Esmera straightened as quickly as if the painting had slapped her. Her heart thudded in her ears, drowning out every other sound, even the whispers she had been so intent on hearing.

Esmera knew why she was leaning in to listen to a painting, but how could she make a stranger understand that? How could she explain that she needed to know why a lark delivered whispering petals to her every morning?

Esmera would rather be swallowed by the floor than make eye contact with whoever had spoken, but she couldn't just ignore the only other person in the exhibit with her. Slowly, she turned to see a man standing behind her, his arms crossed over his chest.

With his pleated tweed pants, white button-down shirt and brown knee-length coat, he could've stepped straight out of those dark academia lookbooks that popped up on Esmera's Pinterest feed.

"I..." Esmera started.

Never had she seen anyone dress like that. She wasn't sure whether it was that or the way the man's coat fitted so snugly around his shoulders that trapped her voice in her throat.

"I was just..."

The man raised his eyebrows. His dark eyes resting on Esmera were no help as she fumbled for a response. They only scattered her thoughts the way a cheeky breeze did fallen leaves.

"I can speak, I promise." Great, now Esmera's ears were burning. She fought the urge to cover them with her cold hands.

Esmera didn't need to make herself look more ridiculous in front of this man. As it was, his mouth curved as if he was trying not to laugh.

Esmera hadn't been smelling the painting but listening to it, which made even less sense. She had heard of people getting high on wet paint, but never of paint that whispered secrets nobody could understand. This man probably hadn't either.

Among the countless responses fluttering through Esmera's mind, she chose the one least likely to make her look stupid and crazy.

"I wasn't sniffing the painting. I just thought I had dropped something." The answer didn't sound as clever coming out of Esmera's mouth as it had in her mind, but she kept her back straight and held the man's gaze.

The only thing to do when one has no confidence is to fake it. Esmera only hoped that it worked.

The man's little smirk bloomed into a full grin. "Ah, yes. Some things can be pesky like that." He came to Esmera's side.

His accent was distinct in its uniqueness, but Esmera couldn't place it. In all her time moving across the state and even out of it, she had never heard any other like it.

His voice was soft, just like a stream trickling over smooth pebbles, just like his black hair might be if Esmera could run her fingers through it...

She snapped her eyes back to the painting and cleared her throat.

"Yeah." The distracting heat from Esmera's ears now spread to her cheeks, and she had no idea why.

It had to be because this man had caught Esmera doing something so foolish. He probably thought she was a weirdo and was just too polite to say so.

Maybe it was because he was so stylish and put together. There wasn't a loose thread hanging from his clothing. His hair was sleek and dry. He had probably run his hand through his hair once or twice when he woke up that morning to get it to look like that, the way only men could. Esmera, on the other hand, looked like a drowned rat. Next to each other, they were opposites, a joke waiting to happen in a comedy skit.

In eerie coordination with Esmera's thoughts, the man turned to her. "What happened to you?" He looked her up and down before his eyes settled on hers.

Esmera had lowered her arms when she was alone, out of sight of any eyes that might make her feel exposed, but she folded them over herself once again. "I got caught in the rain."

She wasn't sure that was what the man was asking, judging by the way his eyes rested on her chest. She looked down to see that the coffee stain was still there, so faint that only the most discerning eye could make it out, and only under lighting designed for appreciating art's subtleties. Like the paintings around them, it told a story, but this was one Esmera didn't want to talk about.

She didn't want to say or do anything to burst this bubble that was dry and cosy and halfway to a land of dazzling sunrises and royals clad in shiny silk.

"You must be cold." The man slid his coat off.

"No, no, I'm fine." Esmera tightened her arms around herself to capture the little warmth they enclosed.

She could survive the cold. She had survived worse, including men who lured her in with small kindnesses. She only saw how meaningless the act had been when they got tired of pretending to be something they weren't.

An umbrella offered on a rainy afternoon could turn into an entrapping marriage, could turn into fights that left scars that would never heal.

"I insist." The man held his coat out to Esmera. "I can't let you walk around like that." He offered her a small smile, and it nearly convinced her.

