“Did your fath…” she stopped, then restarted. “Did he tell you anything about her?”
Samar’s eyes met hers. “No. He raised me thinking I had forgotten about it. She was never mentioned again except when any relative took her name.”
“Did he raise you well?”
He scoffed, looking down at himself — “What do you think?”
“I think he raised you to be emotionally so independent that you cut yourself off from everybody and only invested your emotions in one or two people.”
“What is that supposed to mean?!”
Amaal snapped her mouth shut.
“Go on.” He softened his voice.
“It’s too late. Let’s go to sleep. You need to spend as much time sleeping as you can for healing…”
“Say it, Amaal.”
“Samar…”
“Say it, let me hear what you think about me.”
“You can’t throw it in my face!”
“I won’t.”
“You can’t make it your truth and…”
“Just say it.”
She sighed.
“I think,” Amaal said. “That you became emotionally dependent on Atharva after he became your rock in SFF. Just like you were dependent on your mother, like every child is. When Iram came into the picture and he went out of the shape of your idea of Atharva, when you saw him move towards your enemy’s daughter and lost sight of the man you knew and trusted and depended on, everything shifted. I remember how disturbed you were in those days… don’t look away, look at me. If you want to listen, listen to this looking into my eyes.”
Samar nodded.
“I think, you lost the emotional anchor of your life twice. Once in your mother, and then in Atharva. And when that happened, you resorted to things that had no redemption, you turned into a four year old who did not see any reason or repercussion. You acted out of instinct and out of pure need to protect and get back that emotional anchor any way you could. But…”
“Is there even a but in all this?” He laughed bitterly.
“But,” she took his face between her hands and pulled it down. “You are out of it as well, and at the right time. You woke up from it and moved away from the need to anchor into another person. You built your own life, your own routine, your work. You built a party on your own in another state, away from Atharva. You grew yourself out of it.”
He gently extricated himself from her hands, moving to hold the windowsill and stare out. She saw that the move was more to balance himself after standing without support for so long than anything else.
“I didn’t realise you think so little of me.”
“I don’t!” Amaal slapped her hand on the sill beside his hand. “You said you won’t throw it in my face or make it your truth!”
He remained silent.
“Samar.” She called out to him. “Samar!” She set her hand atop his. He did not look at her.
“It happened, but it was not your fault what it did to you. I am saying that you were strong enough to rise out of it. The life you made, the life we were planning to make before this happened was a good one…”
“But now that’s not the life which will be.”
“We don’t know that.”
