సిరునవ్వు లాగా

You grab your phone, your emergency kit from the trunk — thank god for your mother’s paranoia — and run toward the smoking vehicle. The smell hits you first: gasoline, burnt rubber, something metallic that might be blood.

“Hello?” Your voice comes out steadier than you feel. “Can anyone hear me?”

A groan from the driver’s side. You circle around, your boots crunching on broken glass and scattered debris. The driver’s door hangs open at an odd angle. A man in his fifties sits slumped against the steering wheel, a gash above his eyebrow bleeding sluggishly.

“Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”

His eyes flutter open. Blue eyes. Dazed but focusing. “I—what happened? Where’s-” His head jerks toward the passenger side, and pure terror floods his face. “Beau! BEAU!”

He tries to unbuckle his seatbelt, but you put a hand on his shoulder. “Sir, please don’t move. You might be injured-”

“My son!” He shoves your hand away, stronger than he looks. “My son is in the passenger seat!”

Ice floods your veins. You circle to the other side of the vehicle, and that’s when you see him.

The passenger door is crumpled inward, the metal twisted like paper. The window is completely gone. And in the seat, surrounded by a spider web of cracks in what’s left of the windshield, is a young man about your age.

There’s so much blood.

“Oh god,” you whisper. Then louder, forcing yourself into action: “I’m calling 911 right now!”

Your fingers shake as you dial, but your voice comes out clear when the operator answers.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Motor vehicle collision, Route 2 westbound, approximately two miles past the Lexington exit. Two victims. Driver appears stable with minor head trauma, but passenger has severe injuries-” You’re moving as you talk, assessing with your eyes what you can’t yet touch. “Possible cervical spine injury, significant hemorrhaging from upper extremity, penetrating chest trauma. We need paramedics and ALS immediately.”

“Ma’am, are you a medical professional?”

“Second-year medical student. I have BLS and Stop the Bleed certification.”

“Paramedics are en route. ETA eight minutes. Can you provide care until they arrive?”

“Yes.” You set the phone down, speaker on, and force yourself to breathe. Eight minutes. You can do eight minutes.

You turn back to the passenger. The father is now standing beside you, swaying slightly.

“Sir, I need you to sit down-”

“That’s my son.” His voice breaks. “Please, you have to help him. Please.”

“I will. But I need you to sit down before you fall down. Can you do that for me?”

He nods shakily and lowers himself to the ground, never taking his eyes off his son.

You lean into the destroyed passenger compartment, and your medical training wars with your human instinct to panic. The young man — Beau, his father called him — is unconscious. His head lolls at an angle that makes your stomach drop. Not a natural angle. Not even close.

“Okay,” you mutter to yourself. “Okay, think. C-spine precautions. Don’t move him unless he’s in immediate danger.”

But he is in immediate danger. You can see it in the way his neck bends, the way his head threatens to fall further forward. If his cervical spine isn’t already severed, any more movement could do it.

You look around frantically. The car is stable. No fire. But you need to stabilize his neck now.

Your emergency kit. You dump it on the ground, hands moving fast, grabbing the rolled-up fleece blanket your mom insisted you carry. You carefully roll it into a tight cylinder and maneuver it around Beau’s neck, trying to provide support without moving him any more than absolutely necessary.

“Talk to me,” you call to the father. “What’s his name? Full name?”

“Beau. Beau Maxwell.” The man’s voice is thin with shock. “He’s twenty-two. He’s healthy, no medical conditions, no allergies. He’s—god, he’s the quarterback. He has a game next week. He has-”

“Okay, Mr. Maxwell, that’s good, that’s helpful.” You’re assessing as he talks. The makeshift cervical collar is in place. Now the bleeding. “I need you to keep talking to me. Tell me what happened.”

“A deer. There was a deer in the road, and I swerved, and-” His voice cracks again. “I felt the ice. I felt us sliding. I couldn’t stop it.”

You’re barely listening now, all your attention on Beau’s arm. There’s a shard of glass — thick, wickedly sharp — embedded in his right bicep. Blood pulses around it in rhythmic spurts. Arterial. Brachial artery, most likely.

“Fuck,” you breathe. “Dispatch, update — patient has arterial hemorrhage from upper extremity. I’m applying a tourniquet now.”

Your coat. You’re already shaking from the cold, but you strip off your heavy winter coat without hesitation. You need fabric, need pressure, need to stop the bleeding before he loses any more blood.

The glass shard is still embedded. Leave it or take it out? You run through your training in microseconds. In the field, with no surgical backup, no way to clamp the artery — leave it. But you need pressure above and below.

You wrap your coat around his upper arm, using the sleeves to tie it as tight as you can manage. Your fingers are already going numb, but you pull harder, watching the rhythmic spurting slow to a steady seep. Not perfect, but better.

You’re about to check his other injuries when you see it: a thick branch, maybe three inches in diameter, has punched through the windshield and embedded itself in Beau’s chest. Just left of center. Through the sternum, or maybe just missing it. Either way, it’s deep.

Your hands hover over it, trembling. Every instinct screams at you to pull it out, but you know that branch is the only thing preventing him from bleeding out right now. If it’s hit any major vessels, removing it without a surgical team standing by would kill him.

“Please,” Mr. Maxwell says from behind you. “Please tell me he’s going to be okay.”

You don’t answer. You can’t. Instead, you lean back slightly, taking in Beau’s face for the first time.

Even like this — pale, covered in blood, unconscious — he’s striking. Dark hair matted against his forehead, strong jaw, features that would be more at home on a movie screen than a car wreck. There’s a cut above his eyebrow, minor compared to everything else, and his lips are slightly parted, each breath shallow and labored.

You find yourself reaching out, your fingers — cold and blood-stained — brushing against his cheek.

“Hey,” you whisper. “Beau. I know you can’t hear me, but I need you to hold on, okay? Help is coming. Just hold on.”

His skin is cooling rapidly in the February air. You grab the emergency blanket from your kit with your free hand and drape it over as much of him as you can without disturbing the branch or the makeshift collar.

“Six minutes out,” the dispatcher says through your phone speaker.

Six minutes. Six minutes for his brain to be without adequate oxygen if his breathing gets any worse. Six minutes for that branch to shift. Six minutes for his neck to-

No. You push the thoughts away.

“Mr. Maxwell, is anyone else hurt? Was anyone else in the car?”

“No. Just us. We were coming back from dinner. In the city. His grandmother’s birthday.” The man is crying now, quietly. “I told him I’d drive so he could relax. Have a few drinks. I told him-”

“This wasn’t your fault,” you say firmly. “The deer, the ice — this wasn’t your fault.”

You check Beau’s pulse again. Thready. Too fast. Shock, almost certainly. Blood loss, head trauma, possible internal injuries — the list spirals in your mind.

“His pupils,” Mr. Maxwell says suddenly. “Shouldn’t you check his pupils?”

You should. You know you should. But part of you is terrified of what you’ll find. Unequal pupils would mean increased intracranial pressure, brain herniation, things you cannot fix on the side of a dark highway.

Still, you pull out your phone flashlight and gently lift one of Beau’s eyelids.

Blue. His eyes are the same startling blue as his father’s, even closed like this. You shine the light across. The pupil constricts. Sluggish, but it constricts. You check the other side. The same.

“Equal and reactive,” you report to dispatch, relief flooding through you. “Sluggish but responsive.”

“Paramedics are three minutes out,” the dispatcher responds.

Three minutes. You can see lights in the distance now, hear the wail of sirens cutting through the night.

You check the tourniquet again — still holding. Check his breathing — still shallow but present. Your hand finds its way back to his face, and you realize you’re talking to him, a steady stream of words you’ll never remember later.

“They’re almost here. You’re doing great. Just keep breathing, okay? Keep breathing.”

Behind you, Mr. Maxwell is on his own phone now, his voice breaking as he talks to someone. His wife, probably. Telling her something no parent should ever have to say.

The ambulance screams to a stop, and suddenly there are people everywhere. Paramedics in dark blue, moving with practiced efficiency.

“We’ve got him, ma’am. We’ve got him.”

But you don’t move. Not until one of them — a woman with kind eyes and gray-streaked hair — gently touches your shoulder.

“You did good,” she says. “Really good. But we need you to step back now so we can work.”

You stumble backward, and Mr. Maxwell is there, catching your elbow.

“What do we have?” the lead paramedic asks.

Your voice comes out steadier than you feel. “Twenty-two-year-old male, restrained passenger in head-on collision with tree. Patient found unconscious, significant cervical spine angulation — I’ve placed a soft collar for support. Penetrating trauma to chest, large foreign object still in situ. Arterial hemorrhage from right upper extremity, tourniquet applied. Pupils equal and reactive but sluggish. Respirations shallow, approximately 20 per minute. Pulse thready at approximately 120. Obvious signs of shock.”

The paramedic’s eyebrows raise slightly. “You a doctor?”

“Med student. Second year.”

“Well, med student, you probably saved his life.” She’s already moving, her team swarming around Beau with practiced precision. C-collar. Backboard. IV access. They work with a choreography born of countless traumas.

You watch as they carefully extract him from the vehicle, maintaining spinal precautions, keeping the branch stable. Watch as they load him onto the stretcher. Watch as they cut away his blood-soaked shirt, revealing more of the damage underneath.

“We’re taking him to Mass General,” one of the paramedics calls out. “Trauma one.”

“I’m riding with him,” Mr. Maxwell says, but he’s swaying again, and now that the adrenaline is fading, you can see he’s not as okay as he first appeared.

“Sir, you need to be evaluated too,” another paramedic says, approaching with a second gurney. “We’ll take you both.”

“But-”

“We’ve got him, sir. We’ve got your son.”

You watch as they load Mr. Maxwell into a second ambulance. Watch as both vehicles pull away, sirens wailing, lights painting the dark road in red and blue.

Then it’s just you, standing on the side of Route 2 in just your scrubs and thin long-sleeve shirt, shivering violently as the adrenaline finally crashes. A police officer is talking to you — when did the police arrive? — asking questions you answer automatically.

Your coat is gone. Still wrapped around Beau Maxwell’s arm, probably being cut off by the trauma team right now. Your emergency kit is scattered across the asphalt. Your hands are stained rusty brown with blood.

“Miss?” The officer touches your shoulder. “Miss, are you okay? Do you need medical attention?”

“I’m fine,” you hear yourself say. “I’m fine.”

But you’re not fine. You’re shaking so hard your teeth chatter. Your mind keeps replaying the angle of Beau’s neck, the branch in his chest, the feel of his cooling skin under your fingers.