Surely there wasn't any harm in taking the coat he held out so willingly. Esmera was sure she wouldn't wear it as well as he did, but it looked warm.

Esmera thought she saw genuine kindness in the lines of his smile, but it wasn't something she had seen often enough to be able to recognise with certainty.

If an umbrella could be a trap, so could a coat, and Esmera wasn't ever letting herself get tied down and isolated ever again.

She lowered her gaze and stepped away from the man. Hopefully, that would make it easier to say no, even when all she wanted to do was grab his coat and burrow into it. "Really, it's not—"

All Esmera saw was a flap of brown fabric before a soft warmth settled around her. She shivered. The man's hands were warm against her shoulders as he smoothed the coat over them.

She ran her fingers over the fine material. There wasn't a flaw in it. In its sturdiness, she could sense its wealth. It was probably worth more than she could earn in a year.

"I can't accept this." Esmera convinced her unwilling hands to peel the coat away from her body.

"You don't have to keep it forever if you don't want to." The man caught Esmera's hands and held them in place.

She was too surprised to pull away, too distracted by how soft his skin was against hers, how his eyelashes curled at the edges of his eyes.

Gently, the man guided Esmera's hands to pull the coat back over her shoulders. "Just for today."

She should've been able to tell just from looking at him that he wasn't the type to take no for an answer.

Esmera sighed, trying to keep her eyes from straying to his arms so tightly outlined in white cotton. "Fine." She settled into the coat.

It was so warm. At least Esmera wouldn't have to cross her dodgy neighbourhood in a damp t-shirt during the dark hours that made it dangerous. An expensive coat couldn't solve all her problems, but it could solve this one.

"I'm always at the museum. You can drop it off on a sunny day if you're ever passing by."

"Of course I'll pass by," Esmera said too quickly. She silently kicked herself. "There are so many exhibits I still need to explore," she added to explain her enthusiasm.

It had to be the thought of exploring centuries of stories from remote nations all over the world that made her pulse quicken. It couldn't be the thought that she'd be seeing this man again.

Her heart gave her no answer. She had silenced its cries and pleas for mercy and escape too many times, and it had grown tired of being ignored. Perhaps one day it would dare to speak its feelings and thoughts again, but that wouldn't be for a while, not until Stephan was in Esmera's distant past.

She snuck a sideways glance at the man, only to see that he was gazing at the painting with a little half-smile. Esmera studied his profile, his softly rounded nose and straight eyebrows. He looked like the people in the painting with his black hair, sandy beige skin and narrow eyes.

Esmera dared to break the thoughtful silence. "Do you know where in the world this painting is from?"

"This one and all the others"—the man made a sweeping gesture to indicate the rest of the exhibit— "all come from a small village in the Himalayas. You wouldn't recognise the name."

"Bold of you to assume that."

"Is it?" The man tilted his head as he regarded her.

Esmera had the sudden urge to pull her neckline away from her skin so that the air-con could touch her with its cold breath. She wouldn't have accepted the coat if she had known she would overheat.

"If you don't believe me, Google it. I dare you."

Esmera narrowed her eyes, but she had never been able to resist a dare. She pulled her phone out of her purse and opened her browser.

"What's the village's name?"

"Milatanur." The man stared down at Esmera's screen as she typed the name in the search bar.

The name dislodged some memory in the recesses of Esmera's mind. She had heard it before or read it somewhere. She would find it when she searched the internet, and together, they would prove this man wrong.

Esmera tried not to feel self-conscious about her cracked screen. The man's rapt gaze suggested he hadn't noticed it at all but was as curious as Esmera about what results would come up.

Esmera scrolled past Facebook accounts of people with names that sounded like Milatanur at a stretch until she reached the bottom of the page.

"There's a place called Milatani in Indonesia." She pointed at the search result as evidence.

"Too far south-east." The man shook his head. "See, Google doesn't even know about Milatanur."

Esmera cleared her browser and put her phone back in her purse. "Fine, you win."

"I usually do."

She looked up to see the man grinning. It was so smug and annoying that it made her want to prove him wrong and wipe it off his face, but it also made her smile for some reason.

She rolled her eyes to distract herself from the rollercoaster drop and rise her stomach did.

