When Darya meets Youssef in freshman year of high school, she’s already lost everything but her name and her roots. Youssef practically falls head over feet in love with her then and there, though he’s too young to know it. When Youssef moves back to Iran before senior year starts, Darya is set adrift once again. Four years pass and Youssef returns. He’s not the loud, slightly awkward, a little gangly boy she knew. Now, Youssef is a man. Dark hair, green eyes, stubble on his jaw and a yearning for her that neither of them can deny anymore. He’s back for her. He’s back to show her that love exists and his heart belongs to her more now than it ever did back then.
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@Bat_TeaThe rain in Seattle was a constant. In her first few months in America, Darya would press her small face against the window and watch as it streaked down like glass, or like tears that washed nothing away. She didn't cry much then. She didn't cry much at all. Her parents—Mostafa and Soraya—found her silence reassuring. They had enough grief of their own, navigating a new country, new language, new life.
They thought her quietness was contentment.
In the third year of their American life, the call came at 11:42 PM. Drunk driver. Highway 5. No survivors.
Soraya Pahlevan
the last thing she ever said to her daughter this morning, voice thick with love and sleep, her hand at the doorframe Khosh be halesh, azizam. Be a good girl at school today.
Darya was ten years old when the foster system swallowed her whole.
There were five homes in three years. Each one had its own flavor of failure, its own particular brand of "too difficult." She was too withdrawn, they said. Too angry. Too quiet. Too much.
One family had a dog. A golden retriever named Biscuit. Darya loved that dog more than she'd ever loved anything after her parents. She cried when she had to leave that home, silent and shaking at the caseworker's side, and the memory of that injustice—that one small love she was allowed to have before it was stripped away—followed her for years.
She stopped trying after that.
inner monologue: What's the point of loving anything? It just gets taken away. Everything gets taken away. The rain stays, but that's it. The rain stays.
At sixteen, she was placed with the Chen family in Northgate, a new school, a new life, yet another room that would never quite be hers. She walked into her first-period biology class and sat in the back, as far from the fluorescent lights as possible, her backpack heavy with her entire life contained inside it.
The boy next to her had a thick, dark head of hair, a notebook full of hieroglyphic-like notes, and an energy about him that Darya immediately distrusted. He was too alive for a Tuesday morning.
Youssef Panahi
You're new.
It wasn't a question. He was looking at her with an intensity that felt invasive, like he was seeing past her too-still face, past her carefully empty posture, and straight into the buried, silent grief she kept there.
Darya
stiffly Are you in charge of welcoming committees?
Youssef Panahi
a slow smile spreading across his face in a way that made his whole demeanor crack open No. But I would be, if they asked. I'd be very good at it.
Darya stared at him.
inner monologue: Who talks like that? Who smiles like that at a girl who's clearly trying to disappear?
She turned away, focusing on the whiteboard. But she could feel him there. Watching. Waiting. Interested in a way that made her skin prickle.
Youssef Panahi
What's your name?
Darya
Darya.
Something flickered in his expression. Recognition. Curiosity. Something warmer.
Youssef Panahi
in Farsi, smooth and practiced Darya? Darya? That's a beautiful name. It means "sea," doesn't it?
The room seemed to tilt. Four years since she'd heard her name in her mother's tongue. Four years of chipping away at herself, trying to become something more palatable, more American, more acceptable. And here was this boy, this stranger, handing it back to her with an open, unguarded smile.
Darya
her voice catching just slightly You speak Farsi?
Youssef Panahi
his smile widening I was born in Tehran. My parents brought me here when I was a baby. he shrugged, a gesture that said, "What can you do?" Home is home, no matter where you plant it.
And that was it. That was the moment.
inner monologue: Oh. Oh no.
There it is. The crack. The crack I didn't know was there.
Everything after that was inevitable.
They became friends. Then inseparable. He dragged her to Pike Place Market on weekends, browbeating her into trying every sample, laughing at her discomfort with the chaos of the crowds. He brought her to the art museum and stood beside her in front of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" for forty minutes, neither of them speaking, both of them breathing in sync with the brushstrokes. He took her to the Space Needle just to make fun of the tourists, purchasing the most expensive coffee on the menu and pretending it was a delicacy.
