"Happy Married Life, Shivya Pathak" I weakly smiled seeing my condition, mangalsutra dangling in my neck, vermilion in hair and both hands filled with gold bangles.
"Come out quickly or do you want me to break the gate," my husband knocked again...
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His thumb slowly caressed the back of her hand. "Bahut mushkil se mili hain aap hume. Hum aapko khona nahi chahte." The vulnerability in his confession struck her heart like rain falling upon parched earth. Shivya's expression softened immediately.
"Vedant," she whispered, gently shaking her head before lifting both her hands to cradle his face. Her thumbs brushed lovingly across his cheeks as though she wished to smooth away every fear written there. "Why do you think like this?"
"I could never leave you." She smiled through eyes shimmering with emotion. "No matter what happens, no matter where we live, no matter who stands against us. I would never choose a life that doesn't have you in it."
She leaned forward until their foreheads touched once again. "You are my home too, Vedu Baby. We're not talking about returning to strangers. We're talking about the place where you spent your entire life. Every memory of your childhood lives within those walls. The people in the village don't just respect you because you're their Zamindar; they genuinely love you."
Her fingers absentmindedly traced the line of his jaw. "Your parents are there; they love you so much. Maybe your father doesn't know how to express it. Maybe he's never been good at saying what he feels. But that doesn't mean he doesn't love you. I know somewhere in his heart he wants his son to come back home too."
A bitter laugh escaped Vedant before she had even finished speaking. "Love and him?"
He almost scoffed at the word, as though it were something foreign upon his tongue. Slowly, he turned his face toward her. The warmth in his eyes vanished, replaced by a coldness so old it seemed to have lived inside him for decades.
Holding her gaze without flinching, he spoke with frightening calm, a humourless smile ghosting across his lips. "The only difference between your father and mine is that your father died in real life. But mine pretended to be dead while being alive."
"The only thing that man knows is how to stay in power, nothing else," he continued, every word measured with painful restraint as though speaking them aloud required him to tear open wounds that had spent years pretending to be scars.
"Vedant." His name slipped from Shivya's lips before she could stop it. This wasn't the grief of the man sitting beside her; this belonged to a little boy.
A little boy who had spent his entire childhood standing with his hands full of love that no one ever accepted, waiting for a father who never truly arrived. A child who had kept searching for warmth in winter and blamed himself each time he found only ice.
Without another word, Vedant gently patted his thigh. She didn't need to be asked twice.
Shivya shifted closer before carefully settling herself sideways in his lap, instinctively curling into him as though that place had always been waiting for her and she had simply been too afraid to claim it.