The officer wraps a shock blanket around your shoulders and guides you to sit in your car, heater blasting. He’s still asking questions — your name, your address, what you saw. You answer them all, but part of you is still on that roadside, watching Beau’s chest rise and fall in shallow, struggling breaths.

“You’re a hero, you know,” the officer says after he’s finished taking your statement. “That young man — you probably saved his life.”

You nod numbly. All you can think is but what if it wasn’t enough?

The officer helps you collect your scattered supplies, guides you through the process of leaving the scene. Your car is fine. You’re fine. Everything is fine.

Except it’s not.

As you drive home, your hands won’t stop shaking on the wheel. You keep seeing Beau’s face, keep feeling the cold of his skin, keep hearing Mr. Maxwell’s broken voice. That’s my son. Please, you have to help him.

You make it to your apartment building, into your unit, into your bathroom before you finally break down. You sit on the cold tile floor, still in your blood-stained scrubs, and sob.

Because you’ve spent two years studying medicine, learning about trauma and emergency care, practicing on mannequins and in simulations. But nothing prepared you for the reality of holding someone’s life in your hands while their blood soaks into your coat and their father begs you to save them.

Nothing prepared you for looking into the face of a dying stranger and desperately, irrationally, needing him to survive.

You cry until you have no tears left, until the shaking finally subsides, until you can breathe without feeling like your chest is caving in. You peel off your ruined scrubs, scrub the blood from your hands, and sit on your couch in the dark.

Then you pull up Google on your phone, your hands steadier now, and type in a name. Beau Maxwell.

The results flood your screen. Articles about football, highlight reels, statistics. Briar University’s star quarterback. Twenty-two years old. Junior year. Dark hair, blue eyes, a smile that could sell toothpaste. Projected first-round NFL draft pick.

You scroll through image after image of him — in uniform, in interviews, at press conferences. Healthy. Whole. So full of life it seems impossible that just an hour ago you were watching him bleed out on a dark highway.

You close your phone and lean your head back against the couch, staring at your ceiling in the darkness.

“Please,” you whisper to no one, to everyone, to whatever forces govern life and death. “Please let him be okay.”

Outside your window, Boston sleeps on, unaware. Somewhere across the city, in Mass General’s trauma bay, a team of surgeons fights to save the life of a quarterback you’ve never met but will never forget.

All you can do is wait.

And hope.

And pray that your desperate, fumbling first aid was enough to give him a chance.

***

The weight room smells like sweat and rubber, the familiar clang of metal on metal providing a rhythm Dean has known since he was twelve. It’s barely seven in the morning, but he’s already on his third set of deadlifts, Garrett spotting him while Logan and Tucker argue about last night’s game on the bench press across the room.

“I’m just saying,” Tucker calls over, “if you’d passed to me in the third period instead of trying to be a hero-”

“If I’d passed to you, you would’ve whiffed it like you did in the second,” Logan fires back.

“Fuck off, I was screened-”

“You were too busy checking out that blonde in the third row-”

Dean tunes them out, focusing on his form. Up. Hold. Down. Controlled. His phone sits on the bench beside his water bottle, face down. It buzzes once — probably his mom checking if he’s coming home this weekend — but he ignores it.

He’s pulling the bar up for his fourth rep when the phone starts ringing. Properly ringing, not just buzzing. The specific ringtone that means it’s someone from his favorites list.

“Dude, your phone,” Garrett says.

Dean sets the bar down carefully and picks up the phone, expecting to see his mom’s contact photo. Instead, it’s Coach Jensen.

At seven in the morning.

On a Saturday.

“That’s weird,” Dean mutters, answering. “Coach? Everything okay?”

There’s a pause. Too long. Dean’s stomach does something uncomfortable.

“Di Laurentis.” Coach Jensen’s voice is careful in a way Dean has never heard before. Careful like he’s handling glass. “Where are you right now?”

“Weight room. With the guys. What’s going on?”

Another pause. Dean can hear something in the background — voices, maybe a TV.

“Is Garrett there? Logan? Tucker?”

“Yeah, they’re all here. Coach, what-”

“I need you to sit down, son.”

The weight room goes very quiet. Dean realizes his teammates have stopped talking and are now watching him. He doesn’t sit down.

“What happened?”

Coach Jensen takes a breath. Dean can hear it through the phone. “I got a call this morning from Coach Deluca. He called because he knows a lot of our guys are friends with players on his team.”

Dean’s hand tightens on the phone. “Okay?”

“It’s about Beau Maxwell.”

The world tilts slightly. “What about him?”

“There was an accident last night. A car accident. Dean, he’s-” Coach Jensen’s voice catches. “He’s in critical condition at Mass General. His father was driving them back from dinner in the city, and they hit ice, crashed into a tree. His dad’s okay, but Beau-”

Dean doesn’t hear the rest. The phone slips from his hand, clattering against the concrete floor. The sound echoes, distant and wrong, like it’s coming from underwater.

Beau.

Critical condition.

The words don’t make sense. They can’t make sense. Because Dean just saw Beau yesterday. They grabbed lunch between classes, argued about whether the Packers or the Patriots were going to make it to the playoffs, made plans to hit up a party tonight. Beau was fine. Beau was fine.

“Dean?” Garrett’s hand is on his shoulder. “Dean, what’s wrong?”

Dean opens his mouth but nothing comes out. His knees feel strange, like they might not hold him. The weight room spins slightly, or maybe he’s spinning, he can’t tell.

“Shit, he’s going down-” That’s Logan, suddenly on his other side, propping him up.

Tucker grabs the phone from the floor. Dean watches him lift it to his ear, watches his face go pale as he listens to whatever Coach Jensen is saying.

“Oh fuck,” Tucker whispers. “Oh fuck, oh fuck-”

“What?” Garrett demands. “What happened?”

“It’s Beau.” Tucker’s voice sounds hollow. “He’s—there was a car accident. He’s in critical condition.”

The words hit the room like a physical force. Garrett’s hand tightens on Dean’s shoulder. Logan makes a sound like he’s been punched.

Dean still can’t breathe right. Can’t think right. Critical condition. That means bad. That means really bad. That means-

No. No, he’s not going there.

“We need to go,” Dean hears himself say. His voice sounds far away. “We need to go to the hospital.”

“Dean, maybe we should-” Garrett starts.

“Now.” Dean pulls away from his friends, stumbling slightly. His legs feel like water. “We’re going now.”

“Okay,” Logan says quickly. “Okay, yeah. My car’s out front. Let’s go.”

Dean doesn’t remember the walk to the parking lot. Doesn’t remember climbing into Logan’s beat-up pickup. One minute he’s in the weight room, and the next he’s in the back seat, Tucker beside him, watching the familiar streets of Boston blur past the window.

Garrett is in the passenger seat, on his phone. “Yeah, Wellsy, it’s—yeah, it’s really bad. We’re going to Mass General now. Can you—yeah. Thanks, baby.”

The city passes in a haze. Dean stares out the window without seeing anything. His mind keeps trying to process the information and failing. Beau. Car accident. Critical condition.

They’re brothers. Not by blood, but by choice, which Dean has always thought means more. 

Beau is the guy who stayed up with Dean all night when his grandfather died, never saying much, just being there. The guy who taught Dean how to throw a spiral when some girl Dean was into invited him to throw a football around. The guy who knows Dean’s coffee order and brings him one without being asked when he’s had a rough day.

Beau is his brother.

And Dean doesn’t know what he’ll do if-

No. Stop. Don’t think it.

“We’re here,” Logan announces, pulling into the hospital parking garage with slightly too much speed.

They practically fall out of the truck, running for the entrance. The hospital is massive, gleaming glass and steel, and Dean has no idea where to go.

“Trauma wing,” Tucker pants, pulling out his phone. “Coach sent me directions. This way.”

They follow him through automatic doors, past a reception desk, down a hallway that smells like antiseptic and fear. Dean’s heart is pounding so hard he can hear it in his ears. His workout clothes are still damp with sweat. He should have changed. Why didn’t he change?

They round a corner, and Dean sees them.

The waiting room is full of Maxwells.

Beau’s mom, Debbie, sits in one of those uncomfortable plastic chairs, her face buried in her hands. Beau’s dad is standing by the window, a white bandage visible above his eyebrow. Beau’s grandmother is there too, being comforted by what looks like Beau’s aunt. There are others Dean recognizes from family gatherings and football games, all wearing the same expression of shock and grief.

They all look up as four hockey players in workout gear burst into the waiting room.

His moml’s eyes land on Dean, and her face crumbles.

“Dean,” she chokes out, and then she’s standing, crossing the room in three steps, pulling him into her arms.

She’s shaking. Or maybe he’s shaking. He can’t tell anymore.

“I’m so sorry,” she’s saying into his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, honey, I know you two—I know-”

That’s what breaks him.

Dean Di Laurentis, who prides himself on being smooth, charming, always in control, shatters. His knees give out, and if Beau’s mom wasn’t holding him up, he’d be on the floor. A sob tears out of his throat, raw and ugly and completely beyond his control.

“I’ve got you,” she whispers, even though she’s the one who should be comforted, even though it’s her son in critical condition. “I’ve got you, sweetheart.”

Dean can feel his teammates behind him — Logan’s hand on his back, Garrett’s voice saying something he can’t make out. But mostly he feels the weight of grief trying to crush him, the terror of possibly losing the person who knows him better than anyone.

“What happened?” He manages to gasp out. “Coach said—but he didn’t—what happened?”

Debbie pulls back, her hands still on his shoulders. Her eyes are red-rimmed and swollen. “You should tell them.”

Beau’s dad turns from the window. He looks like he’s aged ten years overnight. The bandage above his eyebrow is stark white against his pale skin.

“We were driving back from dinner,” he says, his voice rough. “In the city. For my mother’s birthday. It was late, almost midnight. I was driving because Beau had a few drinks. We were just—we were talking about the game next week. About his classes. Normal stuff.”

He stops, his jaw working. Beau’s grandmother reaches over and takes his hand.

“There was a deer,” Beau’s dad continues. “It came out of nowhere. I swerved, and the road—there was black ice. I felt the car start to slide, and I couldn’t—I tried to correct, but we just kept sliding. We hit a tree. Driver’s side hit first, then passenger side slammed into it.”

Dean’s stomach churns. He can picture it too clearly.

“I woke up a few seconds later. I was okay, just disoriented. But Beau-” Beau’s father takes a moment to gather himself. “He wasn’t moving. There was blood everywhere. And then this young woman appeared. Out of nowhere. She’d seen the crash and stopped.”

“She called 911,” Beau’s mom picks up the story, her voice steadier than her husband’s. “She was a medical student. She—god, the paramedics said she saved his life. She stabilized his neck, stopped the worst of the bleeding, kept him alive until they could get there.”

