PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE
ANAMIKA
I spot it completely by accident.
Yuvaan opens his wallet to pay the man selling chilli fritters, pulling out a few folded notes with the absent ease of someone who's done it a thousand times.
The leather opens just a little wider than he intends, and my gaze catches on what most people would tuck away behind their licence or an old receipt.
Photographs.
It's an idle glance at first. A simple flicker of curiosity about what someone like him keeps in his wallet. Then my feet stop moving. My breath catches somewhere in my throat. On one side is a photograph of me.
Not the woman I am now. Twelve . . . maybe thirteen years old.
I'm sitting cross-legged on the palace ramparts with both hands full of daisies, my head thrown back in laughter.
One of my front teeth is missing, leaving the most ridiculous little gap whenever I smile.
My hair is escaping two uneven braids, and I look . . . happy. Entirely, carelessly happy.
The second photograph steals the rest of the air from my lungs.
It's us.
My eighteenth birthday.
I know that photograph instantly.
He's standing beside me with one arm resting loosely around my shoulders, both of us laughing at something outside the frame. Three days after that photograph was taken, he'd stood with me at the railway station and slipped a silver chain into my hand before I boarded the train.
I've carried that chain with me for seven years.
He's carried this. In his wallet. For seven years.
A place people open every single day without thinking.
My eyes stay fixed on the photographs, and I hear my own voice before I even realise I've spoken.
“Why?” My breath stutters as I stare at the photo longer than needed.
" . . . Why do you have that?" The question comes out quieter than I intend.
Almost afraid. I lift a finger toward the wallet still resting in his hand.
He follows my gaze. For a second, he doesn't understand what I'm looking at. Then he does. I watch the realization spread across his face, slow and unmistakable.
Confusion. Recognition. And then . . . Something very, very close to being caught.
His composure slips for one tiny heartbeat. Only a heartbeat. Anyone else would probably miss it. I don't. I never have. People insist Yuvaan Jadeja is impossible to read.
Cold.
Controlled.
Unreadable.
The council says it. The ministers say it. Half the state believes it. I've never understood why. Even when we were children, I could always tell exactly what he was feeling. He'd insist he wasn't excited about the polo matches while leaning so far forward I worried he'd tumble over the railing.
He'd tell everyone his father's lectures didn't bother him, then quietly disappear to find me afterwards because jalebis somehow made difficult evenings feel survivable.
Even today, watching him laugh over a rigged ring toss, I could still see the little boy who'd learned far too young how to hide every feeling before anyone noticed it. Whatever mask he wears for the rest of the world . . . It has never quite worked on me.
He closes the wallet gently. Not hurriedly. Not like he's trying to hide it now. Just . . . carefully. His fingers rest against the worn leather for a moment before he looks back at me. "Why do you think, Daisy?" His voice is soft enough that I almost don't hear it over the noise around us.
The fair keeps moving. Children run past us.
Someone nearby cheers as a game is won. Music crackles through old speakers.
A Ferris wheel groans somewhere above our heads.
And somehow all of it fades into the background until it's only him standing in front of me, a paper cone of steaming chilli fritters in one hand and that old wallet in the other.
My heart is beating so loudly I'm almost certain he can hear it.
Does this mean . . . Did he . . . All those years .
. . The questions arrive faster than I can sort through them.
While I was stumbling through Mumbai, building a life from whatever scraps I could gather, learning how to survive, convincing myself every single day that he'd forgotten me...
Was he carrying me too? Did he open that wallet every day and see my face?
Did he keep us with him the way I'd kept that silver chain tucked safely away wherever I lived?
My throat feels strangely tight. "Why?" I ask again.
Quieter this time. Because I need him to explain it away.
I almost want him to. Tell me it's nostalgia.
Tell me you forgot to remove them. Tell me you found them recently.
Tell me anything that doesn't make my heart feel like it's trying to escape my chest.
He doesn't. He doesn't look away. Doesn't laugh.
Doesn't soften it into something easier.
He simply looks at me with that same steady gaze I've known since we were children and tells me the truth.
"Because you are . . . " His voice is barely above a whisper.
“ . . . and you have always been . . . my soulmate, Anamika. "
Everything inside me stops. Not dramatically. Not all at once. It simply . . . stills.
Like someone has reached inside my chest and pressed pause on every thought I've ever had.
Soulmate.
No one has ever called me that. Not even in my own imagination. I stare at him, trying to make that one impossible word fit inside everything the last seven years have taught me.
It doesn't fit anywhere.
"I know it's an impractical thing to say," he continues, a small smile touching his mouth, almost apologetic, almost amused by himself.
"Maybe even an old-fashioned thing to believe.
" He shakes his head once. "But I've never been particularly practical where you're concerned.
" The smile reaches my own lips before I can stop it.
He notices. Of course he notices. "You've always been my person, Daisy." His eyes never leave mine. "Long before either of us knew what to call it."
Something cracks open inside me so suddenly it almost hurts.
I think about Mumbai. About tiny rented rooms. About hospital corridors.
About nights when Sara finally fell asleep and I sat alone beside a window, convincing myself over and over again that what I'd felt for him had only been childhood affection.
That everyone falls a little in love with their best friend at fifteen.
That it passes. That he'd surely married someone beautiful and suitable by now.
That princes don't spend years thinking about housekeepers' daughters.
I repeated those things until they sounded true.
Built an entire life around believing them.
And now . . . He's standing in front of me with my missing-tooth smile tucked inside his wallet. Seven years. Seven whole years. Not hidden away in a drawer. Not packed inside an old album. In the place closest to him. The place he carried every single day.
I suddenly remember my own purse. The faded photograph folded carefully inside it. The one I've carried through every rented apartment. Every hospital visit. Every new beginning.
I thought I was foolish. I thought I was the only one.
"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.