Just A Friend?

Chapter Twelve

Prabhas's voice quivered as he confessed, "I... I love her, Ma." The words slipped out, heavy with the weight of realization, and the moment they were spoken, they seemed to fill the room with an almost palpable tension.

For a moment, Sridevi just stared at him, her expression unreadable. Then, in a sudden burst of emotion, she slapped him across the face, the sharp sound cutting through the stillness of the room. Prabhas recoiled, shock and confusion flashing across his face as he instinctively raised a hand to his stinging cheek.

"Ma?" he whispered, unable to process what had just happened. The woman before him wasn't the nurturing mother he'd always known. There was an intensity in her eyes, a fierce urgency that frightened him.

"Why, Prabhas? Why didn't you realize this earlier?" she demanded, her voice trembling with emotion. "If you had understood your own heart before now, Sweety might still be with us!"

Her words hit him like a cold, harsh wave, crashing over the confusion that had been swirling in his mind. "What do you mean?" he asked, his tone shifting from shock to a desperate need to understand, to piece together the fragments of a truth he had been too blind to see.

Sridevi's breath hitched as she looked at her son, the pain in her eyes deepening. "Do you really think she left because you were harsh with her that day?" she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper, yet heavy with meaning.

"Yes, I thought..." he stammered, but she cut him off, shaking her head as if disappointed in his ignorance.

"She wasn't that fragile, Prabhas. Sweety was strong! Stronger than you know. She wouldn't have left over something so trivial," Sridevi said, her tone softer now, but laced with the bitterness of withheld truth. "There's something else, something you should have seen, should have known..."

Prabhas's heart pounded in his chest, the anxiety building within him as he realized there was a greater truth behind Sweety's departure, something far more profound. "What truth, Ma? What are you saying?" he urged, his voice thick with the need to know.

Sridevi's face softened, the anger dissolving into a sorrow that seemed to age her in an instant. "Sweety... she was in love with you, Prabhas," she revealed, the words hanging in the air like an echo of everything unsaid between him and Sweety, everything he had been too blind to see.

The shock hit Prabhas with the force of a hammer blow, his breath catching in his throat. "What? Sweety... loved me?" he repeated, disbelief warring with a dawning understanding that left him reeling. It was as if the entire world had shifted beneath his feet, leaving him unsteady, unbalanced, and gasping for clarity.

Sridevi nodded, her eyes filling with tears as she watched her son grapple with the truth. "Yes, Prabhas. She loved you, deeply, truly. But she never told you, did she? She kept it hidden, buried it in her heart, because she was afraid... afraid of what it might mean for the both of you."

Prabhas's mind raced, a thousand memories flashing before his eyes. Moments with Sweety that now took on a different light, a different meaning. The way she would look at him when she thought he wasn't noticing, the unspoken words in her eyes on her birthday night that he had dismissed as mere friendship. How could he have been so blind?

"We even asked her directly to be our daughter-in-law. Do you remember the party we organized? You wondered why we went through all that trouble, right? It was to announce Sweety as our daughter-in-law." Prabhas felt as though the ground had been pulled out from beneath him. He couldn't speak, couldn't think. The air was suddenly too thick to breathe.

Sridevi continued, her tone growing sharper, more urgent. "Every time you spent time with Teju, it hurt her. Every time you ignored her, it cut deep. When you forgot her birthday, it crushed her. And the day you proposed to Teju? That was the final blow. Prabhas, this isn't the first time she's been hurt by you."