“What are his injuries?” Garrett asks quietly. He’s moved to stand beside Dean, solid and steady.

Beau’s dad closes his eyes. “Cervical spine trauma. The paramedics said his neck was bent at an angle that should have killed him. Should have severed his spinal cord. But this girl, she somehow stabilized it. Kept it from snapping completely.”

Dean tastes bile. He swallows hard.

“He also had a penetrating chest wound,” Beau’s dqd continues. “A tree branch went through the windshield and-” He makes a gesture toward his own sternum. “She knew not to pull it out. Knew it was the only thing keeping him from bleeding out.”

“And his arm,” Beau’s mom adds, wiping her eyes. “Severe laceration from broken glass. She used her own coat as a tourniquet.”

The waiting room is silent except for the buzz of fluorescent lights and the distant beep of monitors.

“Is he going to be okay?” Tucker asks. His voice is small, younger than Dean has ever heard it.

“They’ve been in surgery for four hours,” Beau’s mom says. “We don’t know yet. They said-” Her voice wavers. “They said the next few days are critical. That even if he survives the surgery, there could be complications. Infection. Brain damage from oxygen deprivation. Paralysis.”

“No.” The word comes out sharp, definitive. Dean doesn’t realize he’s the one who said it until everyone looks at him. “No, that’s not—Beau’s going to be fine. He has to be fine. He’s-”

He can’t finish the sentence. Can’t articulate what Beau means, what a world without him would look like. Can’t.

“We’re praying, honey,” Beau’s mom says softly. “That’s all we can do right now.”

Dean wants to scream that prayer isn’t enough. That there has to be something, anything, they can do. But he just nods, swallowing against the lump in his throat.

More people arrive over the next hour. Beau’s teammates, guys from the football team who Dean knows from parties and the occasional shared class. They fill the waiting room with whispered conversations and shell-shocked expressions. A few of them break down crying. Most just sit in stunned silence.

Dean ends up in one of the plastic chairs, his head in his hands. Logan sits on one side, Garrett on the other. Tucker paces by the window, unable to sit still.

“He’s going to make it,” Logan says quietly. “You know Beau. Stubborn as hell. He’s not going anywhere.”

Dean wants to believe that. Wants to believe that sheer force of will can overcome arterial bleeding and spinal trauma. But he’s seen enough hockey injuries to know that sometimes will isn’t enough.

“Did you know,” Dean says suddenly, his voice hoarse, “that his first word was ‘ball’? He told me that freshman year. Not ‘mama’ or ‘dada.’ ‘Ball.’ His parents said he was obsessed with any kind of ball from the time he could sit up. They knew he’d be an athlete before he could walk.”

“Yeah?” Garrett’s voice is soft, encouraging.

“And he-” Dean’s throat closes up. He forces himself to continue. “He wants to go pro. Obviously. But after that, he wants to coach. High school kids, specifically. He says college and pro players already have all the resources. He wants to work with kids who might not have anyone believing in them.”

“That sounds like Beau,” Logan says.

“He’s going to do it, too,” Dean insists, looking up. “He’s going to play in the NFL and then coach high school ball and probably turn some underfunded program into a state championship team because that’s what he does. He sees potential in people and brings it out of them.”

“Dean-” Garrett starts.

“I mean it.” Dean’s voice cracks. “That’s who he is. So he can’t—he has to-”

The doors to the surgical wing swing open.

The waiting room falls silent immediately. Every head turns. A surgeon walks out, still in his scrubs, pulling off his surgical cap. He looks tired. So tired.

Beau’s parents are on their feet instantly, crossing to meet him. Dean stands too, his teammates flanking him. His heart pounds so hard he thinks it might break through his ribs.

“Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell,” the surgeon says. His voice is neutral, professional, impossible to read.

“How is he?” Beau’s mom asks in barely a whisper. “How’s my son?”

The surgeon takes a breath. Dean holds his own, feeling like the entire world is balanced on whatever words come next.

“The surgery was successful,” the surgeon says, and the relief that floods the room is almost tangible. “We’ve stabilized the spinal trauma, repaired the vascular damage to his arm, and removed the foreign object from his chest. The object missed his heart by less than two centimeters. Any further to the right, and-”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to.

“But he’s alive?” Beau’s dad asks. “He’s going to live?”

“He’s alive,” the surgeon confirms. “He’s in critical condition, and the next seventy-two hours will be crucial. There’s still risk of infection, of complications from the spinal trauma. But he made it through surgery, which given the extent of his injuries, is remarkable.”

“Can we see him?” Beau’s mom asks.

“He’s being moved to the ICU now. You can see him once he’s settled, but he’ll be sedated. We need to keep him as still as possible to let the spinal repair begin to heal.”

“His spine,” Beau’s dad says. “Will he—is there paralysis?”

The surgeon’s expression is carefully neutral. “We won’t know the full extent of any nerve damage until he wakes up and we can do a thorough neurological assessment. The spinal cord itself wasn’t severed, which is extraordinarily fortunate. Whoever stabilized his neck at the scene saved his life and likely saved him from permanent paralysis.”

“The girl,” Beau’s mom says. “The medical student. Do you know her name? We want to thank her.”

The surgeon shakes his head. “The paramedics didn’t get her information. Just that she was a Good Samaritan who stopped to help.”

“We have to find her,” Beau’s mom says, turning to her husband. “We have to-”

“We will,” Beau’s dad promises. “We will.”

The surgeon continues, “I need to be clear with you. Your son’s injuries were catastrophic. The fact that he’s alive is nothing short of miraculous. But the road ahead is going to be long. Months of recovery, likely. Multiple surgeries. Intensive physical therapy. And there are still no guarantees.”

“But he’s alive,” Beau’s mom repeats, like it’s a prayer. “He’s alive.”

“He’s alive,” the surgeon confirms. “You should be very proud of him. He’s a fighter.”

After the surgeon leaves, the waiting room erupts. Quiet at first — no one wants to celebrate when Beau is still critical — but there’s a shift. From hopeless to hopeful. From grief to cautious relief.

Dean sits down hard, his legs finally giving out completely. He drops his head into his hands, and this time when he cries, it’s different. Still scared, still shaken, but there’s something else mixed in.

Gratitude.

“He made it,” Logan says, his own voice thick. “Holy shit, he actually made it.”

“Seventy-two hours,” Tucker says. “That’s what the doctor said. Three days. He just has to make it three days.”

“He will,” Garrett says firmly. “You heard the doc. Beau’s a fighter.”

Dean lifts his head, scrubbing at his face. His eyes feel swollen, his throat raw. He probably looks like hell. He doesn’t care.

“I need to see him,” he says. “I need to see him.”

“Family only in the ICU, probably,” Logan says gently. “At least at first.”

“I don’t care. I need-” Dean’s voice breaks again. “I need to see him.”

Beau’s mom appears in front of him, crouching down so they’re at eye level. She takes his hands in hers.

“As soon as they let us bring visitors, you’ll be the first,” she promises. “I swear. But right now, I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything.”

“I need you to take care of yourself. Go home, shower, eat something. Because when Beau wakes up — and he will wake up — he’s going to need you strong. Can you do that?”

Dean wants to argue. Wants to plant himself in this waiting room and refuse to move until he can see his brother. But her eyes are pleading, and she’s asking so little when she’s going through so much.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay, but you’ll call me? The second anything changes?”

“The absolute second,” she promises. “You’re family, Dean. You know that.”

Family. The word cracks something open in his chest. He pulls Beau’s mom into another hug, holding on tight.

“Thank you,” he says. “For calling me. For letting me know.”

“Oh honey,” she says, pulling back to look at him. “There was never a question. You’re his brother.”

Dean nods, not trusting himself to speak.

His teammates drive him back to campus in silence. The shock is starting to wear off, leaving exhaustion in its wake. Dean’s muscles ache from his workout, which feels like it happened years ago instead of hours.

They end up on the couch, the four of them, not talking. Just being there. At some point, Tucker orders pizza. At another point, Hannah and Allie show up with half the football team, bringing food and offering quiet support.

Dean’s phone buzzes constantly. Texts from teammates, from friends, from people he hasn’t talked to in months, all asking about Beau. He doesn’t answer any of them.

Instead, he pulls up his photos. Finds the album labeled “Best Bro.” Hundreds of pictures spanning three years. Beau throwing a touchdown. Beau at a party, arm slung around Dean’s shoulders. Beau asleep in the library during finals week, drooling on his American History textbook. Beau grinning at the camera, blue eyes bright, completely alive.

“He’s going to be okay,” Dean whispers to the photo. “You’re going to be okay.”

He has to believe it. Because the alternative — a world without Beau’s terrible jokes and unwavering loyalty and ability to light up any room he walks into — is unthinkable.

His phone buzzes again. They’ve settled him in the ICU. He looks peaceful. Still sedated. Doctors say next 12 hours are critical. Will update you in the morning. Try to get some sleep, honey. He needs you rested.

Dean stares at the message for a long time. Tell him I’m here. Tell him his brother is here and waiting for him to wake up.

Dean sets his phone down and leans back against the couch. Around him, his friends have settled into quiet conversation. Someone turned on a movie at some point, something mindless playing on low volume.

But Dean isn’t watching. He’s thinking about a girl he’s never met. A medical student who stopped on a dark highway and saved his brother’s life. Who thought quickly enough to stabilize Beau’s neck, to stop the bleeding, to give him a fighting chance.

Whoever she is, wherever she is, Dean owes her everything.

“We have to find her,” he says suddenly.

Garrett looks over. “Who?”

“The girl. The medical student. She saved him, and she just disappeared. Didn’t even leave her name.”

“Dude, Boston has like five medical schools,” Logan points out. “That’s thousands of students.”

“I don’t care,” Dean says. His voice is stronger now, steadier. “We’ll check every single one if we have to. But we’re going to find her.”

Because whoever she is, she gave Beau a second chance at life.

And Dean is going to make damn sure she knows how much that means.

***

The world comes back in pieces.

First, there’s sound — a steady beeping, rhythmic and insistent. Then sensation — something soft beneath him, something constricting around his neck. Then smell — antiseptic, that particular hospital smell that’s somehow both sterile and cloying at once.

Beau tries to open his eyes, but his eyelids feel like they weigh a thousand pounds.

“-vitals are stable, Mrs. Maxwell. We’re going to start decreasing the sedation now-”

That’s a voice he doesn’t recognize. Professional. Clinical.

“How long until he wakes up?” That voice he knows. Mom. She sounds exhausted.

“It varies. Could be a few hours. His body’s been through significant trauma, so we’re taking it slow.”

