CHAPTER 20
Three Days Later - Ranawat Estate
The note had been discovered on a Monday morning.
Can't do this anymore. The family pressure, the scrutiny—it's too much. I'm sorry. Don't look for me.
She'd called the number seventeen times before accepting it was dead.
She'd appeared at the estate at seven in the morning, red-eyed and rigid, and had been sitting in Saroj's sitting room ever since.
Nimisha could hear her crying through two closed doors.
She sat at her desk with her laptop open and her manuscript untouched, a cup of tea going cold beside her keyboard, and felt something complicated about the sound of that grief.
She knew what it was to love someone who turned out to be something other than what you believed.
The difference was that Tanisha's version, at least, was over cleanly.
A knock at her door.
"Come in."
It was Samarth. He was already dressed—dark suit, the expression he wore when he'd been managing difficult things before most people had gotten out of bed.
"She's been told," he said.
"I heard."
He crossed to her desk, picked up her cold tea without asking, and went to replace it at the small electric kettle she kept in her study.
She watched him move through her space with the ease he'd developed over the past weeks—like he belonged in it, like the room had made room for him without either of them noticing.
He brought back her tea, properly hot, and set it within reach.
"She's asking to see you," he said.
Nimisha looked up. "Me?"
"She specifically asked for you. Not me. Not Ma." His expression was unreadable but careful. "You."
Nimisha was quiet for a moment.
She thought about the slap. About you seduced him, didn't you. About months of careful cruelty from a girl who'd been so in love she'd chosen blindness over truth.
She thought about what it was to be young and certain and wrong.
"Alright," she said.
Saroj's Sitting Room - 9:47 AM
Tanisha had the look of someone who'd cried until crying stopped working—red-rimmed, hollow, stranded somewhere beyond tears on the other side of them.
She looked up when Nimisha entered.
The guilt on her face was immediate and genuine and painful to witness.
Nimisha sat across from her.
Neither spoke for a moment.
"He left," Tanisha said finally. Her voice was stripped clean of its usual confidence.
"I know."
"Did you know he would?"
Nimisha considered the honest answer to this. "I knew something was wrong with him," she said carefully. "I told your brother. He made sure you were protected."
Tanisha's eyes went to the window. "He was using me to get close to you."
"Yes."
"I said terrible things to you." She looked back at Nimisha. "I hit you."
"Yes."
"I'm—" The word cracked. "I don't know how to—" She pressed her lips together, getting herself under control through visible effort. "I'm sorry. For all of it. The things I said about you. The way I treated you. What I did when I—" She stopped. "I'm sorry."
Nimisha looked at her—this girl who was so much her husband's sister, who had the same stubborn pride and the same capacity to be completely wrong about something and the same difficulty admitting it.
"You were in love," Nimisha said. "And you were frightened that someone was trying to take it from you. That doesn't make what you did right. But I understand it."
"That's very generous considering I—"
"I know what I said." Nimisha picked up her tea. "We don't need to list it."
Tanisha was quiet.
"He never loved me," she said after a while. The words were small. Bewildered. "Did he?"
"I don't think he was capable of it."
"How do you live with that? Finding out someone you—" She stopped. "How?"
Nimisha thought about this carefully.
"You let yourself grieve what you thought you had," she said. "And then you remember that what you thought you had was built on his lies, not your love. Your love was real. He was the problem. Not you."
Tanisha looked at her with something exhausted and young in her expression.
"You're kind," she said, like it surprised her. "You're much kinder than I ever gave you credit for."
"You never really looked," Nimisha replied, not unkindly.
A beat of silence.
"Can we start again?" Tanisha asked. "You and me. Properly."
Nimisha thought about it—genuinely considered it, which felt different from the automatic accommodation she'd practiced for a year.
"Yes," she said. "We can try."
Tanisha exhaled. "Bhai loves you, you know."
Nimisha went still.
"He doesn't—"
"He does." Tanisha's voice was steady now, certain in the way she was always certain when she was sure of something. "I've known him my whole life. I've never seen him the way he is with you. He looks at you like—" She paused. "Like you're the only thing in the room that makes sense."
"He's never—"
"He won't say it yet," Tanisha interrupted. "He's terrible at it. Words are hard for him when they matter. But he shows it, Nimisha. He's been showing it for months and you've both been too scared to acknowledge it."
Nimisha looked at her hands.
Later - Library, 3:15 PM
Kritika found her there, which wasn't unusual. The library had become something of a Switzerland between various family factions—neutral territory where people went when they needed to exist without performing.
"Can I sit?" Kritika asked.
Nimisha gestured to the chair across from her.
Kritika sat with the careful posture of someone who had rehearsed this.
"I owe you an apology," she said. "Several, actually."
"You don't—"
"I do." Kritika's voice was firm. "I made your life harder than it needed to be.
I didn't mean to, or—" She paused, honest with herself.
"I didn't mean to consciously. But I knew what I was doing when I brought his favorite foods.
When I used the nickname in front of you.
When I accepted Saroj aunty's favoritism without pushing back on it.
" She met Nimisha's eyes. "I was in love with him, and I used every advantage I had, and I made sure you felt it. That was cruel."
Nimisha studied the woman across from her.
Kritika Mehra—who had loved Samarth since they were children, who had waited and hoped and watched him marry someone else, who had then done the very human thing of making that someone else feel small.
