looking for it, you'd miss it. That's how it works at first. Gossip doesn't arrive screaming. It tiptoes.
Aaron said nothing. He poured his chai, sat down, and watched.
By noon, he had seen enough.
The group behind it all had a leader — a girl named Rhea, sharp-tongued and socially surgical, the kind of person who never got her hands dirty because she always found someone else to do the pushing. Beside her sat Karan, who laughed at everything she said a half-second too late, and three or four others whose names didn't matter because they never decided on their own.
They had been at it since the first evening. Little things. A switched clue during the scavenger hunt. A drink was spilt with a smirk. Whispers in the lunch queue that evaporated the moment anyone turned around. It was the kind of cruelty that was almost impossible to prove — almost being the word Aaron had quietly underlined in his mind two days ago.
Almost.
He had said nothing then. He had smiled. He had let them think they were winning.
Chess, he had told Ishaan that night on the porch. We play chess now.
Ishaan had not slept much since.
The bonfire was the resort's closing event — everyone gathered on the lawn as the sun went down, fairy lights strung between the trees, music playing from a speaker balanced on a cooler. It was supposed to be the perfect ending to the trip.
Rhea had decided it would be. Just not in the way anyone expected.
It started innocently enough. Someone passed a phone around near the fire — a few people leaning in, quiet laughs, glances thrown across the lawn toward Isabella and Estella. The kind of glances that were meant to be noticed.
Estella saw it first. She touched Isabella's arm.
"Izzy."
Isabella followed her gaze. The phone was still moving. And now more people were looking — not laughing, but watching. The way people watch something is that they expect it to go badly.
Rhea stood up.
"I think," she said, her voice carrying just enough to turn heads, "everyone here deserves to know something. Especially certain people."
She held up the phone.
On the screen was a screenshot — a conversation, blue bubbles on white, clearly from a messaging app. The name at the top read Aaron B. The messages below were damning in the quietest possible way: a conversation dated three weeks before the trip, where one voice — supposedly Aaron's — told someone named Priya that the foreign girls were nothing serious. That he had liked Priya for years. That she had rejected him last semester, and he was tired of sitting with it. That being seen with someone new — especially someone that impressive — had a way of making old wounds feel less embarrassing.
It was not screamed. It was not dramatic. It was the kind of message that sounded exactly like something a hurt, proud boy might actually say in private, which was precisely why it was so dangerous.
Isabella went very still.
Estella's hand tightened on her arm.
Across the fire, Ishaan had already seen it. He looked at Aaron.
Aaron was already looking at Rhea.
His expression had not changed at all.
"Can I see that?"
His voice was quiet. Conversational. The kind of quiet that made the people nearest him instinctively stop talking.
Rhea blinked. She had expected anger. Denial. Maybe tears from the girls. She had not expected this — Aaron crossing the lawn with his hands in his pockets like he was walking to check something mildly interesting on a notice board.
"Sure," she said, recovering quickly, holding the phone out with a confidence she was still assembling. "Read it yourself."
Aaron took the phone. He looked at the screen for a long moment. Then he looked up.
"Ishaan."
Ishaan was already beside him. He had not run. He had not rushed. He had simply appeared, the way he always did when it mattered.
Aaron handed him the phone without a word. Ishaan looked at it. Then he did something Rhea had not expected.
He smiled.
Not a happy smile. The smile of someone who had been waiting for exactly this.
"Bhavesh," Ishaan said, not raising his voice, "you want to come here for a second?"
Bhavesh and Ansh appeared from somewhere near the snack table, along with three others from class — Rohan, Sia, and a quiet boy named Parth, who everyone mostly forgot was in the room until he said something that made you realize he had been paying attention to everything. They gathered behind Aaron and Ishaan without fanfare. No announcement. No drama. Just a quiet closing of ranks.
Rhea looked at the group and felt, for the first time, something cold move through her.
"This message," Aaron said, holding up the phone so the circle around the fire could see, "was sent on the fourteenth. According to this screenshot."
He said it simply. Like a teacher stating a fact before a lesson begins.
"The fourteenth of this month," Ishaan picked up, "was the day we had our Accounts unit test at the tuition center. Six to eight pm."
"The message timestamp says eight forty-seven pm," Aaron continued. "Which would be fine, except—"
He pulled out his own phone and opened his gallery. He turned the screen outward. A photo — Aaron and Ishaan at the tuition centre's front steps, taken by Bhavesh, timestamp clearly visible in the corner. Eight forty-nine pm. Aaron's phone, visibly in his hand in the photo, was the same phone that supposedly sent a detailed emotional paragraph two minutes earlier.
"My phone was in my hand at eight forty-nine," Aaron said. "The message says eight forty-seven. I type fast. Not that fast."