Beau wants to tell them he’s right here, that he can hear them, but his mouth won’t cooperate. The darkness pulls him back under.

***

The next time consciousness surfaces, it stays a little longer.

The beeping is still there. But now there are other sounds too — quiet conversation, the rustle of fabric, footsteps in the hallway.

“-told you, you can’t give him solid food yet-” Mom again, but this time she sounds amused.

“I’m not giving it to him. I’m just … having it ready. For when he can.” Dean. That’s definitely Dean.

“You brought Dunkin’ Donuts to a hospital ICU?”

“Munchkins. They’re small. It doesn’t count.”

Despite everything — the pain starting to register in various parts of his body, the confusion, the way his neck feels completely immobilized — Beau almost smiles.

“Beau?” A different voice. Dad. “Beau, can you hear me?”

He tries to respond. Manages something between a grunt and a groan.

“Oh my god.” Mom’s voice cracks. “Oh my god, he’s—get the nurse. Get the nurse!”

Footsteps. Fast.

Beau forces his eyes open. The light is too bright, everything blurry. He blinks, and slowly the world comes into focus.

White ceiling. Fluorescent lights. The edge of what looks like a massive amount of medical equipment.

“Beau?” Mom’s face appears above him, and she’s crying. “Oh, baby. You’re awake. You’re really awake.”

“Hey, Mom.” His voice comes out as barely a rasp, his throat raw and painful.

“Don’t try to move, sweetheart. Your neck—they had to stabilize your neck. You’re in a brace.”

That explains the constricting feeling. Beau tries to turn his head instinctively and immediately regrets it as pain shoots through him.

“Easy, easy.” That’s a new voice — a nurse, he realizes, as a woman in scrubs appears on his other side. “Welcome back, Mr. Maxwell. I’m Theresa. Can you tell me your name?”

“Beau Maxwell.” It hurts to talk, but he manages.

“Good. Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital.” Duh.

“Do you remember what happened?”

Beau tries to think. His memory is … foggy. Disjointed. “Car. We were in a car. Dad was driving.” He looks around, spotting his father standing near the foot of the bed, bandage still visible on his forehead. “Dad. You okay?”

His dad laughs, the sound wet and relieved. “I’m fine, son. I’m fine. You’re the one who-” His voice breaks. “You scared the hell out of us.”

“Language,” Mom chides, but she’s smiling through her tears.

The nurse runs through more questions — what year it is, who the president is, can he feel his fingers and toes. Everything checks out, apparently, because she smiles and says, “Looking good, Mr. Maxwell. The doctor will be by soon to do a full assessment.”

After she leaves, Beau takes stock. He can see Mom and Dad, both looking exhausted and relieved. And there, slouched in a chair by the window, is Dean, holding a Dunkin’ Donuts bag and grinning like an idiot.

“You look like shit,” Beau rasps.

Dean laughs, and it sounds a little hysterical. “Says the guy in the ICU. Welcome back, man.”

“How long was I out?”

“Two and a half days,” Mom says, stroking his hand gently. “They had you heavily sedated while you healed.”

Two and a half days. Beau processes this slowly. “What … what are my injuries?”

His parents exchange a look.

“Son,” Dad starts, “you had—it was pretty bad. Cervical spine trauma. They had to operate. And there was a branch, through your chest-”

“A branch?”

“Missed your heart by less than two inches,” Mom says quietly. “And your arm—there was a lot of glass. They had to repair the artery.”

Beau stares at the ceiling, trying to reconcile this information with the fact that he’s alive and apparently mostly functional. “How am I not dead?”

“Because someone saved you,” Dad says. “There was a woman, a medical student. She saw the crash happen and stopped to help. She stabilized your neck, stopped the bleeding, kept you alive until the paramedics arrived.”

A medical student. Random Good Samaritan. Beau tries to remember, but there’s nothing. Just darkness and then waking up here.

“The surgeon said if she hadn’t stabilized your neck, one more wrong movement and-” Mom can’t finish the sentence.

“We’ve been trying to find her,” Dean interjects, standing up and moving closer to the bed. “To thank her. But she didn’t leave her name, and the hospital doesn’t have her information. Just that she was a medical student who stopped to help.”

“I want to thank her too,” Beau says. His throat is killing him, but this seems important.

“The police have her contact information from the accident report,” Dad says. “We’re working on tracking her down. But for now, you need to focus on healing.”

A doctor arrives shortly after, running through a battery of neurological tests. Can Beau move his fingers? Yes. Toes? Yes. Feel pressure on his arms? Legs? Yes, yes. The doctor looks cautiously optimistic.

“The fact that you have full sensation and motor function is excellent news,” the doctor says. “But you’re not out of the woods yet. The next few weeks are critical. Any wrong movement could jeopardize the spinal repair.”

“So I’m stuck in this neck brace?”

“For at least eight weeks. And then extensive physical therapy.”

Eight weeks. Beau’s season is over. His entire junior year, gone. He closes his eyes against the wave of disappointment.

“Hey.” Dean’s hand lands on his shoulder. “One step at a time, yeah? You’re alive. That’s what matters.”

Beau nods minutely, the brace making even that small movement awkward.

The rest of the day passes in a blur of doctors, nurses, medications, and family. His grandmother comes by and cries all over him. His aunt brings flowers that the nurses say aren’t allowed in ICU but no one has the heart to remove. His uncle brings an embarrassing amount of Packers gear “for morale.”

Dean never leaves. He’s a permanent fixture in the chair by the window, occasionally trying to sneak Beau a munchkin when the nurses aren’t looking, even though Beau still can’t eat solid food.

“Dude, stop,” Beau finally says. “You’re going to get kicked out.”

“Worth it,” Dean says, but he puts the bag away.

It’s late afternoon on the third day post-accident — technically only a few hours since Beau woke up — when there’s a knock on the door.

“If that’s another neurologist, I swear to god-” Beau starts.

“Language,” Mom says automatically, but she’s already turning toward the door. “Come in!”

The door opens, and everyone looks up expecting another doctor or nurse.

Instead, a young woman steps in.

She’s around Beau’s age, maybe a year or two older, wearing jeans and a Harvard hoodie, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. She looks nervous, clutching a worn messenger bag and hesitating in the doorway like she might bolt at any second.

“I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “I know you probably weren’t expecting visitors, but I—the reception desk said that—I asked how the patient from the accident was doing, and they said the medical student who helped at the scene was on the approved visitor list, so I thought-” She’s rambling, talking faster with each word. “I can leave. I should probably leave. I just wanted to check-”

“Oh my god.” Dad is on his feet. “You’re her. You’re the medical student.”

She nods, looking even more uncertain. “I’m—yes. I was the one who—I saw the accident, and I-”

She doesn’t get any further because Dad crosses the room in three strides and wraps her in a hug.

“Thank you,” he says, his voice thick. “Thank you for saving my son. Thank you, thank you-”

You stand frozen for a second, clearly startled, before awkwardly patting his back. “I—you’re welcome. I just did what anyone would-”

“No.” Mom is there now too, and as soon as Dad releases you, she pulls you into an equally tight embrace. “No, what you did — the surgeon said you saved his life. That if you hadn’t stabilized his neck, he wouldn’t have made it. You saved our boy.”

Beau watches from the bed, unable to turn his head much but able to see enough. The woman — the medical student who saved him — looks completely overwhelmed, her eyes suspiciously bright.

“I’m just glad he’s okay,” you manage. “I’ve been checking the news, looking for updates, but I couldn’t find anything, and I was worried-”

“He’s going to be okay,” Mom assures you, finally releasing you. “Thanks to you.”

Then Dean is there, and he pulls you into a hug that actually lifts you off your feet slightly.

“I don’t know who you are yet,” Dean says, “but you saved my brother’s life, so you’re stuck with me now. Fair warning, I’m a hugger.”

You laugh, the sound slightly watery. “I can tell.”

“What’s your name?” Mom asks, steering you gently toward the bed.

“Y/N Y/L/N,” you say. “I’m a second-year at Harvard Med.”

“Y/N,” Dad repeats. “That’s a beautiful name.”

You smile, still looking nervous, and then your eyes land on Beau.

Beau, who has been staring at you since you walked in.

Because holy shit.

You’re beautiful. Like, devastatingly beautiful. Even in casual clothes with no makeup and looking slightly anxious, you’re the most stunning person Beau has ever seen. There’s something about your eyes, warm and genuine, and the way you move, and-

Is this heaven? Did he actually die and this is some kind of afterlife? Because that would explain a lot.

“Hi,” you say softly, moving to his bedside. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I got hit by a tree,” Beau rasps, then immediately winces. “Sorry. That was—I’m apparently still working on the whole talking thing.”

You laugh, and the sound does something strange to his chest. “The tree definitely won that round. But I’m so glad to see you awake. When I left the scene, I-” You pause, taking a shaky breath. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it. Your injuries were severe.”

“Apparently you’re the reason I did make it,” Beau says. He wishes he could sit up properly, look at you without the weird angle the neck brace forces. “Thank you. I mean it. Thank you for stopping. For helping.”

“Of course.” You look genuinely confused by the gratitude. “I couldn’t just drive past.”

“Most people would have,” Dean interjects. He’s back in his chair but watching you with open fascination. “Most people would’ve called 911 and kept going.”

“I had training,” you say simply. “And someone needed help. It wasn’t—I mean, I just did what needed to be done.”

“You did a lot more than that,” Dad says. “The surgeon told us you stabilized his neck. That you thought quickly enough to prevent further damage. That you used your own coat to stop the bleeding.”

You duck your head, embarrassed. “I had an emergency kit in my car. My mom’s paranoid about me driving alone at night. The coat was just the closest thing I had.”

“Did you get it back?” Beau asks. “Your coat?”

“Oh.” You blink at him. “No, I—I assume they had to cut it off you. It’s fine, though. It was just a coat.”

“Just a coat that saved my life,” Beau says. “Along with you. So, not really just a coat.”

You smile at him, and Beau’s heart does something complicated in his chest. The monitors beside his bed beep slightly faster, and he desperately hopes no one notices.

“How are you really feeling?” You ask. “Pain levels? Range of motion? Are you experiencing any numbness or tingling?”

“Did you just go into doctor mode?” Dean asks, amused.

“Sorry.” You look sheepish. “Occupational hazard. I’ve been worried about—I mean, cervical spine injuries are serious, and I was so scared I’d made the wrong call at the scene-”

“You made exactly the right call,” Mom assures you. “Every doctor we’ve talked to has said so.”

You nod, but you still look anxious. Beau recognizes the expression — it’s the same one he wears after a bad game, replaying every mistake.

