Every creak of the house, every splash of water, seemed to echo louder now that the rain had eased a little. His mind wandered, and he began counting things—seconds between raindrops, the number of nails in the exposed beams above, anything to stave off the rising sense of hopelessness.
It was like a slow blur, the minutes stretching into what felt like days. Occasionally, Aditya would stand at the window, looking out at the flooded landscape, watching how eerily still everything seemed in the distance. That’s when his waterlogged villa started to groan around him.