Prologue

Everyone remembered the light from the bulb,

But no one remembered the flicker.

The Girl Who Smiled.

The girl smiled in all her photographs.

That was the first thing everyone noticed.

It became important later.

Her mother kept three photographs on the mantelpiece. Her father kept eight. Her best friend had approximately two hundred and nineteen on her phone, most of them were stupid, taken on video calls, or at birthday parties with ridiculous grins and pouts.

In every single one, she was smiling.

A real smile, people insisted.

Not the polite kind.

Not the kind you give strangers.

A real one. The one you that makes your gums show and may seem too bright in a city where light only comes from bulbs or people's egos.

Which was strange.

Because the diary said otherwise.

___

The police found it six days after she died.

Not in her cupboard.

Not beneath her mattress.

Not inside the desk where she kept her sweets, stickers and half-dead pens.

It was beneath the floor.

A pink notebook.

No lock.

No name.

Just stickers and glitter. It looked like any other diary a teenage girl would own.

"But since when did a girl who abruptly died become.. normal?” It was the first doubt detective Rao had, because, duh. Most mysterious deaths were because of ghosts, heart failure or a badly written plot twist. But this girl? She was weird.

The first few pages were filled with ‘about me-s’, anime checklists, and dumb internet theories. Rao scoffed to himself, “The girl was a nerd.” Which, maybe she was.

Her handwriting was annoying - somewhere it was too neat, then italic, then bold and then messy. Too many spelling errors for the perfectionist detective, he was ready with his pen to correct her mistakes, but Ms. Veena had to interfere, “Sir, this is evidence. Not your son's homework.” Rao sighed and nodded quietly. Almost annoyed at being stopped by his junior.

I think people would be less frightened of death if they knew how much of it happens before you actually die.

Detective Rao read that sentence three times. “Damn,” he thought, “The girl had potential.”

He turned the page.

Everyone thinks they will notice.

Another page.

They won't.

Another.

I smiled today.

Then, underneath it:

Nobody asked why.

Rao stopped reading.

Outside the room, someone laughed.

It was her friend.

A strange sound to hear in a police station after a funeral.

Then came crying.

Then silence.

Rao looked down at the diary again.

There were names.

Hundreds of them.

Some crossed out.

Some circled.

Some written so many times the paper had begun to tear.

There was her mother's name.

Her father's.

Her friends'.

A teacher's.

A boy's.

And, on page eighty-six -

his own.

ARVIND RAO.

He stared at it.

He had never met the girl.

Not once.

Beneath his name was a date.

Three months before her death.

And beneath the date, a sentence.

He will find this.

Rao's fingers tightened around the page.

“Sir?”

He looked up.

Veena Chaturvedi was beside him.

Then he turned the page.

Veena Chaturvedi, she'll be there too. Junior detective, huh?

Rao? He froze in shock, his glasses fogged up. Not because it was cold, but because he had never been this startled in his 25 years of solving cases, never been this horrified after seeing his son's answers. Veena? her eyes widened as wide as saucepans, she had to close them otherwise they would've fallen out.

I never wanted you to find this. But, fate is vicious.

Too vicious.

Chaturvedi snatched the diary in horror and read the next line,

It was never just me. It was them.

Rao snatched it back, glaring at Chaturvedi who grinned like a guilty child who had stolen expensive cookies meant only for guests.

He closed the notebook with a sigh, he wasn't paid enough for this.

___

When the inspector first sent him, he believed that the case would be as easy as squeezing a lemon in Chaturvedi's eye. (Oh he'd love to do that, the woman always annoyed him to the core.)

But he was wrong.

SO wrong.

But, yeah..

..fate is vicious. Too vicious.