A month.

Thirty-two days, actually — not that I'm counting. Okay, maybe I am. A little.

A month since Veer slid that ring onto my finger in front of our family while I was so nervous I kept my eyes fixed on his collar button instead of his face. He noticed. He dipped his head until he was in my line of sight and gave me that quiet, private smile — the one that isn't for anyone else — and said, very softly, "It's just me."

As if that was supposed to calm me down. As if he was the uncomplicated part.

Though, if I’m being completely honest, "uncomplicated" is the last word I’d use for Veer Singhania lately. Ever since that night on the beach—ever since that kiss—a switch has flipped inside him. The fierce, untouchable, broody man has turned into something I never, in a million years, anticipated.

He is clingy.

There is no other word for it. It is entirely shameless and utterly ridiculous. If we are in the same room, he has to be touching me. His hand resting casually on the small of my back while I’m trying to read, his fingers brushing against mine under the dinner table, or his chin dropping onto my shoulder from behind while I’m just trying to make tea. Last night, I literally had to push his face away because he was tracking my movements around the living room like a giant, dark-eyed shadow.

“Veer, go sit down, you’re suffocating me,” I’d muttered, trying to hide my burning cheeks.

He hadn’t even blinked. He just pulled me a little closer by the waist, that slow, knowing smirk touching his lips, and murmured, “No. I don’t think I will.”

It’s infuriating. It’s dizzying. It’s the way he completely consumes my space, making it impossible to brace myself against him because he’s just there, filling up every single corner of my life.

Maa calls every other day. She's subtle about it in the way that mothers are never actually subtle — she asks about the weather, whether I'm sleeping properly, how the dance studio is going — and then, eventually, inevitably: "And how are things with Veer?" Her voice does this tiny hopeful lift on his name that I pretend not to notice.

"Good, Maa."

"Just good?"

"Very good."

"Inayat—"

"Maa."

She laughs. It sounds like home. "Fine, fine. I won't ask."

She always asks.

Papa is quieter about it — he mostly wants to know if I'm eating well and whether Veer is treating me with respect, two questions which, in his vocabulary, mean the same thing. Dadu, on the other hand, has absolutely no subtlety and does not pretend otherwise.

"Wedding date," he said the last time he called, before he'd even finished saying hello. "Give me something. Anything. I am an old man."

"Dadu, you run four kilometers every morning."

"That is beside the point! Inayat, I want to see my granddaughter married before I—"

"Don't finish that sentence."

He huffed. "Just a date. A season. Do you like winter weddings? Your grandmother and I had a winter wedding."

"I know, Dadu, you've told me seventeen times."

"Then you know it was perfect. Winter wedding. Think about it."

I think about it sometimes. More than I expected to.

Before heading home today, I spend my morning at the dance studio. If there is one place where the chaos in my head completely untangles, it’s here. The studio smells of polished wood and jasmine incense, the floor-to-ceiling mirrors reflecting the bright morning light.

Today is my advanced Kathak batch. The girls are already stretching when I walk in, their heavy brass ghungroos chiming softly with every movement.

"Alright, everyone, positions," I call out, clapping my hands to gather them.

As the music starts—the sharp, rhythmic thumping of the tabla filling the room—I let myself slide into the rhythm. Ta-thei-thei-tat. I guide them through a complex chakkaars (turns) sequence, my own feet moving with a precision that feels entirely instinctual. Dance doesn't ask me to remember my past; it only asks me to feel the present.

"Keep your posture elegant, Sarah. Focus your gaze," I instruct, moving through the lines of girls, adjusting a wrist here, a shoulder angle there.

When the final tihai lands, we all finish in a sharp, breathless stance, the sudden silence in the room heavy and triumphant. The girls break into grins, wiping sweat from their foreheads. Teaching them, watching them lose themselves in the art the same way I do, brings a completely different kind of peace to my chest. It makes me feel whole.

Neha moved to Bangalore three weeks ago for a big modeling assignment — she called me from the airport gate, eating an overpriced sandwich and talking at full speed about the shoot concept, the team, the absolute disaster of her checked luggage getting flagged. I could hear how excited she was underneath the complaints. I told her she was going to be brilliant. She told me to stop being sentimental and then got emotional and had to hang up.

