A tear escaped. She let it.
"I don't understand," she whispered. "How. When I was so—I tried to be invisible. I tried not to want anything from you. I tried to be fine."
"I know." Something pained moved across his face. "I know you did. And that was the most devastating thing of all—watching you try so hard to take up less space when what I wanted, what I needed, was for you to fill the whole room."
She made a sound she couldn't quite suppress.
"I love you," he said.
Silence.
She stared at him.
The city lights reflected in his eyes, and he looked at her with the absolute steadiness of a man who had stopped running.
"What?" she said. The word barely had a voice.
"I love you, Nimisha." He stepped closer, and she felt the warmth of him even through the cool evening air. "I'm in love with you. Completely. Entirely. In the way that means I can't remember what I was before it."
"You—" She shook her head. "You can't."
"Why not?"
"Because you were so certain. You said—you told me from the beginning—"
"I know what I said." His voice was gentle. "I was wrong. It took me a year to admit it and I'm sorry it took that long, but I'm telling you now. I love you."
"When?" she asked, needing to understand it. "When did it—"
"I don't know." He lifted one of her hands and pressed his lips to her knuckles. "Somewhere between your quiet strength and your loud absence. Between your words on a page and the way you talk to my dog like he's a colleague you find exasperating." He moved to the next knuckle. "Between the night I found you in the kitchen with chocolate on your lips and the night I left you alone on our anniversary and drove back to my office and sat in the dark for three hours hating myself." Another press of lips. "You consumed me without trying. That's the honest answer. I don't have a specific moment because it wasn't a moment. It was everything. All of it. You."
She was crying properly now—not the contained, disciplined tears she'd perfected over the past year, but real ones, the kind that came from a place too deep for composure to reach.
"I've loved you for months," she said. "Silently. So quietly I thought it wasn't going to survive. I kept waiting for you to give me a reason to stop."
"I know." His voice was rough. "I gave you many."
"You did."
"You didn't stop."
"I tried." She laughed, wet and broken and honest. "I really did try."
"I know." He stepped close enough that she had to tilt her head to look at him. "Then why didn't you tell me? When you knew—when you suspected how I felt—"
"Because I was terrified," she said. "Of being wrong. Of hoping and then losing it. Of—" She stopped. "Of being too much for a man who'd told me from the beginning that he didn't want this."
"You weren't too much." His hands framed her face, his thumbs gentle on her wet cheeks. "You were never too much. You were exactly enough. I was too small for it. I'm trying to grow into it."
"Samarth—"
"I'm not terrified anymore," he said. "I was. For months I was completely terrified of what you made me feel, and I kept choosing the fear over the feeling. I'm done choosing that." His forehead dropped to hers. "You're my wife. You're my home. You are—you are the only thing in my entire life that I would not survive losing."
She closed her eyes.
Felt his breath against her face. The city noise far below. The cool air around them and the warmth of his hands.
"I love you," she said. "I love you. I have been loving you through everything, the good and the terrible, and I would do it again. I would do all of it again if this is where it ended up."
