VIKRAM'S POV:

The weeks that followed were a desolate landscape. My phone, once buzzing with her texts, was a tombstone in my pocket. The silence in my life was a physical presence, thick and suffocating. I had not just lost Arohi; I had amputated a part of my own soul. My father's disappointment was a cold shroud over the house, his greetings curt, his eyes avoiding mine.

Two months later, I stood at the periphery of Vinay's wedding, a ghost at the feast. I had received an invitation—a formality extended to my family, not to me, Vikram, the best friend. The music was too loud, the laughter too bright. And then I saw her.

Arohi stood near the mandap, draped in a silk half-saree the color of sunset. She was breathtaking, a portrait of grace, but the portrait was faded. The incandescent joy that used to light her from within was gone. Her smile, as she performed the rituals for Vinay, was a careful, practiced curve of her lips that never reached her eyes. Our gazes collided across the crowded room—a fleeting, electric moment of shared history. I saw the shock in her eyes, and then, a shutter came down. She looked away, and for the rest of the evening, I was invisible to her.

When I approached the stage with my father to bless the newlyweds, she exchanged polite, distant pleasantries with him.
"Hello,Uncle. I hope you are keeping well."
Her voice was the same,yet it wasn't. It was polished marble, smooth and cold. She didn't look at me once before melting back into the crowd. The dismissal was more painful than any scream.

My relationship with Nisha, already a fragile glass figurine, shattered completely in the wake of the wedding. Her demands grew more brazen, her presence a constant reminder of my folly. The realization dawned on me, cold and clear: I was not a partner; I was a patron. An ATM funding her and her family's lavish ambitions. The love I thought I felt was nothing but the echo of my own loneliness.

The universe, it seemed, had a brutal, final lesson in store for me. Driving home from a late meeting, rain slicking the roads, my car spun into a violent ballet of screeching metal and shattering glass. The world went black.

I swam back to consciousness through a thick, murky fog. The first thing I registered was a sterile, antiseptic smell. The second was a warmth on my hand. I forced my eyes open, the light stinging like needles.

And I saw her.

Arohi. Her head was resting on the side of my hospital bed, her hair spilling over the white sheets, her hand covering mine. For a heart-stopping second, I thought I was dreaming, or dead, and this was my heaven. Then, she stirred, lifting her head. Her eyes, those beautiful, wounded eyes, met mine. There was no smile, no tears of relief. Just a deep, profound exhaustion, and a resolve that felt ancient.

"You're awake," she said, her voice hoarse from lack of sleep. "The doctor is outside. I'll get him."

And just like that, she slipped away, re-establishing the distance I had craved for so long and now dreaded.

The doctors were blunt. The accident had left me broken. A coma for two months. The prognosis: I might never walk again. The fight to reclaim my body was a grueling, humiliating marathon. But through it all, Arohi was my constant, my anchor. She had resigned from her hospital, my father told me with a tremor in his voice, to dedicate herself fully to my recovery.

She was there for every painful, excruciating moment. When I was too weak to lift a spoon, she fed me with a patience that felt saintly. When I cursed my helplessness, she would simply wipe my brow with a cool cloth, her silence more powerful than any lecture. She managed my physiotherapy with the precision of a general, her voice firm yet gentle, pushing me past limits I thought were absolute.

Yet, she never spoke of the past. She never asked for anything. She was a ghost of the bubbly girl I knew, her laughter now a rare, fleeting sound that vanished before it could truly bloom. She slept on a small, uncomfortable sofa in my room, a silent sentinel guarding a man who had once struck her.

"Where is Radhika Aunty?" I asked one day, the question that had been gnawing at me. "Why hasn't she come?"

Arohi's back was to me as she arranged my medicines. I saw her shoulders stiffen for a fraction of a second. "She's... traveling," she said, her voice carefully neutral. "She needed a long break."

It was a lie. I could feel it in the air. But the wall around her was impenetrable.

It took a year. A year of Arohi's unwavering, silent devotion. A year of watching Nisha's name flash on my phone, then go silent forever after the doctors gave their grim prognosis. A year of realizing that the woman I had pushed away was the only one who stayed, while the one I had chosen had vanished at the first sign of storm.

And in that year, my heart, once blind, finally learned to see. The love I had dismissed as a childish infatuation was the real, enduring, selfless thing. It was a love that asked for nothing and gave everything.

The day the doctors declared me fully recovered, I felt a new kind of terror. Arohi had accomplished her mission. What reason did she have to stay?