Page 151 of Scars and Crowns

"Papa?" Sara's voice pulls me back.

"Hm?"

"When the baby comes, will you still give me a flower every day?" The question is casual. Almost careless.

But I know my daughter well enough to understand what sits underneath it. I reach for her hand. "Of course."

"Even when you're busy with the baby?"

"Especially then." She studies my face for a moment. "And the baby gets flowers too?"

"Every day."

She nods. "Okay."

Apparently, that settles the matter. She returns to her book. Anamika's fingers find mine a moment later. She doesn't look at me when she says, "She worries."

"I know."

"She'll worry that she'll be replaced."

"I know."

I squeeze her hand. "She won't be."

Her thumb moves slowly over my knuckles. "I know."

There is something about the way she says it that makes me turn toward her. She isn't looking at me anymore. She's looking at Sara. At our daughter. At the little girl who once called me Mister and now asks whether I will still remember her flowers after her sibling arrives. Anamika smiles.

It's different from the smile she wore when she first came back to Devgarh. There is no apology in it. No hesitation. No glance around the room to see whether she's taking up too much space. She simply smiles.

I think about Daisy's Books.

It has grown far beyond the little shop she first opened with more hope than money. The children's corner is always crowded now, especially on weekends, and Sara insists that every new child who walks in needs to be shown the "good books" personally.

Anamika pretends to be annoyed by this. She secretly loves it. And then there is the foundation.

The work she started after everything she had spent years keeping buried finally came into the light has become something much larger than either of us imagined. Legal support. Counseling. Emergency accommodation. Women who arrive frightened and uncertain and leave with paperwork in their hands, somewhere safe to sleep, someone willing to listen.

She never calls it hers. The letterhead carries her name because the board insisted. Whenever someone praises her for it, she redirects the praise toward the women who walk through those doors.

I have watched her do it more times than I can count. I have watched her sit across from women who remind her of herself at twenty one and speak to them without pity.

You are not ruined. You are not alone. You still have a life.

She never says those words as though she's preaching them. She says them like someone who has finally learned to believe them herself.

I look at her now. Seven months pregnant. Barefoot. Hair falling messily over one shoulder. One hand still holding mine. The other resting over the child growing beneath her heart.

And I think about the woman sitting on the floor of my study years ago, surrounded by a wooden box filled with things she'd once given me, asking me what could possibly be left in her worth loving. I wish I could take that girl by the shoulders and bring her here.

Not to show her the palace. Not the title. Not the wealth.

This.

Her daughter laughing beside her. A husband sitting at her feet. A second child on the way. A bookshop that belongs entirely to her. A life she chose. A life she built. A life that doesn't require her to apologize for existing inside it.

"Papa." I look at Sara again.