"Yes," Nimisha said. "It was."
Kritika blinked, apparently expecting a more diplomatic response.
"But I also understand it," Nimisha added. "I'm not particularly interested in being gracious about it, but I understand it."
Kritika laughed—surprised, short. "You're very direct."
"I've been accommodating for a year. I'm trying something different."
"You're good for him," Kritika said, shifting to what she'd clearly come to say. "Samarth. He's different now."
"He's adjusting."
"No." Kritika shook her head. "Don't do that. Don't minimize it." She looked at her hands. "I've loved him for most of my life. I know him—really know him. The way he's been these past weeks? I've never seen it. Not with anyone." She looked up. "He loves you."
The words landed in Nimisha's chest with the force of something she'd been trying not to want.
"He's never—"
"I know he hasn't said it." Kritika's voice was steady.
"He shows it, though. Every day, in every way he knows how.
And he knows he hasn't said it, and it's eating him alive, because he's never had to say it before and he doesn't know if he's allowed to.
" She paused. "He needs you to give him room to say it. He's working up to it."
Nimisha looked at the window, at the garden beyond it.
"And you?" she asked quietly.
"I'm going to be alright," Kritika said, with the firmness of someone who had decided this and meant to hold to it. "I loved a version of him that was never quite real. The real version—" She smiled, small and slightly sad. "—turns out to love someone else. That's not a tragedy. It's just life."
They sat together in the quiet library.
Outside, the Mumbai afternoon went about its business. Inside, something shifted between the two women who had been rivals without quite meaning to be.
Not quite friends yet.
But something that had the shape of a beginning.
That Evening - Master Bedroom, 10:34 PM
Samarth came to bed to find Nimisha already there, propped against the headboard with her manuscript notes spread around her and her reading glasses perched on her nose.
He stopped in the doorway.
She looked up. The glasses made her look—he didn't have a word for it. Soft. Scholarly. Entirely herself.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing." He came in and closed the door.
He changed, brushed his teeth, went through the routine of a man learning to exist in the same space as another person with genuine comfort rather than tolerance.
When he got into bed, she gathered her papers and set them on the nightstand, taking off her glasses.
"Tanisha came to see me this morning," she said.
"I know."
"She apologized."
"I know."
She turned to look at him. "Did you ask her to?"
"No." He met her eyes. "She did it because she wanted to. She's capable of it when she's not blinded by something."
Nimisha was quiet for a moment. "She said something to me. About you."
He waited.
"She said you love me," Nimisha said. "That you're working up to saying it."
The room went very still.
He looked at her—at the careful neutrality on her face that wasn't quite hiding the thing underneath, the hope she was trying to protect herself from feeling.
He'd been planning to say it differently. At a specific moment, with preparation, with the right words arranged in the right order.
But she was looking at him like that, and he was so tired of waiting for the right moment when every moment was already right, was already her.
"She wasn't wrong," he said.
Nimisha's breath caught.
"I love you." The words arrived without the difficulty he'd expected.
Like they'd been waiting at the threshold for so long that when the door finally opened, they simply walked through.
"I've been trying to find the right way to say it, the right moment, and then tonight—" He reached out and tucked her hair back from her face.
"Tonight you're sitting in my bed with reading glasses and manuscript notes and you're looking at me like that, and I realized there isn't a right moment. Every moment is the right moment."
She stared at him.
"Say something," he said.
"I'm—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "You're going to have to give me a moment. I've been waiting a year to hear that."
"I know." He pressed his forehead to hers. "I'm sorry it took this long."
"Don't apologize," she said, her voice breaking slightly. "Just—say it again."
"I love you." No hesitation. Easier the second time. "I love you, Nimisha. I think I have for a long time. I just didn't know what to do about it."
She made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob and then she was in his arms, her face pressed into his neck, her hands fisted in his shirt.
He held her with everything he had.
"I love you," she said against his skin. "I've loved you for so long it stopped feeling like new information."
He pulled back enough to see her face—her eyes bright, her expression open and unguarded and luminous.
He kissed her.
She kissed him back.
And Bruno, across the foot of the bed, exhaled an enormous sigh of profound relief, as if he'd been waiting for this particular development and found the timing somewhat overdue.
They both heard it.
Both laughed.
The laughter cracked something open, and they held each other and laughed in the dark bedroom with the dog sighing at their feet, and it was the most domestic, ordinary, extraordinary moment of either of their lives.
"Finally," Nimisha said, when they'd stopped laughing and settled together. "Boo Berry thinks so too."
"Don't put words in my dog's mouth."
"He's my dog too."
Samarth looked at her, at the ease with which she said it, at the home she'd made in the unlikeliest of places—his bed, his office, his bathroom, his dog's heart, and apparently his own, without either of them quite noticing.
"Yes," he said. "He is."
He turned off the light.
She settled against his chest.
Bruno shifted at their feet, resettling with a groan.
"He's very dramatic," Nimisha murmured.
"He gets it from you."
"He absolutely does not—"
"Sleep, Nimisha."
She smiled against his chest.
He loves me, she thought, feeling the shape of it. He said it. He loves me.
Outside, Mumbai moved through its nighttime rhythms, indifferent and vast.
Inside this room, something that had been broken for a long time had quietly, finally, put itself back together.