Solace

|64|terror

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***

The documents sat in my lap. Insurance policy. Property registration. My name printed on official paper in neat, professional font.

Nidhi Rajawat.

I stared at them as the car moved through Mumbai traffic, but the words kept blurring. Not because of tears. I wouldn't let myself cry over this.

But because they felt meaningless somehow.

Like someone had written my name on a form to fulfill an obligation. Check a box. Make his wife legally protected because that's what responsible husbands do.

He hadn't said a word the entire time.

We'd sat across from each other in his office that massive glass box with the city spread out behind him like proof of everything he'd built and signed papers in silence. The lawyer had done all the talking. Explaining clauses and coverage and percentages that I'd barely heard because I was too busy being aware of every breath I took.

He'd been so close at one point. Reaching for the same pen I was reaching for, our fingers almost touching. And for a second less than a second something had shifted in his expression.

We'd finished signing. He'd thanked the lawyer. I'd gathered my things. And we'd left his office with the same careful distance we'd maintained for twenty days, only now it felt worse because of what almost happened and didn't.

The driver turned left and I watched another car pass us, a family inside laughing at something. A mother in the passenger seat turned to look at her children in the back, smiling so wide I could see it even as they sped past.

I looked down at the papers in my lap again.

He put your name on a property. That means something. That has to mean something.

But what did it mean if he couldn't even look at me while doing it?

What did it mean if the only way he knew how to say "you belong here" was through legal documents instead of words?

I felt small. That was the word for it. Small in a way I hadn't felt since I was four and learning to make myself invisible in my step-mother's house. Small in a way I'd promised myself I'd never feel again.

But here I was. Sitting in a car with papers that said I mattered, feeling like I didn't matter at all.

My phone buzzed in my purse.

I almost didn't answer. I wasn't in the mood for Shivani's cheerful rambling or my father's careful questions about how everything was going.

I wasn't in the mood to perform fine when nothing was fine.

But it kept buzzing, insistent, so I pulled it out.

Unknown number.

I answered anyway. "Hello?"