Page 90 of Scars and Crowns

"Were we ever . . . " The thought arrives so quietly it barely feels like mine.

Were we ever really just friends? Or were we simply two hopelessly stubborn people giving our feelings smaller names because neither of us knew what else to do with them?

Did he lie awake some nights the way I did? Did he ever hold that photograph and wonder where I was? Did he ever miss me so much it physically hurt? Did he ever imagine conversations with me that never happened?

The possibility turns everything I thought I knew upside down.

He hasn't moved. He's still standing exactly where he was, giving me all the time in the world.

No pressure. No expectation. Just . . . waiting.

Waiting the way he always has.

I laugh. It's tiny. Breathless. Half disbelief. Half wonder.

"You . . . I shake my head, wiping quickly beneath one eye before a tear can properly escape. "You kept a picture of me with missing teeth."

His mouth curves into the softest smile I've ever seen. "I did."

"I looked ridiculous."

"You looked happy." The answer comes so quickly that it steals another piece of my heart. "I still think you looked beautiful."

Heat rushes straight into my cheeks. "Oh, God . . . " I hide my face with both hands. "You can't just say things like that."

"I've waited long enough." I laugh again. Properly this time. The kind of helpless laugh that arrives with tears already threatening behind it.

When I finally lower my hands, he's still looking at me exactly the same way. Like I'm something precious. Like I've always been.

And standing there in the middle of a noisy village fair, surrounded by lights and laughter and people who have absolutely no idea that my entire world has quietly tilted onto a different axis . . . I realise I no longer know which feels more unbelievable.

The fact that I carried him with me for seven years . . . Or the fact that, all this time . . . he'd been carrying me too.

MUMMA’S HAPPINESS

ANAMIKA

Soulmate.

Every few minutes I replay the moment in my head, searching for some hidden meaning I might have missed. Maybe I heard him wrong. Maybe he hadn't meant it the way my foolish heart immediately wanted to believe he did.

There has to be another explanation.

Maybe he meant it the way people speak about childhood companions—the kind who grow up together until their lives become impossible to separate. Maybe he meant we understood each other better than anyone else ever had. Maybe that was all.

That had to be it. . . didn't it? Because if he meant it the other way . . . If he meant exactly what that word usually means . . . I don't know what to do with that.

Not after spending seven years convincing myself that whatever had lived between us belonged safely in the past.

He's never crossed a line I couldn't quietly pretend not to notice. A hand resting lightly against the small of my back. The way he says Daisy as though it's something precious. A kiss on my cheek that only happened because our daughter had decided we both needed one.

Little things. Gentle things. Things that always left me just enough room to convince myself I was imagining the rest. Maybe that's why one part of me is grateful for his patience.

A man who rushed me . . . who demanded answers before I was ready . . . would have terrified me. Yuvaan never has. He simply waits. Always waits. And yet another part of me wants to shake him.

How could he hand me a word as enormous as soulmate . . . and then leave it there? No explanation. No confession. No I've loved you.

Just one impossible word and enough silence afterward to let me drown in every possible interpretation of it. I've spent years teaching my own heart to survive on certainty. He has just handed it hope instead. Hope is infinitely more frightening. I'm still hopelessly tangled in my own thoughts when we reach the house.