with a match in one hand (and my heart in the other)

Chapter 3

Akira

There's a lump in her throat that deserves a tub of ice cream to be sobbed out over, but it's a lump made up of too many different emotions for her to choose a flavour. So she swallows down the simplest one - rejection - and picks up her phone to call Meera. She never had a chance, no matter how or when kismet might have flung them together. And if it's her high hopes that have been standing in the way of Samar's happy ending, she needs to share this new understanding that that's all they ever were.

They meet at the park near Meera's office again. Thanks to Akira's antsy need to get this whole thing over with, she's the first one there, which means she gets to stand around and watch the world's most beautiful wife approach in all her damn perfection. Heels. Short black dress with a ruffly bottom edge like the tail of a tropical fish. Glossy black hair that ripples with the wind before settling still perfect down to every last single strand. Everything somehow screaming class .

She scrunches up her nose for a second, trying to be mad about it, but she's not really feeling it. Mostly she just feels... sad.

"Today I met Samar Anand," she begins. "A man who I had never met before." Frank had hit the nail on the head; a man who could charm anyone. He just... enjoyed making people happy.

She pulls in a breath that hurts the lump still sitting in her throat, and knows all of it's there for him now; for that joyfully exuberant young man of ten years past, and for the hollow shadow of himself he became. But she can do something for them both. "The Samar I know is like a ghost," she tells Meera, then tries to get the message across; she gets it now. Samar gave his very life to this woman, and without her has only been existing empty of it ever since. If Meera's insistence to Dr Khan this morning that she can't keep the charade up much longer, that they need to make him remember now, was due to her thinking Samar had moved on - that Akira was anything to him - then she couldn't be more wrong.

"...So I've come," she finishes, "to tell you that if it's because of me that you're stopping yourself, then you're wasting time. Because I've never existed in Samar's love story." How could she? Two weeks of mostly begrudging companionship was nothing to what he'd lost.

Meera studies the grassy field for a beat, then turns back to Akira with the same neutral expression she's worn since arriving. "I wasn't stopping myself because of you, Akira," she says calmly. "It's because of Samar. Every day I want to break my promise..."

Akira blinks at her, momentarily dumbfounded as the same decade-old reasoning she read about in Samar's diary is repeated in much cooler, empty tones. Is this what gaping feels like? It takes her a moment to push past it once Meera stops talking, and another to pull her thoughts together into any kind of measured response. "Now this... God, prayers, promises and all, I don't understand," she admits. "I don't really pray much. But before going, there's one tip I'm giving you. You left him so that he stays alive, but now if you're not with him he is as good as dead. Maybe your God's trying to tell you, Hey, Meera, enough's enough. Now go live ."

There's no hint on Meera's face that the words might have sunk in.

Well, she's done her best. She tilts her head, offers Meera a smile and a shrug, then tells her, "See you," and walks away.

By the time she reaches her boarding house again she's full of things she should have said. And things she shouldn't but would like to. And hot, angry, tearful things in general. She flops down on the bed and wallows in them for a while, then, for want of anything better to do, picks up her laptop and camcorder to download the day's video. Not because she's missing him. Definitely not because she needs to remind herself why she's removing herself from the equation. Just a silly crush, she'll tell him, if she ever has to. Don't worry, it meant nothing. Me? In love? Psshh.