“Hey,” he says, waiting until you look at him. “I’m alive. I can move everything. The doctors say I’m going to make a full recovery. You did good. Better than good. You were amazing.”

You hold his gaze for a moment, and something passes between them. Something Beau can’t name but can definitely feel.

“I’m really glad you’re okay,” you finally say, your voice soft.

“Me too,” Beau replies. “Though I’m pretty sure I have the worst concussion in history because there’s no way someone as beautiful as you is real.”

There’s a beat of silence.

Then Dean bursts out laughing. “Oh my god, did you just use a pickup line while in a neck brace in the ICU?”

“It’s not a pickup line if it’s true,” Beau says, not breaking eye contact with you.

You’re blushing now, a pink tinge spreading across your cheeks. “I think your brain is working just fine,” you manage.

“That’s what I said!” Dean crows. “The boy’s got game even half-dead.”

“Dean,” Mom says warningly, but she’s smiling.

You laugh again, shaking your head. “I should probably go. Let you rest. I just wanted to check—to make sure you were okay.”

“Wait,” Beau says quickly. Too quickly. The movement makes pain shoot through his neck, and he grimaces.

You step closer instinctively, your hand hovering near his shoulder. “Are you okay? Should I get a nurse?”

“No, I’m fine. I just-” Beau takes as deep a breath as the chest wound allows. “Can I get your number? To, uh, keep you updated on my recovery. Since you saved my life and all.”

Dean makes a noise that’s probably supposed to be a cough but sounds suspiciously like a laugh.

You’re definitely blushing now, but you’re smiling too. “Sure. That—yeah. Let me write it down.”

Mom, bless her, immediately produces a pen and paper.

You write quickly, your handwriting surprisingly neat, and hand the paper to Beau. “Text me anytime. I mean it. I want to know how you’re doing.”

“I will,” Beau promises. He wishes he could take the paper himself, but his arm is still heavily bandaged and moving it is a production. Dean takes it for him, setting it on the bedside table with a knowing smirk.

You linger for another moment, looking like you want to say something else. Finally, you speak. “You know, I have to tell you something.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m a Harvard fan,” you say, and there’s a hint of mischief in your eyes now. “Which means I’m technically rooting against Briar. So you need to make a full recovery so we can beat you fair and square next season.”

Beau stares at you. Then he laughs, the sound rough and painful but genuine. “You save my life and then threaten to destroy me on the field?”

“Not a threat,” you say cheerfully. “A promise. We’re coming for that championship.”

“I love her,” Dean announces. “Beau, I love her. Can we keep her?”

“I’m working on it,” Beau mutters, which makes you laugh again.

“Okay, I really do need to go,” you say, backing toward the door. “But it was wonderful to meet you all. And Beau, heal up fast, okay? The rivalry isn’t fun if you’re not playing.”

“Yes ma’am,” Beau says, giving you a slight salute that his injuries allow.

You wave and slip out the door, closing it softly behind you.

The room is silent for exactly three seconds.

“Dude,” Dean says.

“Not now,” Beau replies.

“You just flirted with your guardian angel.”

“Dean-”

“In the ICU. While in a neck brace. While your parents were standing right there.”

“I was perfectly respectful-”

“You told her she was too beautiful to be real!” Dean is grinning like the Cheshire cat. “Your game is unreal, man. I’m actually impressed.”

“You asked for her number,” Mom says, and she sounds amused too. “That was certainly … forward of you, sweetheart.”

“I need to thank her properly,” Beau says defensively. “It’s only right.”

“Uh-huh,” Dean says. “Is that what we’re calling it?”

“She’s a Harvard fan,” Beau continues, ignoring him. “Which means she’s smart but has terrible taste in football teams. Someone needs to educate her.”

“Someone being you?” Dad asks, his lips twitching.

“I mean, I feel like I owe her that much.”

Dean is full-on cackling now. “You’re going to date the girl who saved your life. That’s some romance novel shit right there.”

“I’m not—we just met. I’m just going to text her. To say thank you.”

“Sure,” Dean says, not even trying to hide his grin. “Just thank you. Nothing else.”

“Dean, I swear-”

“Boys,” Mom interrupts, but she’s smiling. “Beau needs to rest.”

“I’m fine,” Beau insists, even though he’s exhausted just from the conversation.

“You nearly died three days ago,” Mom says firmly. “You need rest. Dean, stop riling him up.”

“Yes, Mrs. Maxwell,” Dean says dutifully.

After his parents leave to grab dinner, it’s just Beau and Dean in the room. Dean is back in his chair, finally eating the munchkins he’s been carrying around.

“She was amazing,” Beau says quietly. “Not just—I mean, yeah, she’s gorgeous. But she saved my life, Dean. She stopped on a highway in the middle of the night and saved my life.”

“I know,” Dean says, and all the teasing is gone from his voice now. “I know, man. We owe her everything.”

“I was so close,” Beau continues. His throat is tight. “Dad said my neck … one more movement and that would’ve been it. And she fixed it. Some random medical student who happened to be driving by.”

“Not random,” Dean says. “Right place, right time. Some people would call that fate.”

“You believe in fate?”

“I believe in you,” Dean says simply. “And I believe you’re here for a reason. So yeah, maybe fate had something to do with putting her on that road at that exact moment.”

Beau thinks about you — your nervous smile, the way you brushed off the gratitude like it was nothing, the competitive spark in your eyes when you mentioned Harvard football.

“I think I was saved by an angel,” he says.

“Probably,” Dean agrees.

“And I think I’m in love.”

Dean nearly chokes on his munchkin. “What?”

“I’m in love,” Beau repeats. It sounds insane. It is insane. He just met you twenty minutes ago. But there’s something — a pull, a connection, something he can’t explain.

“Beau, buddy, I say this with love — you’re high as hell on pain meds right now.”

“I’m serious.”

“You just woke up from a medically induced coma like six hours ago.”

“I know what I feel.”

Dean studies him for a long moment. Then he sighs. “Well, shit. You really mean it.”

“I really mean it.”

“You’re going to marry the girl who saved your life, aren’t you?”

“If she’ll have me,” Beau says, completely serious.

Dean shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “This is either the most romantic thing I’ve ever witnessed or the pain meds talking. I’m not sure which.”

“Maybe both,” Beau admits. “But I don’t care. I’m going to thank her properly. And then I’m going to get to know her. And then-”

“Then you’re going to sweep her off her feet and ride off into the sunset?”

“Something like that.”

“She’s a Harvard fan,” Dean points out. “You know that’s going to be a problem.”

“I’ll convert her.”

“She literally told you she is waiting for Harvard to beat you.”

“She’s competitive. I like that.”

Dean laughs, shaking his head. “You’re insane. But okay. I’m here for it. Team Beau and his angel.”

“Her name is Y/N.”

“That doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

Beau doesn’t care. He’s already thinking about what to text you. How to thank you properly. How to convince you that stopping on that highway was the beginning of something, not just an isolated act of heroism.

His body is broken. His season is over. His recovery is going to be long and painful.

But for the first time since waking up, Beau feels hopeful.

Because somewhere out there is a girl who saved his life.

And he’s going to spend his recovery figuring out how to deserve her.

“Dean?” He says.

“Yeah?”

“Help me figure out what to text her.”

Dean grins. “Now we’re talking.”

They spend the next hour crafting the perfect message, with Dean offering increasingly ridiculous suggestions that Beau keeps vetoing. By the time visiting hours end and Dean is forced to leave, they’ve settled on something simple and genuine.

After Dean leaves, Beau stares at the piece of paper with your number, at your neat handwriting, and allows himself to smile.

Three days ago, his life nearly ended on a dark highway.

Today, looking at your number, it feels like it’s just beginning.

***

The physical therapy room smells like sweat and determination, which Beau has decided is just a nicer way of saying it smells like pain.

“Five more, Maxwell,” his PT says in that annoyingly cheerful voice that all physical therapists seem to possess. “You’ve got this.”

Beau grits his teeth and pulls himself up on the bar, his neck muscles screaming in protest. Four months ago, he couldn’t lift his head off the pillow. Three months ago, he couldn’t walk without assistance. Two months ago, he couldn’t turn his head more than thirty degrees.

Now, he’s doing pull-ups.

“One,” he grunts.

“Good. Keep that form.”

“Two.”

“Breathe through it.”

“Three.”

“Two more. You’ve got it.”

“Four.” His arms are shaking.

“Last one. Make it count.”

Beau pulls himself up one final time, holding at the top for a three-count before lowering himself down. His muscles feel like jelly, but he’s grinning.

“Hell yeah!” His PT claps him on the shoulder. “That’s what I’m talking about. Four months ago, you were in a neck brace wondering if you’d ever play again. Look at you now.”

“So I can play?” Beau asks hopefully.

“Nice try. That’s a question for your surgeon and your coach, not me. But I will say, physically you’re progressing faster than anyone expected.”

It’s not a yes, but Beau will take it.

After the session, he checks his phone. Seventeen texts in the group chat with the guys, mostly Dean sending increasingly absurd memes. Three texts from his mom checking in. One from Coach Deluca asking about his PT progress.

And one from you.

Y/N: How was PT? Did he make you cry today?

Beau smiles, typing back quickly.

Beau: Only a little. Mostly manly tears of triumph though.

Y/N: Sure. I believe you. Completely.

Beau: I did five pull-ups.

Y/N: FIVE? Beau, that’s amazing! I’m so proud of you!

Beau: Thanks. Couldn’t have done it without my guardian angel believing in me.

Y/N: Stop calling me that. I’m just a person who happened to be in the right place.

Beau: A person with a hero complex and really good instincts under pressure. AKA an angel.

Y/N: You’re impossible.

Beau: You love it.

There’s a pause.

Y/N: Maybe a little.

Beau’s grin widens. Over the past four months, texting you has become his favorite part of recovery. You check in daily, asking about his PT sessions, his pain levels, his progress. You send him terrible medical jokes. You quiz him on anatomy when you’re studying, claiming he’s helping you prepare for exams when really he’s just learning more about the exact ways his body almost failed him.

You’re funny and smart and competitive and kind, and Beau is more convinced every day that he’s in love with you.

The only problem? You’re still treating him like a patient. A friend, yes, but a friend you saved, which apparently puts him in some kind of off-limits category in your mind.

He’s been trying to change that. Slowly. Carefully.

Not carefully enough, according to Dean, who keeps telling him to “just ask her out already, you coward.”

But Beau wants to do this right. You saved his life. You deserve more than some half-assed attempt at romance from a guy who still can’t turn his head all the way without wincing.

His phone buzzes again.

Dean: Emergency. Get to the house ASAP.

Beau: What’s wrong?

Dean: Just get here. It’s important.

