The studio was unusually silent that afternoon — the kind of silence that makes even machines hum a little louder.
Arjun sat in front of his screen, editing the "label" episode they'd recorded last week. He trimmed pauses, softened breaths, leveled frequencies — until her voice came through clean.
> "Love should be free, period."
He stopped. Rewound. Played it again.
There was something about her tone — the way it dipped on the word free — that tugged at him. Not romantically. Not yet.
It was something older. Deeper. Like he'd heard it before, just... smaller. Younger.
He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. Maybe it was just fatigue. Maybe it was just her voice — it had that quality, the kind that stayed with you long after the conversation ended.
Still, when he closed his eyes, he could almost hear water — faint splashes, laughter, the rush of wind.
And then — a scream.
He was ten years old again, standing near a lake in Shimla during a school trip.
There'd been shouting, teachers yelling for everyone to stay back. And then he saw her — a little girl in a red scarf, standing too close to the edge.
The ground had given way, and she'd fallen.
No one moved. So he did.
He remembered the cold, the panic, the pull of her small hand underwater.
And then the stillness when he got her out — her coughing, shivering, and the scarf clinging to her like a wound.
He'd given her his own blanket.
She'd looked up, eyes wide and terrified, and whispered, "Thank you."
That was the last thing he remembered before being rushed away by teachers.
He never saw her again.
"Arjun?"
He blinked. The producer, Rhea, was standing in the doorway, watching him zone out.
"You okay? You've been staring at the waveform for, like, ten minutes."
He forced a smile. "Yeah. Just… tired."
"Sure," she said, crossing her arms. "You and Suhana are good together on mic. You have that—what's the word—magnetism. Don't ruin it by over-editing."
He chuckled. "I'll keep that in mind."
When she left, he looked back at the screen. The cursor blinked beside her voice.
He whispered, almost to himself, "Suhana Mehta…"
The name rolled off his tongue like a chord half-remembered from an old song.
Across London, Aanya was sitting at a coffee shop, writing notes for their next episode: "Fear of Intimacy."
Her laptop screen blinked with unfinished sentences. She wasn't sure why this topic felt so personal.
She kept remembering his question from last time — "Spoken like someone who's been trapped in one."
It had hit closer than she wanted to admit.
> "Fear of intimacy is not fear of love," she typed, "it's fear of losing yourself within it."
She read the line twice, frowning at her own honesty.
Then her phone buzzed — a text from Arjun.
Arjun: "Need your input for next episode outline. Can call?"
Suhana: "Sure. Give me 5 mins."
Five minutes later, her phone rang.
And just like that, the sound of his voice through the line — low, easy, familiar — felt like déjà vu.
> "Hey," he said. "Sorry if I caught you at a bad time."
"No," she replied. "Just writing. Trying to sound smart about things I don't fully understand."
"That's what we all do for a living."
They both laughed.
And in that laughter — warm, overlapping, imperfect — something clicked again.
Later that night, Arjun replayed the rough cut before sending it to Rhea.
He adjusted the background static — faint city hum, low traffic, wind brushing the mic.
He turned up the gain slightly and froze.
Underneath her voice, in that static, there was something faint — like rippling water.
He hit pause.
The sound vanished.
He replayed it.
There it was again — brief, like a ghost memory.
He closed his eyes. For a second, he wasn't in London anymore. He was back by the lake, the smell of pine, the cold, the girl with the red scarf.
> "Suhana…" he murmured.
"It can't be."
Suhana, meanwhile, sat by her window, journal open, writing thoughts for their next topic: "Do we heal with love, or despite it?"
The rain began again — a steady rhythm against the glass.
She looked at the city lights, her reflection layered over them.
Something about this new project — this new partnership — was stirring old ghosts.
She touched her red scarf absentmindedly, thumb grazing the faded thread at one corner.
A soft smile touched her lips.
She didn't know why she'd kept it all these years — only that it made her feel safe.
---
Some connections begin long before the people in them are ready to remember.