Vansh stared at his laptop screen, where he was one click away from purchasing his ticket to Guatemala. His friend Amaan had been running a camp for American teenagers to work with the local villages to lay electrical lines for light bulbs. Physical labor outside the bubble of privilege that looked good on college apps. Amaan needed help with herding the kids. It was just the kind of thing that had always called to Vansh.

Young, unjaded people looking to find themselves. Small actions with tangible results. A bulb turned on, the egg of an endangered bird hatched, a building painted, a baby animal fed, a plastic bag pulled out of the ocean. Not big solutions but something he believed rippled across the universe and did something. Or undid something. How simple it had seemed.

SFO–GUA. The words flashed on the screen.

The most important thing he sought in a project had always been that it was far away from the place where he was nothing more than the youngest Raje.

Some might say the most insignificant Raje.

The child his father was proud of too.

Vansh had always prided himself on not caring. On not feeling insignificant or disappointing.

I’ve still been running away all my life.

All his life he’d been plagued by the sense that he had no purpose here. For the past months, he hadn’t felt that once. He closed out of the website without purchasing the ticket. He couldn’t leave their work unfinished. They were in the process of starting their own foundation. He’d messed up, but he’d find a way to make the foundation work.

Everything inside him told him to pick up the phone. Text her. Call her. Show up at her door.

The part that wouldn’t stop haunting him was how much pain she’d been in when she threw him out. How afraid she was of losing control of her life. If he pushed her into a relationship, he’d just be doing what she was afraid of. She had to want this.

She didn’t.

She’d called him stupid. Not in so many words, but she’d used something he struggled with to push him away.

For the hundredth time since he’d seen her two days ago, he dictated a text and erased it. Since he was staring into his phone, he couldn’t ignore the text popping up from his mother. He hadn’t been answering his family’s calls. He’d told them he was too busy working on something important.

It wasn’t a lie. He’d been taking care of both projects while hiding out in Yash’s apartment. Naina hadn’t shown up at work. He knew she wouldn’t abandon work for too long. And losing himself in the endless tasks was the only thing that kept the pain of her absence from taking over.