"Welcome home," Meera whispered back, though she was the one arriving.

But tonight, in the last week of December, she finally stood outside her childhood apartment in Delhi. The digital clock on her phone read 11:47 PM. Her suitcase, lighter than when she'd left for Melbourne two years ago, rattled over the uneven tiles of the corridor.

2020 had taken so much. But that night, on the last page of a difficult year, Meera learned that "home" wasn't a place you streamed or downloaded. It was a verb. An arrival. A choice.

And she had chosen to return.

"I came," she replied.

They sat together in the dark living room, sharing leftover chai and a single piece of stale cake. No 300Mb download could capture the grain of that moment—the way her mother's hand never left hers, the way her father kept checking the door as if afraid she'd disappear.

The key still turned with the same stubborn grind. Inside, the smell of old wood and cardamom tea wrapped around her. Her father had fallen asleep on the sofa, the TV murmuring a news channel's year-end recap. Her mother's knitting lay abandoned on the armrest.

2020 had been a year of locked doors and distant voices. For Meera, the phrase "Welcome Home" had lost its meaning somewhere between March and August, when her flight was canceled twice and the word "quarantine" became a constant hum in her brain.