Some places are designed to make you behave.
Switzerland was one of them.
The air was too clean to hide anything. The streets too orderly, the buildings too precise, as if chaos itself had been politely escorted elsewhere. Even the mountains looked disciplined—sharp peaks aligned in immaculate rows, white and indifferent, as though nature itself had agreed to keep its distance.
Nothing here reached for what it wasn't allowed to have.
Nothing asked questions.
That was the point.
I learned this on my third morning at the academy, standing at the edge of the courtyard while the bells rang with punctual cruelty. Their sound was crisp, echoing off stone walls that had never learned how to listen. Snow dusted the paths like a warning—beautiful, untouched, and cold enough to punish you if you lingered too long without moving.
They said it would be good for me.
Structure.Distance.Perspective.
They never used the word exile. No one ever does when it wears silk gloves and calls itself care.
I pulled my coat tighter and inhaled slowly, counting my breaths the way they taught us during orientation. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. Again.
Control the body, and the mind will follow.
It was a lie.
My body obeyed. My mind never had.
It returned, relentlessly, to the same thing. The same face. The same voice I hadn't heard in months but still recognized everywhere—in passing laughter, in the low rumble of engines outside the gates, in the way my pulse reacted when someone said his name without meaning to.
Aras.
Later, someone might say this was the moment I should've understood that distance hadn't worked. That silence hadn't cured anything.
But back then, I still believed in obedience.
The academy was all stone and glass, tucked into the Alps like a well-funded secret. Girls walked in pairs, uniforms immaculate, posture corrected before it ever slipped. Conversations were quiet, curated, designed not to linger too long on anything real. Emotion was something you processed privately, preferably with a counselor and a neatly timed follow-up appointment.
I had stopped going to mine.
Not because I was better.
But because every time she asked me how I felt, I saw his hands instead.
White-knuckled on the steering wheel the last night I saw him. Jaw tight. Control layered over panic like armor. Furious at himself for wanting something he believed he wasn't allowed to keep.
I'm doing this to protect you, he'd said.
From what?
From you, I'd almost answered.
Instead, I nodded. Because loving Aras Atalyas meant learning when silence was survival—and when speaking would only give him another excuse to disappear.
I sat through my first class without hearing a word.
Political theory. The irony wasn't subtle.
My phone buzzed once in my pocket.
I didn't look.
Hope was a luxury I'd been taught to unlearn.
What I didn't understand yet was that Aras had loved me long before he ever touched me.
That realization came later, slowly, painfully, as hindsight always does. In the way he watched before he spoke. In the way he flinched when I laughed too freely, like joy made him nervous. In the way he never stood between me and danger—only between me and himself.
He loved me the way men love when they've been taught love is dangerous.
With restraint.With distance.With violence turned inward.
He was already leaving long before he ever walked away.
Lunch passed in polite silence. Soup. Bread. Conversations that skimmed the surface of nothing. A girl across from me—French, I thought—asked if I missed home.
I smiled, practiced and careful. "I don't know where that is anymore."
She laughed, assuming it was a joke.
It wasn't.
I excused myself early and walked the perimeter path behind the academy, boots crunching against fresh snow. The mountains rose around me, stunning and suffocating. They did not care who I was or what I'd lost.
That was their appeal.
My phone buzzed again.
This time, I stopped.
I told myself I wouldn't check. That I was stronger now. That I'd learned. That distance had done what it was supposed to do.
Then I saw the name.
Unknown Number.
My heart stuttered, then sped.
I opened the message with hands that refused to steady.
You shouldn't be this far from the people who know how to ruin you.
No signature.No explanation.
Only one person wrote like that.
I typed before I could stop myself.
Naiya:You disappeared.
The typing bubble appeared instantly.
Aras:So did you.
Anger surged—hot, sharp, welcome.
Naiya:I didn't choose this.
A pause. Longer this time. Long enough to feel deliberate.
Aras:Neither did I.
I should've stopped. Should've put the phone away and returned to the safety of bells and rules and consequences.
Instead, I typed:
Naiya:Then why does it feel like you left me first?
The reply didn't come.
Minutes passed. Then ten.
The snow kept falling, soft and relentless.
Finally:
Aras:Because if I stayed, I wouldn't survive myself.
I closed my eyes.
That was the truth he never let himself say out loud.
He loved me enough to destroy us both trying to keep me safe.
Aras was in the United States when the damage caught up to him.
He didn't remember the flight. He remembered the noise. Music too loud. Glass breaking. The burn of alcohol he no longer enjoyed but needed anyway. Women whose names blurred together, whose bodies felt like distraction, not desire.
None of them were me.
That was the worst part.
He thought of me constantly—my anger, my stubbornness, the way I never let anyone decide who I was supposed to be.
I was everything his father feared.
Which meant I was everything he loved.
He checked his phone every night and told himself not to message.
Every night, he failed.
I didn't answer his last message.
Not because I didn't want to.
Because I didn't know how to love someone who believed disappearance was mercy.
The academy bell rang again, echoing across the courtyard like punctuation. A reminder. A boundary.
I slipped my phone back into my coat and walked inside.
Switzerland was very good at silence.
And silence is where feelings learn how to wait.
That night, lying in my narrow bed beneath pristine white sheets, I stared at the ceiling and thought of him in places I'd never seen. Dangerous places. Loud places. Places where no one would stop him from unraveling.
I didn't know then that we were already moving toward each other again.
I only knew that distance hadn't saved us.
It had sharpened everything.
And somewhere between restraint and obsession, a story we'd tried to bury was already pressing upward—patient, inevitable, and very much alive.