Aworldnotreal
She had already been broken by his silence.
But hope is a stubborn thing. It lingers in the spaces between what you know and what you can bear to believe.
So she went to him. Through the rain. Through the locked gates and the guards who turned her away and the city that felt like it was drowning alongside her. She had one fragile, desperate thought pounding in her chest: If he just sees me... if I can just tell him about the baby...
She found a way in.
She found him.
He was covered in turmeric. Smiling not at her, never at her, not anymore but at a woman she didn't recognize, a woman in bridal yellow, a woman whose name was written on a board beside his.
𝗔𝗱𝗶𝘁𝘆𝗮 𝘄𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝗦𝗮𝗿𝗮.
She read it once. Then again. Then again, as if repetition might change the letters, might rewrite the truth, might turn Sara into Radhika.
It didn't.
She stood there in the rain, soaked and invisible, her hand pressed to a belly that held his children. Children he would never know about because the man she loved no longer existed. He had been replaced by a groom who looked happy. He had been replaced by a stranger who had blocked her number, silenced her voice, erased her from his life so completely that she started to wonder if she had ever been there at all.
She didn't scream. She didn't step forward. She didn't do any of the things the old Radhika would have done.
The old Radhika died in that doorway.
The woman who walked away into the rain was someone new someone quieter, someone harder, someone who understood that hope is just another word for the pain you haven't felt yet.
She never tried to contact him again.
She never told him about their children.
And she never, ever let herself hope like that again.