ordinaryshaola
Maya has always believed love is something you earn through patience, through usefulness, through managing someone else's chaos long enough that it might finally calm down because of her. It's a belief that costs her three years of her life, a public humiliation at a wedding, and a slow, quiet erosion of who she was before she started measuring her worth by how well she absorbed someone else's pain.
When she finally walks away, she doesn't walk toward healing so much as toward a series of harder questions: how much of someone's suffering is actually hers to carry, whether a good man arriving at the wrong moment is still a good man, and whether she's capable of wanting something simply because it's good for her, rather than because it needs her.
On a fogged-in mountain, she meets someone who answers those questions without meaning to and then loses her nerve at exactly the moment it matters, certain she isn't whole enough yet to deserve him. What follows is a search for the version of love she thought she wanted, a slow, humbling return to herself, and the possibility never promised, never rushed that some things aren't about who's right for you at all.
They're only ever a matter of timing.