It isn't because he's smiling, she told herself. I'm probably hungry. After all, she hadn't eaten since lunch, and that was hours ago.

Of course this man usually won. That was the only reason why he could afford to wander around a museum talking to strange girls whose misfortunes had brought them there. He was probably a college student, judging by his clothing, probably at some school Esmera could only dream of attending.

She wanted to resent him for all these things she imagined he had that she didn't, but she couldn't find the feeling in herself.

He had been kind to her, and she couldn't begrudge a kind person his good fortune.

The man turned his gaze back to the painting. "The world is so much bigger than Google knows."

Of all the strange things that had happened today, Google being unable to find a place was among the top on Esmera's list. All her life, she had accepted that Google knew all and saw all. She wouldn't have believed that there were villages so distant from civilisation that even modern technology couldn't lay eyes on it.

Esmera frowned as she followed the man's gaze to the people who lived in the paint before them. Would a small mountain village have royals? Somehow that didn't seem right.

Kings ruled kingdoms, not villages, but what did Esmera know? The Himalayas were on the other side of the world. Its people probably had traditions and practices Esmera and Google could only guess at.

Still, this snapshot into this foreign world was so enchanting, so unlike anything Esmera had ever seen or imagined.

"Milatanur must be beautiful." She could picture the curtained windows behind the royals looking out at a sunrise not too different from that in the painting beside theirs.

"It is."

Esmera had known enough yearning to recognise its subtle note in the man's voice.

She looked up at him. "Are you from around there?"

The man let out a breath before answering. "No. I just look at these paintings sometimes and feel like I have been there." He met her eyes. "Do you know what I mean?"

"I do." Esmera found herself smiling at his answer. "The rawer the art, the realer than reality it can feel."

She knew it when she listened to music and felt feelings that weren't hers, began to yearn for people she had never met.

"Exactly." The man turned back to the painting, and Esmera followed his gaze.

"This looks like a happy family," she couldn't help but say, even though she felt she was interrupting the man's contemplation.

The smile that took over his face told her that wasn't the case. "They do." He pointed at the King and Queen sitting at either head of the table. "You can see how the parents adore their children, and how"—he moved his finger between the younger royals at the centre of the table— "even as the siblings fight, they love each other."

Esmera snuck another glance at him. His words were so like her thoughts that she had to wonder whether he had heard them and was speaking her ideas as his own.

"Looking at this painting sometimes makes me feel as though I'm part of this family." The man's eyes glazed over. "There's no way around loneliness, and sometimes we need glimpses of others' lives to help us navigate our own."

A silence settled between them. Esmera was still pondering the man's words when he turned to her.

"Too heavy?"

"No." Somehow, despite the sadness in his words that felt akin to the one that constantly accompanied Esmera, she managed a smile for him. "I relate to that."

Music gave Esmera comfort because it showed her that she wasn't alone. Centuries ago, there had been people who knew sadness, heartbreak and even loneliness. Art spoke the words the world couldn't say.

The man gave Esmera a gentle smile in return, but his eyes were distant, dreamy as if he was sitting around that table with the family in the painting. "I come here sometimes when I feel lonely. This is my favourite painting in this exhibit."

"Well, it looks like you found some company this time." Esmera kept her voice light.

"I guess I did." The man nudged her.

She was happy to see the grin dominate his face.

The painting summoned Esmera's gaze back to it.

This man must really connect with this painting if he preferred it over all the others in the exhibit, even with their bright shades and vibrant scenery.

Esmera could see why. The painting was from the perspective of a sixth person sitting at the table, watching their family with the unmistakable warmth of love. Nothing could feel more meaningful to a girl who had seen loving families but had never been part of one. She wondered if it had the same meaning to the man beside her.

"Are you also an orphan?"

A beat of silence passed before Esmera realised she was talking to no one. The man had vanished as suddenly as he had appeared.

Esmera should've known the mysterious stranger was too kind to be real, too good to last. She might've dismissed him as an apparition conjured up by her wishful thinking if it wasn't for his coat that rested on her shoulders.

She hadn't gotten to thank him for his generosity. She hadn't even asked for his name.