Claimed Before Love

When Smriti Mandhana was twelve, she was told a truth so absolute it settled into her bones.

Ellyse Perry was hers.

It was decided over polite smiles and quiet laughter-two powerful families, two prodigies, an arrangement made too early to feel real. Smriti's parents and Ellyse's parents agreed to a future marriage as if they were discussing schools or summer plans.

Ellyse laughed it off.

She was thirteen, brilliant and careless, too busy chasing cricket and first crushes to take grown-up promises seriously. To her, it was a joke-something to be forgotten the moment the adults left the room.

Smriti did not laugh.

She listened.
She remembered.
She claimed.

From that day on, the idea rooted itself deep inside her-silent, patient, unyielding. Ellyse was not a choice. Not a possibility. Not a question.

She was a certainty.

So when Smriti showed up uninvited to Ellyse's dates years later, smiling sweetly as boys fled under her quiet intensity, she wasn't being cruel.

She was being consistent.

You don't steal what already belongs to someone else.
And Smriti Mandhana had never learned how to let go of what was promised to her.