“Follow me,” Assi says. When we don’t move, she looks back at us and her lips quirk. “We mean you no harm.”

There’s absolutely no reason to believe her, but we do anyway. She leads us to a small house with a walled garden. It seems empty of people; the windows are dark. The fierce middle worlders accompanying her don’t speak, so we make no attempts at conversation either.

The night is soft and pliant. We fill the garden of the small house, leaning against the wall without care for the empty garden beds beneath our heels. We keep a distance from the group of middle worlders, not an unfriendly distance but one marked by caution.

They, in turn, seem more at ease once the gates between the house and the streets outside are closed. As we watch, they shift away from each other. It is then that we see the boy they were hiding in the middle. He has dark skin through which pinpricks of light peek out. Each of his eyes has a five-pointed star gleaming in its dark depths. His face is beautiful, and his attention is trained solely on us.

We look at Paheli and find her with a shuttered face. No light sparkles in her eyes. She has retreated somewhere deep inside.

Paheli: An Interlude in Blue

What do you do when your past pops up into your present to say hello? If you are me, you pretend you don’t see him for at least three whole minutes. A lot can happen in three minutes. Lives can get ruined. People can disappear. What was right can become wrong. When it becomes clear that none of these (especially the second) things is going to happen, I change my strategy. I try to blend in with the scenery. What is one more girl in a madness of girls? Right?

It is not my night.

The boy’s eyes calmly assess all of us. When it is my turn, he looks as if he is peering through my skin and bones right into that dark place where I hide all the things I don’t want to remember. The stars in his eyes brighten. He recognizes me as that broken creature he offered an escape to so many years ago. How, I don’t know. I don’t exactly resemble her anymore. She is gone now, that broken girl.

I am lying.

She is still here. Slumbering in the depths of me. Pro tip: You don’t ever get rid of your broken pieces. You just bury them as deeply as you can.