In rage. It’s immediate and hot and instinctive, the kind that doesn’t ask permission before it takes hold. I don’t even realize I’ve stopped listening to the conversation in front of me until I feel Sitara’s fingers tighten around my arm.
Just slightly.
Not enough for anyone else to notice. Just enough for me to know. She’s seen him too.
I look down at her, and the change in her expression hits me harder than seeing him ever could.
Her face has gone still. Not composed. Not calm. It’s frozen.
Like her body has locked itself in place before her mind can catch up. The color drains from her cheeks so fast it’s unsettling, leaving her skin pale, her lips parted just a little. Her eyes—usually so expressive, so alive—turn glassy, unfocused. Panic flashes there, raw and unguarded, the kind that slips through defenses because it doesn’t belong tonow.
It belongs tothen. It drags the past with it like a dead weight tied to her ankle, pulling her backward no matter how far she’s walked since.
And in that moment, something inside me burns with a clarity that makes my jaw clench. This man didn’t just leave her. He stayed inside her. He lingered in the quiet doubts. In the moments she questioned her worth. In the nights she replayed what she could have done differently. He didn’t walk away clean—he embedded himself in the damage and let her carry it alone.
Ayush’s gaze lifts then, casual, lazy. And lands on us. On her.
I watch his face closely, unwillingly hoping—like an idiot—that I might see something human flicker there. A pause. A tightening. A trace of guilt. Regret. Even discomfort would have been something.
Anything that suggested he understood what he had done. Instead, his lips curve. He smirks. Actually smirks. And in that instant, every polite rule, every carefully practiced restraint I’ve learned over years of rooms like this, fractures—because that smile tells me everything.
He remembers. And he doesn’t care. And then, as if to add effects, he winks at Sitara. It’s such a small gesture. Barely a flick of muscle. Something anyone else in the room might miss or dismiss as meaningless.
But I see it. And something inside me gives way with a sharp, sickening clarity—like a rope snapping under too much tension. That wink isn’t casual. It isn’t clumsy or accidental or born out of awkwardness. It’s intentional. It’s calculated.
A quiet, ugly reminder delivered with confidence.
I was here first.I did this to you.And nothing happened to me.
My jaw tightens before I realize I’ve clenched it. My hands curl into fists at my sides, nails biting into my palms hard enough that it almost grounds me. Almost. I can feel my pulse hammering, heavy and fast, like my body has already decided what it wants to do before my mind can catch up.
I want—no, Ineed—to move.
To cross the room. To grab him by the collar and drag him out of whatever false civility he’s hiding behind. To make him look at me. To make him say her name out loud, without mockery, without smugness, without that lazy cruelty men like him mistake for charm.
I want him to understand what he did. Not in abstract terms. Not as a “mistake” or a “change of heart.” I want him to understand the humiliation. The waiting. The silence. The way she learned to smile through something that broke her quietly.
The images come unbidden, vivid and frightening in their clarity.
Throwing him across the room.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
Until that expression cracks. Until the arrogance drains from his face and something human—somethingreal—seeps out in its place.
Until he apologizes.Not because he’s cornered. Not because it’s expected. But because he finally understands that what he did mattered.
“Dhruv—” Her voice cuts through the noise in my head like a blade through fog.
I stop. I turn back to her, and the sight of her hits harder than anything Ayush could have done.
She’s shaking. Not enough for it to be visible to people here, not trembling hands or rattling breath that would draw attention. It’s subtler which is more hurtful. I can feel it in the way she presses closer to my side, like she’s instinctively seeking cover. In the way her fingers dig into my sleeve, not gripping, not pulling—just holding on. In the shallow rise and fall of her chest, breaths cut short before they’re finished.
Her eyes keep moving.
