Falling, Fallen

They said the past was over.
But when she looked into his eyes...
She realized the past was staring right back.

She didn't choose him.
And he never reached for her.

Leyla Dogan thought she had finally carved a new beginning-new city, new job, new hope. She didn't expect him.

Yahya Mansouri: perfectly pressed shirt, unreadable face, and the man she was once married to in a nikkah neither of them truly chose. No celebration. No wedding. Just a promise exchanged between two fathers... and a silence that stretched for years.

Now, by a twist neither of them saw coming, they find themselves in the same place, at the same time-working in the same school. Strangers by choice. Bound by something neither of them fully claimed, nor fully escaped.

She walks the halls with calm resolve.
He keeps his collar straight, his gaze elsewhere.
And yet... the air between them stirs like a secret trying to breathe.

In a world of laminated smiles and clipped emails, of children's laughter layered over grief and ambition, Falling, Fallen is not a love story. It's a story of restraint. Of timing. Of the heaviness between two people who could never be lovers-yet never truly became nothing.

And when the past returns not as a memory, but as a living, breathing presence-what do you do?

You don't speak.

You don't flinch.

You carry the silence like a second skin.

And pray it doesn't crack.