CHAPTER 29 #2
Yes. Abhimanyu and Rajat did have a client meeting scheduled that morning. Had Mishti gone to the office instead? Had anyone there seen her?
He dialled Abhimanyu immediately.
“Bhai, the meeting went well,” Abhimanyu said cheerfully.
“I don’t care,” Karan cut in. “Is Mishti there?”
There was a brief silence. “Mishti bhabhi? At the office?” Abhimanyu asked, confused. “Was she supposed to resume today?”
Karan’s jaw tightened. So Abhimanyu didn’t know either.
“Check her cabin,” Karan ordered. “Ask security if she came in today.”
Before Abhimanyu could respond, Rajat took the phone. “Karan, what’s going on? Mishti isn’t at home?”
“No,” Karan said, pacing the room. “She’s not here. Look for her at the office. If she’s there, inform me immediately.”
He disconnected the call and continued pacing, anger and unease colliding violently inside him.
He tried calling Mishti again, but as expected, her number was still unreachable.
Frustrated, he was about to shove the phone aside when he thought he saw her name on the phone notifications.
He instantly opened his phone again. And he was right.
There was a WhatsApp notification from Mishti’s number.
His breath hitched. She had messaged him? When? Why a message instead of a call?
He opened the chat thread with shaking fingers. A single voice note stared back at him, nearly ten minutes long, sent three hours ago. Three hours. And he was only seeing it now? What the hell! He had been asleep then. Completely unaware. Something about this felt deeply wrong.
He was about to press play when Maria’s anxious voice echoed from the temple room.
Karan hurried there and found Maria standing near the idol, pointing toward a neatly wrapped parcel placed in front of the idol.
It was roughly the size of a book with his name written on it, along with Mishti’s Mangalsutra.
Karan’s heart pounded. She would never remove her Mangalsutra. This meant no less than her heartbeat to Mishti, and she taking it out, keeping it here like this didn’t give him a good feeling.
First, the unheard voice message. Now this.
The gift and her mangalsutra lay in the very space where Mishti prayed every single day. He picked it up with unsteady hands, along with the gift, and turned away, heading straight for the stairs.
With every step toward his room, he started connecting the dots. Her missing bag. The message. The Mangalsutra. This gift left behind. It all only meant one thing.
She was gone. Not just stepped out. She had left. Without telling him where. Without giving him a chance to stop her. And God help him, all he wanted in that moment was to find her, to reach her, to bring her back home. Back to him.
Once inside his room, he shut the door and finally pressed play on her voice message, and there it was… her voice.
“Karan…”
There was a pause, as if she was trying hard to say what she had in her heart.
“Karan… I know I shouldn’t be doing this. I know how much you hate it when I defy you. I defied you yet again. But this is the last time.”
He shut his eyes for a second, his jaw tightening.
“I am sorry,” she continued. “Sorry for leaving without telling you. Sorry for choosing this path without asking you. But if I stayed, I would only hurt you more. And that is something I can no longer do.”
He moved blindly toward the bed and sat down, holding the phone in his hand, letting her voice and her words sink in.
“After knowing what my father did to you… to your family… I could no longer live under the same roof as your wife without being consumed by guilt. I cannot bear to watch you hate me the way you did, nor can I ignore the pain that surfaces in your eyes every time you look at me.”
Her voice faltered, just slightly.
“You married me for revenge. You never hid that truth from me after that day. And now…You have taken it. You have done what you waited fifteen years to do. Trinity is gone, and even the DG group won’t survive.
The power, the wealth, the pride that we Goels built on stolen blood… it has all come crashing down.”
Karan’s fingers fisted.
“You don’t need me anymore to finish this chapter of your life,” she said softly. “And I don’t want to be the reason you keep bleeding when you should finally begin to heal.”
The room felt unbearably still.
“Your parents… they are watching you, Karan. They are blessing you from wherever they are. And I know they would never want you to live like this. Carrying anger like a second spine. Living with grief and emptiness when you deserve happiness. They would want you to live fully, surrounded by people you love… people who bring you peace.”
She paused again before continuing.
“And I am not one of those people.”
His throat tightened.
“You told me yourself,” she went on, “that every time you see me, you remember what my father did. That I will always be a Goel to you before anything else. I heard you. I understood you. And that is why I found the courage to walk away. That realisation gave me the strength to make this painful decision. To choose a different path for myself. Not because I want to leave, but because I do not want to hurt you any further.”
His eyes burned, but he did not blink.
“I cannot change the past,” she said. “I cannot undo what he did. But I can choose not to become another constant wound in your life. Leaving you is the only way I know how to stop hurting you.”
Karan exhaled hard, his eyes tearing up.
“You will always be in my prayers, Karan. I will pray for your wounds to heal. For you to finally find the peace you were denied for fifteen years. I will pray to God to ease your wounds, to make you the happiest man in the world. You have burned long enough. You deserve peace now.”
His other hand went to his face, wiping the corner of his eyes.
“And you are not alone in finding that peace,” she continued. “The gift I left for you in the temple room… it will remind you of who you were before all this. Before grief changed you. Before revenge became your purpose. It will always remind you how to live again.”
Karan’s breath hitched as his eyes fell on the wrapped parcel lying on the table.
With shaking hands, he opened it.
The moment he saw it, something inside him cracked again. It was an old photo diary. Restored. Carefully preserved. The leather cover looked new, but the soul of it was unmistakably his.
His eyes filled instantly with tears as her voice continued.
“I found this diary in the temple room,” Mishti said. “I’m sorry, I never told you. But the diary… the photographs… they were old, dusty, almost forgotten. I had them restored because I wanted you to have them like this. Untouched by time. Untouched by pain.”
He flipped the pages one by one, which revealed glimpses of his mother, him, and his little family.
Karan’s breath broke.
“These pictures are your life,” Mishti said softly. “The best days of your life. The days you had your family around you. I want you to remember those moments. I want you to live them again… even if only through these pages.”
His fingers trembled as he turned the page.
His toddler form clinging to his mother’s dupatta.
A family photograph, laughter frozen in time.
Him sitting on his father’s shoulders, fearless, happy.
Tears spilt freely now, dropping onto the pages as he stared, unable to stop himself.
“I know even if you chose to restart your life now that your revenge is complete, the past will never fully leave you,” she continued.
“It will always live somewhere in the darkest corner of your heart. But I still pray that one day, love finds you again. That peace chooses you. That happiness stays in your life forever.”
She did not speak of herself.
Not once.
Not her pain. Not her feelings.
Not where she was going.
Not how she would survive.
Not what she felt.
Every word was for him. About him.
And then, finally, she said something that broke him all over again.
“If letting me go helps you heal even a little, then losing me is worth it.”
The final pause she took was longer this time.
“Take care of yourself, Karan. Goodbye.”
The voice message ended, and the silence that followed was unbearable.
Karan lowered the phone slowly, his hands shaking as tears continued to fall. He pressed her mangalsutra to his chest like a lifeline, his shoulders finally giving way as a sob tore out of him.
This time, his tears were not for his past.
Not for his family.
Not even for his mother.
They were for the woman whose voice and words reached the part of his heart he had locked away for fifteen years.
For his wife Mishti!