Dually Devoted ✓

Epilogue

Years later...

Turning to the next page of the notebook, he continued to read what Arpita had written. Surprisingly, this one wasn't written years before he'd met her again. This one was written after they had started dating...

There you are,
standing in front of me.
But I hide my pain from you.
How funny is life? I'm hiding my pain from the one without whom I cannot be healed.

"Siddharth," Arpita dragged, heaving a sigh. He smiled, closing the book as she entered the room.

"Can you stop reading that?" She took her notebook from him.

"Okay," he shrugged.

"Ha?!" she turned to him, bewildered. Usually, he'd put up an argument about how these were written for him to read, and that he had every right to read it- "You finished reading it?!"

He chuckled, shrugging again. She sat down next to him, on the bed, her lips automatically curved downwards, "They don't have anything important."

He wrapped his arms around her, "Of course, they do. Each of it is a part of you. A part of the pain that made you you."

"How does it matter? You don't need to read it to get to know me. I'm in front of you."

He simply smiled, not answering her. True, she was in front of him. Presently, she was. But he felt envious, that she knew so much more about him than he himself would ever know, while he couldn't even remember the moments they had spent together.

Their very first meeting, to him, was still the day he'd met her in the office. Their first casual talk was still of the time they'd had their dinner in Seasons of flavor. He knew they were all wrong, and he'd also heard the right ones, but he couldn't rearrange them in his head. For the ones he remembered still remained the most precious moments to him; he couldn't feel connected to those that he'd just heard from her.

That look in her eyes that he had never before deciphered, those strange emotions that he'd hadn't recognized, were all clear to him now. And it made him want to remember, not just for himself but also for her.

They had tried to re-create a few moments; they had gone to places that he was supposed to be aware of. She had narrated so many events in detail, but it had triggered nothing. The doctors had informed them that it was a miracle enough that he'd got that one glimpse; that the chances of him recalling things again were very low. At least that was what the scans had suggested, and yet, like fools, they had tried everything they could, for months. Gradually, she had stopped looking at him with a flicker of hope, or at least that's what she'd made him believe. And he had stopped pressuring himself to remember, though it was inevitable that sometimes, he couldn't stop himself from hoping. Nevertheless, he was once again becoming better at controlling his emotions, his impulses. One of the huge reasons for his strength, being her.

That night when he'd seen a glimpse of his past- when he was laying next to her, her hand in his- his insecurities had come knocking at his door, again. He had concluded that she'd loved him for he was Arnav, and he had been foolish to think otherwise.

'What are you thinking?' She had asked him with a voice that almost seemed angry. She had known exactly what he had been thinking.

''My d- That man. He had told you that day, didn't he?'' Siddharth kept his gaze on their intertwined hands, holding hers tightly, ''When you came to the office and told me you missed me, you had meant it for the me I didn't know about. When you told me, you loved me-'' his throat got caught; he couldn't say it aloud.