A ripple of murmurs went through the crowd.
"That could be a different—" Karan started.
"The time stamp," Parth said from the back, his quiet voice cutting through cleanly. Everyone turned. He shrugged. "Anyone with basic photo knowledge knows screenshots carry metadata( like time stamps which appear under a photo). Editing apps leave traces — compression artefacts, pixel inconsistencies around the text. I looked at this image for about four minutes this afternoon when Bhavesh sent it to me. The font rendering in the timestamp is two generations behind the current app version. They used a template."
Silence.
Real silence this time. The kind that has weight.
"Also," Ansh said, stepping forward with his own phone, "Priya — the girl this message is supposedly about — left our school eight months ago. She moved to Bangalore. Aaron had not spoken to her since Class Nine. I know because I sat between them in Science and watched them not speak to each other for two full years."
Someone near the back of the crowd actually laughed. It died quickly.
Rhea opened her mouth.
Aaron looked at her.
He didn't say anything. He just looked at her with those calm, steady eyes that had been watching everything for three days and recording all of it — and the words she had prepared dissolved somewhere between her throat and the open air.
"We're not angry," Aaron said finally, and somehow that was worse than if he had been. "We're tired. There's a difference. Angry means you still think it was worth something. Tired means you've already understood exactly what this was and exactly why, and you've decided it doesn't deserve your energy."
He held out the phone to Rhea. She took it.
"Next time," Ishaan said pleasantly, "at least use the right app version. Basic stuff, yaar."
He turned around. The group behind him turned too. And just like that, it was over.
Not with a fire. With an exhale.
The crowd dispersed slowly — not knowing quite where to put themselves, conversations breaking out in low voices that had nothing to do with Rhea anymore.
Isabella and Estella had not moved.
They were still standing where they had been when the phone went around — just outside the firelight, close enough to have heard everything, far enough to feel like spectators in their own story. Isabella's arms were crossed, not in defiance but the way you cross your arms when you are trying to hold something in. Estella was looking at the ground.
Aaron and Ishaan walked toward them.
Neither girl looked up immediately. And when Estella did, her eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the firelight.
"We almost believed it," she said. Her voice was small. Not Estella-small — real small. "For about thirty seconds, I almost—"
"You didn't, though," Ishaan said.
"That's not the point."
"Then what is?"
She pressed her lips together. Looked away. Looked back.
"The point is that we know what you've been through. Both of you. And we still — even for thirty seconds — we still let someone else's words make us look at you differently. That's not okay."
Ishaan opened his mouth. Closed it. For once, he didn't have a quick answer.
Beside her, Isabella had gone very quiet. The composed mask she wore so naturally had slipped somewhere between the screenshot going around and Aaron taking the phone, and she hadn't quite retrieved it. She looked younger without it. Less like a princess. More like a person.
"Aaron," she said.
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he said, with the same quiet honesty he'd used in every conversation that had ever actually mattered between them:
"I know. But you don't need to be. You didn't believe it. Not really. If you had, you wouldn't look like that right now."
"Like what?"
"Like it hurt you that you even had to question it."
Isabella's breath caught. She looked away quickly — not because she was hiding, but because some feelings are too large to look at directly.
The bonfire crackled behind them. Someone had changed the music to something slower. The fairy lights swayed in the warm breeze.
Aaron didn't push. He never did. He just stood close enough that she knew he was there, which had always been enough.
Estella wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and immediately scowled at herself for it.
"Don't," Ishaan said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't be embarrassed about it. You're allowed to feel things, Estella. You don't have to perform being fine."
She stared at him. Then she laughed — wet and unsteady and entirely real.
"I hate that you know that about me."
"I know," he said, grinning. "It's my best quality."
She shook her head. But she didn't move away.
The guilt, though — the guilt was still there. It settled in quietly, the way it always does, ignoring the resolution around it. Both girls felt it. The boys could see it in the way they held themselves — present, but braced. Like they were waiting to be told it was fine and already knowing that being told wouldn't make it so.
Some things you have to sit with. Some things don't fix themselves in one night.
And everyone standing there knew it.
The bus home left at seven the next morning.
Aaron was asleep before it cleared the resort gates. Ishaan lasted approximately four minutes longer, which he would later claim was an impressive display of discipline. They had been up until past three — not plotting, not planning, just quietly decompressing the way people do after something draining finally ends. Bhavesh had ordered Maggi. Parth had fallen asleep on the floor with his shoes still on. Nobody talked about the bonfire directly. They didn't need to.
By the time the bus hit the highway, both brothers were completely, profoundly gone — Aaron's head tilted against the window, Ishaan slumped sideways with his mouth slightly open, the bracelet Estella had given him still on his wrist, catching the morning light.
Isabella and Estella sat two rows behind them.