Aisha I see on Saturday evenings mostly, when her hospital schedule doesn't eat her alive. We sit with chai that goes cold while we talk too much, and she asks me careful questions about Veer with the particular attention of someone who is watching to make sure I'm actually okay, not just performing okay. Last week she finally relaxed her shoulders about it. I noticed.

"You look different," she said.

"Different how?"

She considered me for a moment, her chai cup halfway to her mouth. "Softer. Like you're not braced anymore."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I stole a biscuit from her plate and changed the subject. But I thought about it on the drive home. Not braced anymore.

Is that what this is?

Veer brings flowers.

This is a fact I am still getting used to. Not roses, usually — he pays attention, which is somehow more disarming than grand gestures.

Sunflowers because I mentioned once, offhandedly, that they're the most optimistic flower. Jasmine on the evenings he comes home late, because he knows the smell settles something in me.

Last Tuesday, a single branch of something I didn't recognize with tiny white blooms, which he set in a glass on the kitchen counter and said, "The woman at the stall said it smells good at night."

"What is it?"

"I have no idea. She wrote the name down." He fished a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. "Raat ki rani."

I looked at him. Queen of the night. He'd bought me a queen of the night because a flower stall lady told him it smelled good. He didn't even know what it was. He just bought it.

"Veer."

"What?"

"Nothing." I put the branch in water. "Thank you."

He made a small dismissive sound like it was nothing, like he hadn't just quietly leveled me, and went to change out of his work clothes.

I stood in the kitchen for a moment with my hands around the glass, looking at the little white blooms.

Not braced anymore.

Sundays are ours. We've made it a kind of unspoken rule — no work, no laptops, no answering emails after breakfast.

Sometimes we take his bike out past the city limits where the roads open up and the noise drops away, and I hold on and let the speed do whatever it wants to my heartbeat because I trust his hands. Last Sunday we found a dhaba on the side of a highway we'd never been on before and ate dal and rotis on plastic chairs while trucks groaned past and it was — perfect. Stupidly, simply perfect.

He insists I leave the deep cleaning to Maya Aunty, who comes every Saturday with the focused energy of someone on a personal mission.

I argued with him about this for approximately three days. He listened carefully to every argument and then said, very reasonably, "I know you can do it yourself. I'm asking you not to." Which was, I have to admit, an infuriatingly good answer.

Thirty-two days.

I am, for the first time in a long time, not waiting for the other shoe to drop. I am just — here. In this life. This warm, flower-scented, bike-ride, Sunday-dhaba life.

It's 1 pm and I'm on the couch scrolling through Netflix with the particular listlessness of someone who doesn't actually want to watch anything — I want to do something.

My hands are restless and I have this sudden, ridiculous impulse.

I want to cook. Not just for me. For them.

I find myself in the kitchen before I've finished deciding, pulling out the basmati rice, the whole spices, the yogurt.

There's a biryani recipe Maa walked me through on video call two weeks ago that I've been meaning to try, and this feels like the right afternoon for it. Rotis too. And raita — the proper kind, with boondi and jeera, not the rushed kind.

I put on a playlist and get to work.

The ghee goes into the pan and the whole spices hit it and the smell — God, the smell — is so good it's almost violent, all warm and dark and sweet. I fry the onions until they're the color of caramel and fold in the marinated chicken and let it do what it needs to do.

The rotis puff up beautifully on the tawa, one after another, and I brush ghee on each one like I'm being paid to, which is to say, generously. The biryani goes on dum, sealed with foil, doing its quiet, aromatic work.

Veer's going to make that face, I think — the one where he tries to seem normal about food and fails completely because his eyes go soft.

Mahir Bhai's going to tease me about who I made it for. Papa's going to eat two helpings without saying much and that will be the whole compliment.

Thirty-two days and I've turned into someone who grins at pots of biryani.

I pack three tiffin boxes — careful, neat — and change into the white Anarkali. I don't plan it; it's just what my hands reach for.

The anklets go on last, the ones from the date two weeks ago when we walked along the sea face until it got dark and he bought them from a roadside stall and crouched down on the pavement to put them on my feet himself, very seriously, like it was a formal transaction.

The boxes are warm in my hands. The anklets jingle. I think: this is a good afternoon.