Darya
You're ridiculous.
Youssef Panahi
You love it.
Darya
I tolerate you.
Youssef Panahi
undeterred That's the first step to love. Tolerating me. I'll take what I can get.
He did. He took everything he could get.
The Panahi household became her second home. Reyhaneh, his mother, called her "ghand" — sweet — and insisted she eat until she couldn't breathe. Aref, his father, would ask her thoughtful questions about her plans, her interests, her life, treating her answers with the same weight he'd give his own son's. The house smelled of turmeric and saffron and cardamom; the walls were lined with Persian rugs and photographs of family members spread across continents. It was the first place in America that felt like something other than waiting.
She was fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen, and somewhere in that stretch of time she'd begun to believe that maybe, just maybe, she wasn't so alone in the world after all.
And then Youssef turned seventeen.
His grandmother in Tehran fell gravely ill. There was no world in which the Panahis wouldn't go to her. Reyhaneh packed up her practice, arranged the closing of her clinic, and with tearful farewells and promises of return, the family that had opened themselves to Darya like a sanctuary folded themselves into checked luggage and boarded a plane to Iran.
inner monologue: Don't leave. Don't leave. Don't—
She didn't say it. She stood in the airport, her hands shoved in her pockets, her face carefully blank, and watched the man who had taught her how to laugh again disappear down the jet bridge.
Youssef Panahi
I'll be back. Four years at the University of Tehran, and I'll be back. I'll have a job, and I'll find you, and—
Darya
Youssef.
He stopped.
Darya
quiet, firm, a goodbye she'd never say You have a life to live. Go live it.
The hurt that flickered across his face was brief, but she saw it. She saw everything in that moment. The weight of his unsaid words, the depth of his longing, the way he looked at her like she was the answer to a question he hadn't yet figured out how to ask.
Youssef Panahi
his voice low, fierce I'll come back for you. Wait for me.
Darya
I'll be here.
It was a lie. She knew it was a lie. She had already begun the process of forgetting him, or trying to, the moment he turned his back.
He left, and she finished high school alone.
She turned eighteen and aged out of the foster system, a piece of paperwork, a stack of manila folders, a handshake from a caseworker who'd already forgotten her name.
She got a small apartment in Capitol Hill, a studio with a window that faced the Space Needle and a radiator that clanked in the winter. She worked at a plant nursery called The Rooted Passage, owned by a Palestinian woman named Amal who had immigrated here decades ago and who looked at Darya with the kind of knowing that comes only from having survived.
Amal
You have sad eyes, habibti.
Darya
I have tired eyes. There's a difference.
Amal
her accent thick, her voice gentle Same thing.
The years passed. She learned to live alone, truly alone, and found that it was easier than she'd feared. No one to disappoint. No one to lose. She tended her plants, watered her small collection of succulents, and kept her life small and manageable and safe.
She was twenty-two years old, three weeks into autumn, and she was kneeling in the back of the nursery, transplanting a fern into a larger pot, when the bell above the door chimed.
She didn't look up. Customers didn't usually need her, and she liked it that way.
But then she heard the footsteps. And then—impossibly, ridiculously, like the rain had somehow rerouted itself to follow this exact moment —she heard a voice. A voice she knew. A voice that had been buried somewhere in her chest, untended and unwatered, for four years.
Youssef Panahi
warm, familiar, incredulous, as if he'd found exactly what he'd been searching for his entire life Darya?
She froze.
The fern tilted in her hands. The dirt spilled. The world went very, very quiet.
She looked up.
He was taller. Broader. His shoulders had filled out, his jaw sharper, his face older — but his eyes were the same. Those eyes, dark and endless and full of that unbearable, unshakable curiosity.
And he was smiling at her like she was the sun.
inner monologue: Four years. Four years since I've seen her face. Since I've breathed her air. And she's still— He's still the same. She's still the same. She's still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Still the same girl who broke open my chest at sixteen and made me want to be someone worth coming home to.*
The pot shattered on the ground. Or maybe that was just the sound of Darya's carefully constructed walls, beginning to crack.