Beau’s heart kicks up. Dean doesn’t do “emergency” unless something is actually wrong. He grabs his bag and heads out, making the drive back to campus in record time.

He bursts through the door of the house he shares with Dean and half the hockey team, expecting — he doesn’t know what. Fire? Flood? Someone dying?

Instead, he finds Dean standing in the living room surrounded by streamers, balloons, and a banner that reads I LIVED, BITCH.

“Surprise!” Dean spreads his arms wide, grinning. “We’re throwing you a party.”

Beau stares. “You said it was an emergency.”

“It is an emergency. You’ve been back on campus for a week and we haven’t properly celebrated your return from the dead.”

“I wasn’t dead.”

“You were close enough that it counts.” Dean starts hanging more streamers. “Party’s tonight. Eight PM. Everyone’s invited.”

“Everyone?”

“The team. The guys. Some of the football players. Allie and her friends. That kid from your econ class who kept asking about you-”

“Dean-”

“And Y/N.”

Beau freezes. “What?”

Dean’s grin turns shit-eating. “I invited Y/N. She said yes, by the way. She’ll be here around nine.”

“You invited—without asking me-”

“You’ve been texting her for months and haven’t made a move. I’m helping.”

“By ambushing me?”

“By creating the perfect opportunity.” Dean hangs the last streamer and steps back to admire his work. “Come on, man. Party atmosphere, some drinks, you finally see her in person again — it’s romantic.”

“It’s manipulative.”

“It’s efficient.” Dean throws an arm around Beau’s shoulders. “Trust me. This is going to be great.”

***

The party is, objectively, insane.

By nine PM, the house is packed. Music thumps through the speakers. Someone has set up a beer pong table. Tucker is already three drinks in and teaching a group of freshmen the rules of some drinking game that definitely doesn’t have any rules.

Beau is nursing a beer and trying not to look at the door every five seconds.

“Dude, relax,” Logan says, appearing at his elbow. “She’ll be here.”

“I’m relaxed.”

“You look like you’re about to throw up.”

“That’s just my face.”

“That’s not your face. I know your face. This is your ’I’m freaking out’ face.”

Garrett joins them, holding two beers. “Is he doing the thing where he stares at the door?”

“He’s doing the thing,” Logan confirms.

“I hate both of you,” Beau mutters.

“You love us,” Garrett says cheerfully. “And you love Y/N, which is why you’re doing the door-staring thing.”

“I don’t—we’re friends.”

“Right,” Logan says. “Friends who text every day.”

“Friends who have inside jokes,” Garrett adds.

“Friends who he calls his guardian angel-”

“Okay, yes, fine, I like her.” Beau takes a long pull from his beer. “Happy?”

“Ecstatic,” Dean says, materializing out of nowhere. “And you’re going to tell her tonight.”

“I’m not-”

“You are. Because life is short, Beau. You nearly died. You got a second chance. Are you really going to waste it being chicken about asking out the girl who saved you?”

Beau opens his mouth to argue. Then closes it. Because damn it, Dean has a point.

“What if she says no?” He asks quietly.

“Then she says no,” Dean says. “But what if she says yes?”

Before Beau can respond, the front door opens.

And there you are.

You’re wearing jeans and a simple black top, your hair down instead of in the ponytail you usually wear, and Beau forgets how to breathe.

“She’s here,” Logan whispers unnecessarily.

“I can see that,” Beau hisses back.

You spot them and wave, smiling as you make your way through the crowd. Allie intercepts you halfway, pulling you into a hug and saying something that makes you laugh.

“Go talk to her,” Dean says, giving Beau a shove.

“I am talking to her.”

“You’re standing here like a statue. Go.”

Beau takes a breath and crosses the room. You look up as he approaches, and your smile gets wider.

“Hey!” You say, and then you’re hugging him. It’s brief, casual, but Beau’s heart still does something stupid in his chest. “I can’t believe Dean threw you an I Lived, Bitch party.”

“I can,” Beau says. “Subtlety isn’t really his thing.”

“I brought you something.” You dig in your bag and pull out a small wrapped package. “I was going to give it to you later, but here.”

Beau takes it, curious. “You didn’t have to get me anything.”

“Just open it.”

He unwraps it carefully. Inside is a keychain — a small football with the Briar University logo engraved on it and proof that miracles happen on the other side.

Beau stares at it, his throat tight. “Y/N-”

“I know it’s cheesy,” you say quickly. “But I saw it at this little shop near campus and thought of you. Because you are a miracle. You know that, right? The odds of you surviving what you survived, of recovering the way you have-”

“Hey.” Beau sets the keychain carefully on the nearest table and takes your hand. “Thank you. Really. This is—it’s perfect.”

You squeeze his hand, and for a moment, it’s just the two of you in the crowded room.

Then Dean’s voice booms over the music. “EVERYONE! CAN I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION?”

The music cuts off. Everyone turns to look at Dean, who’s standing on the coffee table with a beer raised.

“Oh no,” Beau mutters.

“Oh no,” you echo, but you’re smiling.

“Three months ago,” Dean announces, “my best friend nearly died. Car crash, black ice, the whole dramatic scene. And while I was sitting in a hospital waiting room having a complete breakdown, there was someone else on a dark highway saving his life.”

The crowd is silent, watching.

“Y/N Y/L/N,” Dean continues, finding you in the crowd. “Stand up. Come on, don’t be shy.”

You look mortified. “Dean-”

“Stand up!”

Reluctantly, you stand. The crowd turns to look at you.

“This woman,” Dean says, “stopped on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Could’ve driven past. Could’ve just called 911 and left. But she didn’t. She stopped. She used her medical training to stabilize Beau’s neck, to stop the bleeding, to keep him alive until the paramedics arrived. The surgeon told us that if she hadn’t done what she did, Beau would have died at the scene.”

Beau can see your eyes are shiny. His are probably the same.

“So this party isn’t just about Beau living, though that’s obviously the main event,” Dean continues. “It’s about Y/N. About the fact that there are still people in the world who stop to help strangers. Who run toward danger instead of away from it. Who save lives because it’s the right thing to do.”

He raises his beer higher. “To Y/N. Beau’s guardian angel. The reason we still have our quarterback. The reason I still have my brother.”

“TO Y/N!” The crowd roars.

You’re definitely crying now, wiping at your eyes with your free hand. Beau pulls you into a hug, and you bury your face in his shoulder.

“I hate your best friend,” you mumble into his shirt.

“I know,” Beau says, grinning. “Me too.”

Dean, having successfully made everyone emotional, declares that the situation requires shots. Multiple shots. A truly irresponsible number of shots.

“I don’t think this is medically advisable,” you protest as Dean lines up shot glasses on the kitchen counter.

“You’re not on duty,” Dean says. “And we’re celebrating. Celebrating requires shots.”

“That’s not-”

“Shots! Shots! Shots!” Tucker starts chanting. The crowd joins in.

You look at Beau helplessly. He shrugs. “When in Rome?”

“Rome didn’t have vodka.”

“Rome would’ve had vodka if they’d survived a near-death experience.”

You laugh and grab a shot glass. “Fine. But I’m blaming you when I regret this tomorrow.”

Dean passes out shots to everyone in the kitchen. “To Beau!” He shouts.

“To Beau!” Everyone echoes, and the shots go down.

One shot turns into two. Two turns into three. By shot four, you’re leaning against the counter, cheeks flushed, giggling at something Tucker is saying about his disastrous history midterm.

Beau stays close, not drinking as much because his tolerance is shot after months of not drinking, but enough that he feels warm and loose and brave.

“Having fun?” He asks, appearing at your side.

You beam up at him. “The most fun. Dean is insane. I love him.”

“Don’t tell him that. His ego can’t take it.”

“Too late!” Dean calls from across the room. “I heard! She loves me, Beau!”

“You’re the worst!” Beau calls back.

“You love me too!”

“Debatable!”

You laugh, the sound bright and unrestrained, and Beau wants to bottle it. Wants to keep it forever.

“Come on,” he says, taking your hand. “Let’s get some air.”

He leads you through the crowd, out the back door to the porch. The April night is cool but not cold, the first real hint of spring in the air. The noise from the party is muffled out here, just the bass line thumping through the walls.

“This is nice,” you say, leaning against the railing. “Quieter.”

“Yeah.” Beau stands beside you, close enough that your shoulders brush. “You okay? Dean didn’t overwhelm you too much?”

“Are you kidding? That toast was-” Your voice catches. “That was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me.”

“You saved my life. You deserve a lot more than a toast.”

“I was just doing what anyone would do.”

“No,” Beau says firmly. “You weren’t. You did something extraordinary. And I will spend the rest of my life being grateful for it.”

You turn to face him, leaning your hip against the railing. “The rest of your life, huh? That’s a long time.”

“Not long enough,” Beau says. His heart is pounding, but whether it’s from the alcohol or your proximity, he can’t tell. Probably both. “Y/N, I-”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been wanting to tell you something. For months, actually.”

You tilt your head, curious. “What is it?”

“I-” He stops. Starts again. “Do you remember what you said to me in the hospital? About Harvard beating Briar fair and square?”

“Of course. And I meant it. You guys are going down next season.”

“See, that’s the thing.” Beau takes a small step closer. “I’ve been thinking about that. About you being a Harvard fan and me playing for Briar. And I realized I don’t care.”

“You don’t care about football?” You sound skeptical.

“I don’t care that we’re rivals. I don’t care that you’re rooting against my team. I don’t care about any of it because-” He takes a breath. “Because I like you. A lot. Like, an embarrassing amount for someone who’s supposed to be playing it cool.”

Your eyes widen slightly. “Beau-”

“I know we’ve been friends,” he continues quickly. “And if that’s all you want, I’ll take it. I’ll take whatever you’re willing to give me. But I need you to know that I think about you constantly. I look forward to your texts more than anything else in my day. When I was in PT, struggling through the worst pain I’ve ever experienced, the thought of texting you after kept me going.”

“Really?” Your voice is soft.

“Really.” He reaches up, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. The gesture is gentle, tentative. “You saved my life, Y/N. And then you kept saving it, every day, just by being you. By making me laugh when I wanted to give up. By believing I could recover when I wasn’t sure I could.”

“I always believed in you,” you whisper.

“I know. I felt it. Every text, every terrible medical joke, every time you called me out for pushing too hard or not hard enough — I felt it.”

You’re staring at him now, your eyes bright in the porch light. “I like you too,” you say. “I have for months. But I didn’t—you were recovering, and I didn’t want to take advantage-”

“Take advantage?” Beau laughs. “Y/N, I’ve been trying to figure out how to ask you out since I woke up in that hospital bed and saw you for the first time.”

