It was a day full of brutal truth; life was a spatter on a steamed-up glass. Haltingly Laila revealed all; her baba was about to die, and the grief in her heart could make her try to end it before K2 even threatened to roll back like some cruel fate. "I didn't want you stuck in all this muck," she said in the smallest voice. Her slender little hands were trembling in hands that squeezed as tight as he could—so tight—with all the love of some rage against the dying of the light. "Aye, Cassette. I'm breaking, okay? You …you're my l-y-y-l song. I don't quit."
In between—her head on his shoulder in a dull moon hallway—he would brush her tears fast off her cheek in one, hard weave of fingers. Baba had half pulled through; breathe steady; and her smile flickered back, fragile but there. But the clock was an ingrate; his funds dried up within shortcuts; the train beckoned Mann back. When he hugged her fiercely at the station, she almost wished for his voice to break, "What if this is all we get?"
She might have glanced up straight into his eyes. "This ain't the end, Cassette. It's just a pause—I'll roll back to you." She smiled through a hitch in her dreamy tears; encased in his arms, he got into the train, feeling for the first time like he had been wrenched from his heart on the station.