His Burden, His Blessing

That Day

"Where were you, Zeyansh?" I asked my husband, the question flat and devoid of any real curiosity. It was past eleven, and the silence in our apartment had been deafening, punctuated only by the distant hum of traffic. I was tired, bone-deep and soul-weary. I didn't think I had the strength left to play this marital game with him, the one where I pretended to care, and he pretended to tolerate my existence.

"Work," was all he offered. A single, dismissive syllable before he disappeared into the bathroom, the sound of the shower immediately drowning out the possibility of further conversation.

I sighed and sank deeper into the mattress, deciding to let it go. I had already eaten a solitary dinner and cleaned up the kitchen. If he was hungry, he could make himself something. The lack of appreciation I received certainly didn't motivate me to perform extra chores for him anymore. That part of me, the eager, hopeful wife had been starved into extinction.

The day had been long and exhausting, and I craved the blank oblivion of sleep, but as always, rest refused to come. I lay in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the water run, and then, a series of soft pings from the nightstand.

Zeyansh's phone.

How utterly ironic that he was my husband and I was his wife, yet we existed in such complete isolation. After a few previous attempts to catch a glimpse of his phone, I had honestly given up. He kept notifications turned on, but cleverly configured to hide the contents. And of course, there was no chance Zeyansh Mehra would ever share his phone's password with me; we weren't that close. We weren't close at all.

I tried to count sheep, then tried focusing on my breathing, but sleep refused to grace me with its presence. In the suffocating darkness, my mind drifted, pulled inexorably toward the memory that kept surfacing, the one that marked the abrupt, terrifying turning point in our lives.

It had been two months since that day.

Aditya Singh Rathod.

The name itself was a shockwave.
He was the first man who was close to me, someone who didn't share a familial bond, yet felt closer than my own kin. He was the first man who had made me feel everything, the dizzying rush of being truly seen, the first man who made me crave the sweet, blessed relief of being numb when he left. He was the first man I had spent years desperately trying to forget.

And there he had stood, in the stark, fluorescent light of that hospital room, utterly transformed.

He wasn't the same boy I used to know. The lean frame of my memory had been sculpted into that of a man, muscled, tall, and radiating an almost brutal competence. Everything blurred for a moment as I took him in: the sharp lines of his white button-down shirt, the perfect drape of his black, well-tailored trousers. His white doctor's coat was neatly folded over his arm, his stethoscope draped around his neck like a promise. He looked like something out of a magazine, every girl's impossible dream made flesh.

I remembered I had a husband when the air shifted, weighted down by a familiar, hostile silence. Zeyansh cleared his throat, his gaze snapping from me to Aditya in a furious, possessive glare.

I felt a perverse, thrilling lack of guilt for openly ogling another man with my husband in the same room. Why should I? If my own husband possessed the courtesy and the basic morals to show respect and devotion, perhaps I would have felt a prick of remorse. But he hadn't.

Zeyansh, still reeling from the drugs and the shock of his injury, demanded an answer. "Who are you and what do you mean taking over my job?" he asked, his voice sharp with frustration and proprietary annoyance.

"As I said, I'm your temporary replacement, and I'm here to check you and give you the green light for your discharge," Aditya replied calmly. That was the core of him: a deep, steady calm that had once been the anchor for my own once-crazy, turbulent self. He remained utterly unfazed by Zeyansh's combative attitude.