It had been years since Ruhan last stood in front of Aarya's house.
The gate was the same — crooked, with peeling green paint and a missing hinge.
The swing on the porch creaked slightly in the breeze, just like it used to.
But the windows… the windows looked newer. Open. Breathing.
Aarya didn't hesitate. She walked straight in, barefoot, her steps slow but certain.
Ruhan followed.
Dev and Samaya paused at the gate before stepping through.
They weren't kids this time.
They weren't ghosts either.
Just people trying to return to a place that had stopped waiting but never stopped holding.
The door wasn't locked.
It never had been.
Inside, dust had gathered in corners, but the cushions still bore the old flower patterns.
The clock above the mantel was stuck at 5:47 — the exact time the power had gone out the night the storm hit.
Ruhan touched the frame gently. "It's like it froze."
Aarya was already in her old room.
The walls still had the glow-in-the-dark stars she had pasted up in seventh grade.
Her shelf had fallen sideways. A photo frame lay facedown.
She picked it up.
All four of them. In school uniforms. Mud on their faces, grins so wide they looked unreal.
She turned the photo around.
On the back, in her own handwriting:
"One day, we'll forget why we ever stopped laughing. And that'll be the beginning again."
Samaya walked over to the window, brushing aside cobwebs.
"This place… it remembers us."
Dev nodded. "Or maybe it just needed us to remember it."
Ruhan stood in the doorway. He didn't move. He didn't want to touch anything.
He felt like if he did, the house might fall apart — or worse, feel too whole.
Aarya looked at him. "It's okay, you know. To be scared."
He met her eyes. "I'm scared of what comes next."
"What comes next," she said softly, "isn't about fixing what we broke."
She paused, then walked over and took his hand.
"It's about choosing what we build now."
That evening, they cleaned the house together.
They didn't call it moving back in. They didn't call it a reunion.
They just swept the dust, lit candles, opened the windows, and let the wind speak through the rooms again.
Samaya found old letters under the bed — ones they never sent.
Dev played a chord on an imaginary guitar and said, "It still sounds like home."
And Aarya… she sat cross-legged in the center of the living room and whispered,
"You found me."
Ruhan sat beside her.
Quiet.
Certain.
"We never stopped looking."
Somewhere deep in the house, a pipe groaned.
A door creaked open on its own.
Not haunted.
Just relieved.
That the ones it held in memory had finally come back —
not as the children it once knew,
but as the people who had chosen to remember.