Kritika lights up when she sees me. "Inayat Ma'am! You've come today?"

"Surprise visit," I say, holding up the tiffin carrier. "I made biryani."

Her eyes go wide. "Ma'am, you'll be everyone's favorite person on this floor."

"I already am," I say, and she laughs, still blushing as I head to the lift.

Mahir Bhai's secretary Vinayak greets me at the 7th floor desk with genuine warmth — he always does — and points me to the last cabin on the left.

I knock. Bhai's voice: "Come in."

He looks up from his desk, sees me, and his whole face changes — that particular Singhania smile that crinkles at the corners.

"Inu! What are you doing here?" He's already getting up, coming around the desk to hug me. "Surprise lunch." I set the tiffin carrier on the coffee table. "Biryani. Rotis. Raita."

He pulls back and looks at me like I've said something extraordinary. "You made all of this?"

"Don't sound so shocked."

"I'm not shocked, I'm delighted, there's a difference." He sits on the couch and opens the tiffin with the reverence of a man who takes food seriously. The smell hits the room. He actually closes his eyes for a second.

"Bhai—"

"Give me a moment." He takes a bite. Chews slowly. Opens his eyes. "Inu. Where did you learn?"

"Recipe from my maa. And a lot of YouTube."

He shakes his head like this is remarkable. "Papa is going to love this. You know he talks about your cooking? He told me last week that you made that dum aloo and he thought about it for three days afterward."

I feel warmth climb up my neck. "He never tells me that."

"He's a Singhania man. We show it, we don't say it." He grins. "Mostly. Veer's better at saying it than the rest of us were."

I look down at the tiffin boxes in my hand. "I have one for him too."

"Then go." He waves me away, already going back to the biryani. "Before it gets cold. And Inu—" I turn. He's smiling at me, properly, no tease in it. "He's lucky. I hope he tells you that."

I don't answer that. But I'm smiling when I leave.

Neel Bhai on the 15th floor tells me Papa is on his rounds, takes the tiffin with both hands and a promise to keep it safe.

Veer's cabin is at the far end.

The floor is quiet — the particular hush of a lunch hour, chairs empty, screens sleeping. My anklets fill the silence, that soft, familiar jingle I've stopped noticing except in moments like this when it's the only sound.

His door.

I don't knock. I don't knock anymore because three weeks ago, when I hesitated outside this very door with a file he'd forgotten at home, he opened it before I could and said, "You don't have to knock. This isn't somewhere you're a guest."

I push it open and The first thing I see is the hand.

A woman's hand on his chest — fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, knuckles white with some private urgency. And Veer's hand — his hand — over hers.

The tiffin boxes hit the floor.

I don't feel myself let go of them. One second they're in my hands, warm and solid and full of everything I spent the afternoon building, and then they're on the floor and the sound is cracking through the silence like a slap and they're both turning toward me —

And I see her face.

The world does something strange and slow.

Mia... Mia Batra

She looks exactly the same. That's the thing that gets me first — she looks exactly the same, same sharp jaw, same way of holding herself like she's always slightly above whatever room she's in.

And her eyes move over me with that expression I remember from a hallway three years ago, something between satisfaction and pity, and something in my chest that I thought was long dead — isn't.

Rose Day. His graduation day.

I'd been carrying that white rose since morning. A single white rose from the florist near the campus gate, carefully chosen — I'd stood in front of the buckets for almost ten minutes, red feels too much, yellow feels wrong, white feels honest. I wanted to be honest. I removed the thorns myself, standing in the bathroom of my dorm with nail scissors, working slowly, because I had this thought — what if he takes it and the thorns cut his hand? What if the first thing this feeling does is hurt him?

So I removed them. Every single one.

I saw him crossing toward the parking lot and I followed. My heart was doing something embarrassing. I had a speech rehearsed, three different versions, and I'd settled on the shortest one: I think I've liked you for a while. I wanted to say it before I lost the nerve. Simple. Clean. Honest.

I turned the corner into the parking lot.

Mia had her hands in his hair. He had his hands on her waist. The afternoon light was very bright and very ordinary and absolutely indifferent to the fact that my chest was collapsing in on itself.

Three seconds. I counted them.