“You were on a lot of pain meds.”

“Doesn’t make it less true.”

You bite your lip, and Beau tracks the movement. “So what now?”

“Now,” Beau says, stepping even closer, “I’m going to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“Can I kiss you?”

Your breath catches. For a moment, you just stare at him. Then you smile — that brilliant, beautiful smile that he’s dreamed about for months.

“Yes,” you breathe. “God, yes.”

Beau cups your face in his hands, thumbs brushing against your cheeks, and leans in.

The first touch of your lips is electric. Soft and sweet and perfect. You make a small sound and melt into him, your hands coming up to grip his shirt.

Beau kisses you like he’s been wanting to for months, which he has. Kisses you like you’re precious, which you are. Kisses you like he’s afraid you might disappear, which part of him is.

You kiss him back just as intensely, your fingers curling into his hair, pulling him closer.

Someone starts whooping from inside. “YES! FINALLY! GET IT, MAXWELL!”

Beau flips him off behind your back without breaking the kiss, which makes you laugh against his mouth.

“Your friends are watching,” you mumble.

“Don’t care,” Beau says, kissing you again.

“They’re cat-calling.”

“Still don’t care.”

You pull back slightly, just enough to meet his eyes. Your lips are kiss-swollen, your cheeks flushed, and Beau has never seen anything more beautiful.

“This is really happening?” You ask. “We’re really doing this?”

“If you want to,” Beau says. “I mean, I know it’s complicated. The rivalry thing-”

“Is football,” you finish. “Just football. This is more important.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You smile. “Besides, it’ll make beating you next season even sweeter.”

Beau laughs and kisses you again. “You’re impossible.”

“You love it,” you say, echoing your earlier text.

“I do,” Beau agrees. “I really, really do.”

From inside, Dean is now leading a chant of “KISS! KISS! KISS!” that’s quickly spreading through the party.

“We should probably go back in,” you say, not moving.

“Probably,” Beau agrees, also not moving.

You stay like that for another moment, just looking at each other, before you finally step back and take his hand.

“Come on,” you say. “Before your best friend has an aneurysm.”

You walk back into the party together, hands linked, and the entire room erupts into cheers.

Dean tackles Beau in a hug, nearly knocking you both over. “FINALLY! Do you know how hard it’s been watching you pine for four months?”

“Get off me,” Beau laughs, shoving him away.

“I’m the best wingman ever. Admit it.”

“You’re the worst.”

“But I’m your worst,” Dean says, grinning. Then he turns to you. “Welcome to the family, Y/N. You’re stuck with us now.”

“I can think of worse fates,” you say, smiling.

Logan and Tucker appear, both looking entirely too pleased with themselves.

“So,” Logan says. “Are you guys like, official? Is this a thing?”

Beau looks at you. You look back.

“It’s a thing,” you say.

“It’s definitely a thing,” Beau confirms.

“Well fuck,” Garrett says, joining the group with Hannah. “Because Hannah bet me twenty bucks you’d get together before summer, and I bet after. So thanks for costing me money, Beau.”

“My pleasure,” Beau says dryly.

The party continues late into the night. Beau stays by your side, your fingers laced with his, and for the first time since the accident, everything feels right.

Better than right.

Perfect.

Later, when the crowd has thinned and it’s just the core group sitting around the living room, Dean raises his beer one more time.

“To second chances,” he says.

“To guardian angels,” Tucker adds.

“To love,” Hannah says, making everyone groan.

“To football rivalries,” you contribute, which makes everyone laugh.

“To all of it,” Beau says, looking at you. “To whatever brought you to that highway at that exact moment. To whatever made you stop. To whatever led us here.”

You lean your head on his shoulder. “To fate,” you say softly.

“To fate,” Beau agrees.

And as he sits there, surrounded by his friends, his arm around the girl who saved his life in more ways than one, Beau can’t help but think that Dean was right.

Life is short. Second chances are rare.

And he’s not going to waste a single moment of his.

***

The Briar University athletics facility smells like sweat and ambition at seven AM on a Saturday, which is exactly why Dean loves it. That, and the fact that most people are still asleep, leaving the weight room gloriously empty.

Well, mostly empty.

“Come on, Maxwell, one more set!” Dean calls from his spot on the bench press. “Or are you going to let your girlfriend out-lift you?”

Beau, currently doing bicep curls while watching you on the treadmill, flips him off without looking away from you. “She’s not trying to out-lift me. She’s doing cardio.”

“I can hear you both,” you call from the treadmill, your ponytail swinging as you run. “And I absolutely could out-lift Beau if I wanted to.”

“Oh, fighting words!” Dean sits up, grinning. “Beau, you gonna take that?”

“Yes,” Beau says immediately. “Have you seen her deadlift? It’s terrifying and hot.”

“It’s medical student grip strength,” you explain, not breaking stride. “Years of studying have given me callouses of steel.”

“And here I thought it was just natural perfection,” Beau says.

Dean makes gagging noises. “You two are disgusting. It’s been five months. The honeymoon phase should be over by now.”

“Never,” Beau says cheerfully, setting down his weights and grabbing his water bottle.

Dean watches as Beau wanders over to your treadmill, leans against it, and says something that makes you laugh mid-stride. You nearly trip, smacking his arm, but you’re grinning.

Five months. Nearly half a year since that party. Half a year of watching his best friend fall more in love every single day.

It’s been an adjustment, Dean will admit. Suddenly having to share Beau with someone else, having to accept that he’s no longer the most important person in Beau’s life. But watching Beau now — healthy, happy, whole — Dean can’t begrudge it.

Especially because you’re pretty fucking cool.

You finish your run and hop off the treadmill, breathing hard but not winded. “Okay, what’s next? Weights? Core? Please say core. I need to work off the stress of this week.”

“Rough rotation?” Beau asks, immediately concerned.

“Just long,” you say, stretching your arms over your head. “Twenty-hour shifts don’t leave a lot of time for self-care. Hence why I’m here at seven AM on my one day off instead of sleeping like a normal person.”

“It’s the endorphins,” Dean says knowingly. “You’re chasing that dopamine high.”

“Exactly,” you agree quickly. “Purely scientific. Nothing to do with-”

“With wanting to see Beau shirtless and sweaty?” Dean finishes, smirking.

You turn red. “I—that’s not—I mean-”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Beau says, already pulling his shirt over his head. “I am pretty great to look at.”

“Your ego is showing,” you mutter, but you’re definitely staring.

Dean laughs. “Okay, lovebirds, let’s actually work out. Beau, you’ve got full medical clearance now, right?”

“As of last week,” Beau confirms, and there’s an edge of excitement in his voice that Dean recognizes. It’s the same excitement that’s been building since the doctors finally, finally said he could return to full contact practice. “Coach wants me back in peak condition before the season starts.”

“Which is three weeks,” Dean adds. “So we’ve got to get you whipped into shape.”

The effect is immediate and bizarre.

Beau and you lock eyes across the weight room. Something passes between you — some kind of silent communication that Dean has seen before but never understood. It’s like you share a brain sometimes, which is both impressive and deeply unsettling.

Then, in perfect unison, you both gasp dramatically.

“Did you just say-” you start.

“Whipped into shape?” Beau finishes.

“Oh no,” Dean says, recognizing the gleam in both your eyes. “No. Whatever you’re thinking-”

But it’s too late.

You sprint to the corner of the gym where someone has left a pile of equipment. You emerge triumphantly holding two jump ropes.

“Where did you even—when did you-” Dean sputters.

“Shhh,” you say, tossing one rope to Beau, who catches it with a grin that can only be described as maniacal. “Let us have this.”

“Have what?” Dean asks, genuinely concerned now.

You and Beau exchange another look. Then you hold up one finger and suddenly you’re both jumping rope and singing.

“I WANT YOU WHIPPED INTO SHAPE!” You belt out, your voice surprisingly strong for someone who just ran three miles.

“WHEN I SAY JUMP, SAY ‘HOW HIGH?’” Beau joins in, jumping rope with enough enthusiasm to be concerning given that he had spinal surgery less than a year ago.

Dean stares. Just stares.

“YOU KNOW YOU’RE DOING IT RIGHT,” you continue, now doing some kind of complicated jump rope move that involves crossing your arms.

“WHEN YOU START TO CRY!” Beau adds, attempting the same move and nearly tripping over the rope.

“IF YOU DON’T LOOK LIKE YOU SHOULD,” you both sing together now, jumping in sync, “YOU’VE GOT TO-”

“WHIP IT, WHIP IT, WHIP IT GOOD!”

You finish with a flourish, both of you breathing hard, jump ropes held high like you’ve just won Olympic gold.

There’s a moment of silence.

Then you and Beau collapse into laughter, dropping the ropes and leaning on each other for support.

“What,” Dean says slowly, “the actual fuck was that?”

“Legally Blonde: The Musical,” you gasp out between giggles. “Brooke Wyndham is an icon.”

“And when you said whipped into shape-”

“We just had to,” you finish together.

Dean continues to stare. “You two are insane.”

“Probably,” Beau agrees, still grinning.

“Definitely,” you add, not looking remotely apologetic.

Dean shakes his head, but he’s smiling now. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or concerned that you both knew all the words.”

“Be impressed,” Beau says. “We also know the choreography to ‘Omigod You Guys.’”

“We do NOT need to see that,” Dean says quickly.

“Your loss,” you say cheerfully. “It’s iconic.”

Beau wraps an arm around your shoulders, pulling you close and pressing a kiss to your temple. You lean into him naturally, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Like you’ve been doing it for years instead of months.

And Dean …

Dean has a moment.

He’s been Beau’s best friend for years. Has seen him date casually, has seen him hook up at parties, has seen him in relationships that lasted a few months before fizzling out. But this thing with you … it’s different.

It’s in the way Beau looks at you, like you hung the moon and stars. It’s in the way you know what he’s thinking before he says it. It’s in the stupid inside jokes and the synchronized musical numbers and the fact that Beau drove to your apartment in Cambridge just to bring you coffee before a tough rotation.

It’s in the way you saved his life, yes, but also in the way you keep saving it, every day, just by existing.

And Dean realizes, standing in a weight room at seven AM on a Saturday, watching his best friend and his girlfriend be ridiculous together, that you’re soulmates.

The thought hits him with unexpected force. He’s never believed in soulmates before — always thought it was romantic nonsense, something people made up to explain compatibility. But looking at you and Beau now, he can’t think of another word for it.

Whatever happened that night last February — the deer, the ice, the crash, the fact that you were on that exact stretch of highway at that exact moment — it wasn’t just coincidence.

It was fate.

It had to be.

