6 years ago.

Aarna sat in her car three streets away, engine off, hands still on the wheel like she might need to drive somewhere in a hurry. She wouldn't. There was nowhere left to go that mattered.

She watched the time on the dashboard clock change — 11:47, then 11:52 — and told herself she was being careful, not cowardly. There was a difference. She'd decided there was a difference about forty minutes ago and she was sticking to it.

At 11:58, she finally made herself get out of the car.

The promenade was empty by the time she reached it, which meant he'd actually left. She'd been half-convinced he wouldn't — that he'd still be standing exactly where she'd left him, waiting for her to come back and tell him she hadn't meant any of it. That would have been so like him. Stubborn enough to wait out an apology that was never coming.

He hadn't waited. Good. That was good. That was what she'd wanted.

She sat down on the bench anyway — their bench, if a bench could belong to two people who technically didn't belong to each other anymore — and let herself finally stop performing.

"Okay," she said out loud, to no one. "Okay. That happened."

Her voice didn't sound like her own voice. It sounded like someone doing a very bad impression of someone who was fine.

She pulled out her phone. His name sat at the top of her recent messages, the last text from three days ago — something stupid about dinner, something ordinary, something from a version of them that no longer existed as of about forty minutes ago.

Her thumbs moved before she could stop them.

I didn't mean—

She deleted it.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I—

Deleted.

Please don't hate me. Please just—

Her thumb hovered over send for three full seconds before she deleted that one too, harder than necessary, like the phone had personally betrayed her by letting her type it in the first place.

She almost called him. Got as far as pressing his name, watching the screen change, her heart doing something frantic and stupid in her chest — and then she hung up before the first ring could even start.

If she heard his voice, she would go back. She knew herself well enough to know that much. And going back meant everything she'd just done — everything she'd spent the last three weeks planning, lying about, destroying herself to make sure it stuck — would mean nothing.

"You don't get to do that," she told herself, firm, like Meera would've said it if Meera had been there. "You don't get to undo it just because it hurts."

It was supposed to hurt. That was supposed to be the point. If it didn't hurt, it wouldn't be real enough to keep him safe.

She stayed on that bench until the sky started doing that thing it did right before dawn — not quite light, not quite dark, Mumbai holding its breath between one day and the next. A few early walkers passed. An old man doing his morning rounds nodded at her like she was just another person out early, not someone who'd spent six hours quietly falling apart on municipal property.

By the time the first real light hit the water, she wasn't crying anymore. She'd run out somewhere around 3:00 a.m., and what was left now was something quieter and worse — a kind of emptiness that didn't announce itself, just sat there, patient, like it planned on staying a while.

She stood. Smoothed down her kurta like that would fix anything. Looked at the bench one more time, memorizing it the way you memorize something you don't expect to see again for a long time.

"I did the right thing," she said.

She almost believed it.

It would take her 6 years to actually mean it — and by then, she'd have learned something she couldn't have known that night, sitting alone on a bench with a phone full of unsent apologies: that doing the right thing and surviving it were two very different battles, and nobody warns you that you have to fight both.

She walked back to her car before the city fully woke up, and didn't look back once.

Some habits, it turned out, started the very first night.

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💛 Author's Note: And so it begins. 😭 I know, I know — no context yet, just heartbreak. Promise we'll get answers. For now, just know she had her reasons.

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