Neither was asleep. Neither was really trying to be.
The guilt had not lifted overnight. It had done what guilt does — settled deeper, quieter, more insistent. Estella kept looking at the back of Ishaan's head and then looking away. Isabella watched the road.
Bhavesh dropped into the seat across the aisle from them about twenty minutes in, unwrapping a packet of biscuits with the unbothered energy of someone who had slept brilliantly.
"You two look terrible," he said cheerfully.
"Thank you," Estella said flatly.
He offered her a biscuit. She took it. He offered one to Isabella. She took it too, which surprised him enough that he sat up straighter.
"Can I ask you something?" Isabella said.
"Sure."
"Why did you help them? You, Ansh, the others. You didn't have to get involved. It wasn't your problem."
Bhavesh was quiet for a moment. He looked out the window at the highway unfurling ahead, at the flat morning light and the trucks overtaking each other in the slow lane.
"You've known Aaron since when?" Estella asked quietly.
"Since Class Six," he said. "So about four years, give or take."
"And Ishaan?"
"Same. They were a package deal from day one."
"So you know them well."
"Well enough."
"Then tell us," Isabella said. "What kind of people are they? Not the version they show everyone. The real version."
Bhavesh thought about it properly. Not the way people think when they're about to say something nice — the automatic warmth of it — but the way people think when they're trying to be accurate.
"Aaron," he said finally, "doesn't fight for things. That's the honest version. Not because he doesn't care — he cares about everything, that's the problem — but because somewhere along the way he got it into his head that caring too much out loud makes you a target. So he watches. He remembers. He shows up quietly, does the thing, and then acts like it was nothing."
Estella had gone very still.
"The thing with this trip," Bhavesh continued, "none of us had ever seen him plan something like that. Screenshot folders. Timestamps. Getting Parth involved, who, by the way, has never willingly joined anything in his life. Aaron had to personally explain the situation to him three times before he agreed, and the third time, he brought a flow chart. A flow chart, I'm telling you."
Despite everything, Isabella almost smiled.
"And Ishaan," Ansh said from the row behind — neither girl had noticed him sit down — "is the easiest person in the world to misread. You think he's just noise. You think he's the punchline. And then something actually matters, and you realize he's been paying attention to everything the whole time. He just hides it under the comedy so people don't realize how much he sees."
"He was the one who noticed it first," Bhavesh said. "The whole scheme. He came to us two days ago with a list of times, incidents, and names. Aaron had figured out the pattern the night before, but hadn't told anyone yet because he wanted to be sure. Ishaan was already sure. He was ready to walk up and say something right there and then."
"What stopped him?" Estella asked.
"Aaron told him to wait."
"Why?"
Bhavesh looked at her.
"Because Aaron wanted to make sure you two were okay first. That you hadn't been pushed too far. That if it came out publicly, you'd be standing beside them — not blindsided by it."
The bus hummed. The road stretched ahead. Two rows forward, Ishaan shifted in his sleep, mumbling something incoherent, and Aaron didn't even stir.
Estella looked at Ishaan's sleeping face for a long time.
"He always does that," she said softly. Not to anyone in particular. "Shows up before you even know you needed him to."
Isabella said nothing. She was looking at Aaron — at the graphite smudge still on his left hand from sketching the night before, at the rise and fall of his breathing, steady and unhurried even in sleep.
"I drew him wrong," she murmured.
"What?" Bhavesh asked.
"When I first met him. I drew him wrong in my head. I thought the calmness was distance. Self-containment. I didn't realize it was the opposite. He's calm because he's already decided. About things. About people."
She paused.
"He decided about us a long time ago. And he still — even after everything — he still showed up."
Bhavesh watched her carefully. Then he said, simply:
"Yeah. That's Aaron."
Ansh leaned forward. "And honestly? The fact that you're sitting here feeling guilty about thirty seconds of doubt — that's exactly why they did all of this. Because you're the kind of people worth doing it for."
Neither girl had an answer for that.
The guilt was still there. It would be for a while — that was just the truth of it. But it sat differently now. Less like a verdict and more like a reminder. A reminder of what they had, and what it had taken to build it, and how much both sides had chosen it, again and again, without making a production of the choosing.
Outside the window, Delhi was getting closer. The skyline was beginning to emerge through the morning haze — chaotic and familiar and entirely itself.
Isabella reached forward and very gently adjusted the hoodie that had slipped off Aaron's shoulder in his sleep. He didn't wake. He just settled a little, the way people do when something uncomfortable is quietly fixed without them ever knowing.
She sat back.
Estella watched her. Said nothing. Smiled.
Two rows ahead, Aaron slept on — sketchbook in his bag, gloves on his hands, entirely unbothered.
As if he had always known they'd find their way back.