She showed him the photo. Pepsi stared at it for a long time. Then he looked up.
Uma laughed—a real, surprised sound she hadn’t made in months. “Oh, really?”
She saw the billboard from the passenger seat of Pepsi’s beat-up delivery van, stuck in evening traffic. He leaned over and kissed her temple.
As the senior art director for one of Mumbai’s biggest ad agencies, she had learned to love the chaos of a shoot—the frantic stylists, the temperamental cameras, the way a single beam of light could turn a product into a promise. But for the past six months, every campaign felt like a ghost. Especially the Pepsi ones.
Irritated, she waved him in. A lanky man in a faded blue polo shirt walked onto the set, holding a slim cardboard tube. He had grease on his knuckles and the kind of quiet confidence that doesn’t apologize for existing. His name, according to the badge clipped to his pocket, was Pepsi.