Will Die In Love

Chapter 73

The room felt confined for everyone as if time had stopped. Paro, her parents, Preeti, Adi's whole family except him, and her aunt's family, everyone was present there and all they could hear was the sound of each other's breath. The room seemed to be wrapped in an eerie uncomfortable silence until Mr. Chatterjee  decided to speak. 

“Why ?" He asked in a low, hesitant voice, almost whispering, afraid to know the answer. “Why didn’t you say anything to us, Paro?”

For a moment, Paro just stared at them, as if disbelief clouded her expression. And after a few seconds, she let out a laugh. An open, loud, carefree laugh that sent a chill through everyone's spine standing there. For two straight minutes, she kept laughing like a madman, as if she had just heard the funniest joke in the world. Her eyes turned glassy, tears pooling at the corners, but she still couldn’t stop. The broken, raw, and aching pain behind it made everyone stunned. 

“Seriously?! Why! You’re asking this to me?!! You?!” Finally, she spoke, controlling herself. Her voice suddenly turned serious. Those brown eyes burned with a mix of anger and pain. She suddenly shook her head, trying to control the tremor in her voice, but it was impossible. The words wouldn’t stop. “Remember what happened last time? Remember what happened all those years ago? Remember Jay, Mr. Chatterjee ?”

Her voice trembled remembering the past once again as she directly looked at her father. 

“Do you remember what you said when you found out that I loved him? You didn’t even let me speak. You didn’t hear me. You didn’t listen to me for once. You just shut me out, like I was the biggest problem of your life. A disgrace.”

Her voice cracked, her words felt too heavy with the weight of everything she had bottled up.

 “You didn’t hear me. You didn’t need to listen to your own daughter. How can I, Paromita Chatterjee , your daughter, love someone?  How could I have done such a heinous thing? I ruined the reputation of this family. Shame! Shame! Shame! I am such a disgrace to our family, aren’t I, Mom?” her chest burnt to utter the words. 

Paro paused once, trying to swallow the bitterness rising in her throat, but it came out anyway. “And after all these years, when I finally… finally got a second chance, out of nowhere Aditya came. I don’t even know how someone like me caught his attention, but I somehow did. And that became the biggest curse of my life.”

The venom was slowly creeping in now, but her voice was still choked with emotion. “But that's just another wish for someone like him, right? A privileged rich man who has never heard ‘no’ as an answer.” Paro suddenly turned to Adi’s parents, their heads hanging low, they were clearly in a state of guilt and shock.

 “What would I have said?” Paro again looked at her father. “That Aditya Raj Malhotra , the youngest son of the famous Malhotra family, the future CEO of Malhotra Industries ….took fancies in me? That his weird obsession with me destroyed me beyond repair? Would you have believed me, Dad?”

Paro suddenly stopped. 

“ Tell me. Would you have believed me if I told you that it was him who wanted me, not the other way around? Wouldn’t you think it was your shameless daughter who lured him in?”

Her voice trembled, yet she pressed on. “And on top of that, I got to know that it was him who helped you financially when you had your heart attack. Him. He even almost saved your life, Dad. So would you have believed me if I told you the truth? That he... he...”

Paro took a deep breath, trying to steady herself. Her chest tightened. She was shaking now. “That he... he... rap…” She couldn’t say a word. The words stuck in her throat, the pain was too much as if she was living the nightmare once again.  She exhaled sharply.