Then I turned around and walked away, very fast, because the alternative was standing there until one of them noticed me and I would rather have dissolved into the floor.

She caught up with me at the corner.

I don't know why I stopped. Some stupid reflex. Some leftover hope that she was going to say wait, it's not— something. Anything.

She didn't.

"You really thought you had a chance?" Not cruel. Worse than cruel — amused. Like I was a sweet, confused child who'd wandered somewhere she didn't belong. "Veer will never be yours. He belongs to me."

I didn't say anything. I was still holding the rose.

I threw it away in the first bin I passed. I went back to my dorm and sat on the floor of my shower for twenty minutes and told myself it was fine, it was a crush, these things happen, I would be fine.

I was fine.

I was fine for three years.

And then Veer came back into my life and looked at me like no time had passed at all, and slowly, against every reasonable instinct I had, I let myself believe that maybe the story wasn't over. That maybe we were just — late.

"Inayat."

His voice. Real and present and from very far away.

I look at him. I look at her. She's watching me with those same eyes — older, maybe, but the expression is the same, that I told you so settled into her face like she'd been waiting for this exact moment.

And maybe she has been. And maybe I should have known.

"Inayat—" Veer's chair scrapes back. He's standing. "This isn't — wait—"

But something has broken loose inside me, some dam I didn't know was holding back three years of carefully managed hope, and I can't be in this room. I can't stand here and listen to an explanation while she's still standing there looking at me like that.

I turn. I run.

Down the hallway, into the stairwell — I can't wait for the lift, I can't stand still, I take the stairs two at a time and come out into the lobby half-breathless and Papa is there, just stepping through the door from his rounds, and he sees my face and his own goes very still.

"Inayat—"

"Sorry, Papa." My voice sounds strange. Far away. "Sorry, I—"

I go past him.

Out the glass doors and into the grey afternoon where it's started to rain—that sudden, violent Mumbai rain that doesn't warn you, that just decides and arrives. It soaks through my white Anarkali in seconds, the heavy fabric clinging to my skin like a shroud, but I barely feel the cold. Inside my chest, everything is burning.

My anklets are ringing frantically against the wet pavement.

I keep running.

I don't have a destination. I just have the motion — the desperate, mindless forward momentum that makes it temporarily impossible to think about anything except the next step and the next. Because if I stop moving, the image of Mia’s hand curled into his shirt will catch up to me. If I stop, I’ll have to face the agonizing reality that the last thirty-two days were nothing but a beautifully crafted illusion.

“Still not scared?” he had whispered to me on the beach. And like a fool, I had believed him. I had let my guard down. I had spent the last month secretly loving how he wouldn't let me go, how he filled every room, how he was always there. I had mistaken his possessiveness for safety.

The tiffin boxes are still on his office floor. The biryani is getting cold. The rotis I pressed one by one on the tawa this afternoon, wondering if his eyes would go soft when he tasted them... it all feels like a joke now. The raita with its careful little boondi pearls, the raat ki rani still sitting peacefully in its glass on our kitchen counter at home—it was all a monument to a trust that never actually belonged to me.

He asked me to trust him.

And I did. I built that trust like you build a house — slowly, brick by brick, checking the foundation twice because I was so terrified of a collapse. I didn't rush it. I was so careful. I opened every locked door in my heart that he asked me to. I didn't let myself sprint ahead, I held back, I protected myself until he made it impossible to stay away. I gave him the pieces of a mind I didn't even fully understand yet, and he—

He let her touch him. He let her hold him exactly where I had just held him.

The betrayal is a physical weight in my lungs, cutting off my air until I’m gasping, my vision blurring from a mixture of the pouring rain and the hot, angry tears finally spilling over my eyelashes. I step off the curb, my foot slipping on the slick asphalt, my mind spinning so fast I can barely see the street in front of me.

A horn. Sharp. Blaring. Close. Very close.

The sound slices through the roar of the rain, violently snapping me out of the spiral.

I turn my head.

White light, blindingly bright, very sudden. For a fraction of a second, the heavy downpour freezes in the glare of the high beams, suspended in the air like shattered glass.

And then — nothing.

The rain. The pavement. The anklets, still.

A silence so complete it sounds like an ending.