After seventeen years of watching her from a distance, his mind was unable to process her presence nearby.
Now she was beside him. Close enough that the faint scent of her reached him between the incense and the marigolds.
He could not look at her directly. Every time he tried, his thinking fractured.
He had not had words for it then. He still didn't, entirely.
She would not have known any of that. To her, it would have looked like indifference. Like she wasn't worth the effort of a single glance.
He had looked. Many times. Never when she was looking back.
That night, alone, he had painted it.
Not the ceremony. Not the priests, the fire, the formal portraits that would be released to the papers the following week.
Just her. The exact angle of her head as she tried to speak to him. The slightly shy smile and her eyes filled with hope before she had given up trying.
He had captured it all.
Three days before the wedding, she was gone.
He had not interfered when she ran five and a half years ago.
He had known where she was. He had known who she was with.
He had allowed her to build the life she thought she wanted.
Until harm entered the equation.
He did not interfere when she chose. He intervened when she was being hurt.
There was a difference. But she did not know it.
She still believed pieces of her life had been rearranged by him out of pride. And revenge.
He let her think that because it was easier than the truth.
Exhaling slowly, he turned back to the canvas drying against the wall.
The newest one. Still wet.
Her anger. The day she left.
He looked at the row of paintings one more time before he reached for the lamp.
Twenty-two years of the same person, in every canvas.
Twenty-two years later, in a locked studio at midnight, he was still painting her.
He turned off the light.
CHAPTER 51
The exhibition gallery smelled faintly of winter roses and expensive perfumes.
Yamini stood just inside the entrance, one step away from the flow of guests, where she could watch without being pulled in. The space was clean and modern with industrial beams overhead, concrete floors softened by warm spotlights, and white walls now holding her work in frames.
The first wall stopped people in their tracks. A six-foot print of a woman in a hard hat, visor lifted, face turned slightly toward the camera—not smiling or posing, just present. The light from the furnace had caught the curve of her cheekbone and the faint sheen of sweat at her temple, making her look like something carved from heat.