Because the odds of everything aligning the way it did? Of you having the exact training needed to save him? Of you stopping when most people wouldn’t? Of Beau surviving injuries that should have killed him?

The odds were astronomical.

And yet here you both are.

“Dean?” Your voice pulls him from his thoughts. “You okay? You look weird.”

“I’m fine,” Dean says. His voice comes out rougher than intended. “Just thinking.”

“Dangerous,” Beau jokes, but he’s looking at Dean with concern now. “Seriously, man, what’s up?”

Dean opens his mouth. Closes it. How does he even put this into words?

“I just-” He stops. Tries again. “You two are it for each other, aren’t you?”

The question hangs in the air.

You and Beau look at each other. Something passes between you again — that silent communication that Dean’s starting to understand is just how you two operate.

“Yeah,” Beau says finally, turning back to Dean. “Yeah, we are.”

“I love him,” you add simply. “Like, scary amount. Forever amount.”

“I’m going to marry her,” Beau says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Probably not today, because I think she’d kill me if I proposed in a gym-”

“I absolutely would,” you confirm.

“-but someday. Definitely someday.”

Dean feels his throat get tight. “Good,” he manages. “That’s good.”

“Are you crying?” You ask, peering at him.

“No,” Dean says. He’s definitely about to cry. “Shut up.”

“Oh my god, you are!” Beau looks delighted. “Dean Di Laurentis, notorious womanizer and emotionally unavailable hockey player, is crying over our relationship!”

“I’m not crying. It’s allergies.”

“That’s not-”

Dean crosses the gym and pulls both of you into a hug, one arm around each of them. “I’m really glad you didn’t die,” he tells Beau.

“Me too, man,” Beau says, returning the hug. “Me too.”

“And I’m really glad you stopped,” Dean says to you. “That night. I’m really glad you stopped and saved him. Because I don’t know what I would’ve done if-” His voice cracks.

You squeeze him tighter. “I’m glad I stopped too.”

“You’re stuck with us now,” Dean continues. “You know that, right?”

“I can live with that,” you say softly.

You stand there for a moment, the three of you, holding onto each other in an empty weight room while early morning sunlight streams through the high windows.

Finally, Beau pulls back, wiping at his eyes. “Okay, enough emotions. We’re supposed to be working out.”

“Right,” you agree, also suspiciously misty-eyed. “Working out. Building strength. Whipping into shape.”

“Don’t,” Dean warns.

“We’ve got to-”

“No-”

“WHIP IT, WHIP IT, WHIP IT GOOD!” You and Beau shout together, dissolving into laughter again.

“I hate you both,” Dean says, but he’s grinning.

“No you don’t,” Beau says, slinging an arm around Dean’s shoulders.

“You love us,” you add, linking your arm through Dean’s other arm.

“Unfortunately,” Dean admits. “Now come on. If you two are done with your Broadway moment, Beau actually does need to get whipped into shape before camp starts.”

“I’m in great shape,” Beau protests.

“You’re in good shape,” you correct. “Great shape requires more work. Doctor’s orders.”

“You’re not my doctor.”

“I could be. Want me to check your reflexes?”

“That sounds like innuendo.”

“It wasn’t, but I like where your head’s at.”

Dean makes a strangled sound. “I did NOT need that mental image.”

“Then stop listening to our conversations,” Beau says reasonably.

“You’re having them three feet away from me!”

“Sounds like a you problem,” you say cheerfully.

The workout continues, but the energy has shifted. There’s something lighter about it now, something that feels like the future rather than the past.

Dean watches as Beau spots you during squats, his hands hovering near your waist, ready to catch you if needed. Watches as you correct Beau’s form on shoulder presses with the clinical precision of someone who knows exactly how bodies work. Watches as you both take a water break and Beau pulls you in for a kiss that’s probably too long for a public gym but that no one’s around to complain about.

And someday — maybe years from now, maybe at that wedding Dean is already planning in his head — he’s going to tell this story.

He’s going to tell everyone about the night Beau almost died. About the medical student who stopped to save him. About the months of recovery and the I Lived, Bitch party and the first kiss and the musical numbers in the gym.

He’s going to tell them about soulmates, about fate, about second chances.

And he’s going to tell them that he knew.

He knew from that moment in the weight room, watching them be ridiculous together, that you were forever.

And Dean allows himself to feel grateful. Grateful for black ice and bad timing and good Samaritans. Grateful for medical training and quick thinking and jump ropes in gyms. Grateful for musicals and inside jokes and the way love can find you in the darkest moments.

Grateful for second chances.

2 years. 730 days. 730 glances. 730 kisses. 730 smiles. 730 promises. The earth revolves around its sun twice in that frame. He, however, stood stagnant for the first time in 730 days– for he had lost his sun all together.  

Uzair couldn’t grasp when he had started taking her for granted but god, oh god, would he offer his bleeding heart at stake just to keep her. 

Month 18 [9:45PM] Baloch Haveli, Lyari – Karachi, Pakistan 

Y/N sat impatiently on Uzair’s bed, draped in a simple black saree dusted with faint gold flecks that caught weakly under the bedroom light. It was her mother’s saree; Uzair’s favorite. Tonight was supposed to be theirs. Y/N had finally completed her third year of medical studies, Rehman bhai’s years of labor within Lyari had finally begun bearing fruit, the kind sweet enough to let Uzair breathe on his own terms for once.

Yet somehow, he still couldn’t.

The room sat heavy beneath the suffocating heat. Lyari was notorious for its clammy nights, but this felt different… artificial… as though the resentment Uzair held was seeping into the hot air locked within. Uzair paced slowly-footsteps uneven against the floor, phone pressed tightly against his ear while the veins on his arms protruded, hinting at his agitation during the call. One moment he was still by the window, the next he turned sharply again, dragging frustrated fingers through his damp, humidity-clung hair before snapping at the voice on the other end.

His jaw remained locked, grinding his teeth to halt the frustration threatening to spill out of him. Each exhale grew sharper than the last. Y/N followed every movement from the edge of his bed, hands fidgeting on her lap. At first, she watched him with concern. Then slowly, quietly, she sank into herself in understanding.

She had lost him to someone else yet again.

Three weeks. Three weeks since they had been allowed uninterrupted time together, and even tonight, when the world had finally slowed enough to hand them a few hours of peace, she sat waiting for him to finally look at her.

His kurta clung to his back with sweat as he halted by the window once more, completely consumed by the conversation refusing to end. The pale light from his phone sharpened the exhaustion beneath his eyes. He never noticed her stand as she pushed herself off the bed quietly, her saree brushed faintly against the floor tiles as she walked toward the bathroom in resignation.

The flickering bathroom light stung, highlighting the taunting reality of her state. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her curls had long since fallen loose, softened by the stuffiness and hours of waiting. The glitter around her eyes no longer caught light the way it had earlier. Her lipstick had faded nearly two shades lighter than before-applied carefully in hopes of leaving traces of herself across Uzair’s skin. Maybe behind his ear; across his jaw if he was lucky enough.

But only her efforts remained visible and this time she didn’t bother fixing it. 

Quietly, she reached up to remove her jhumkas. The metal clinked sharply against the marble sink, the sound mocking her hope. Y/N paused for a moment, trying to find a sliver of light in the enclosing darkness that had started to grow over their bubble. Then her fingers drifted toward the delicate سُکون (sukoon) necklace resting against her neck. Her fingertips paused against the clasp. Uzair had fastened it on her birthday, fingers fumbling slightly while he avoided looking directly at her afterward. Safe haven. Security. That’s what he had accepted her as in his life.

Tonight, the chain felt sturdier than whatever held them together. She unclasped it slowly, wincing faintly when a strand of hair caught against the hook before slipping free.

From outside, she heard his curt “Khuda hafiz” followed by the rustle of fabric and the dull sound of pacing resuming almost immediately after. He was probably dragging his hands through his hair again, trying to regain control over whatever had stolen him away this time.

Y/N looked at herself one final time in the mirror. Less adorned now, easier to disappear into the night.

She stepped back into the room softly, and Uzair still hadn’t looked up. She made her way quietly toward the bedroom door, fingers wrapping carefully around the handle, hoping to slip away without interruption.

“Chalo. Waise hi time kaam hai.” Uzair directed, his eyes still fixed on his phone while his thumbs moved hurriedly across the screen. The collar of his kurta had darkened, a sign of his weariness, fabric wrinkled heavily around his forearm from how long he had held the phone there.

Y/N said nothing. Her fingers tightened around the handle again hoping to disappear. Only then did he finally look up.

“Y/N?” agitation still lingered beneath his voice.

“Hm?” she answered softly, turning toward him.

His gaze dropped immediately toward her hand curled around the handle.

“Kahan jaa rahi ho?”

“Ghar” she admitted quietly.

He looked at her. Really looked. Her hair, once curled neatly down her back, was now dull. A few strands frizzed around her face. Her lipstick had nearly disappeared. The glitter around her eyes no longer caught the light in his periphery.

Then his gaze shifted lower. Her neck was bare. His necklace was gone. Something about its absence irritated him even more.

“Tum kahin nahi jaa rahi ho.” The firmness came slower now.

“Uzair, main-”

“Hum dono bahar jaane wale hain.” He adjusted his damp collar absentmindedly while stepping toward her, as though the night could still be salvaged if they simply continued where they had left off.

“Der ho gayi hai…” 

“Kya?” he halted at her mutter.

“Der ho gayi hai.” a pause.

She pulled the bedroom door open not wanting to explain herself further, but Uzair reached it before she could leave, pushing it shut with a sharp thud against the frame.

“Yeh kya befazool ka natak kar rahi ho? Jaa rahe hain na bahar?” he snapped at her, frustrated, as though she were the difficult one.

Y/N finally broke “Nahi jana mujhe bahar! Samajh nahi aa raha ya phir behre ho?”

“Kyun nahi jana? Huh? 5 minute kisi se baat kya kar li kaam ke baare mein, tum apna chehra mukaar logi?!”

“5 minute?! Yeh sab 5 minute ki rukawat thi?” She flailed her hands around the room to highlight their disheveled state.

“To agar mera kuch kaam aa gaya, usme kya masla hai tumhe? Abhi bhi jaa sakte hain bahar… yahi chahti thi na tum?” His voice rose in agitation, reminding her that this had been her plan.

“Ehsaan mat karo mujh pe. Bheek nahi maangi thi maine tumse… waqt guzarne ka mann tha, lekin tumhe fursat kahan hai humare liye?!” she countered, matching his level, yet shocked by his nerve. How dare he?

“Fursat hai, issi liye tumhare saamne abhi khada hua hun.” He stepped closer to her in defiance, narrowing his eyes, daring her to continue this fight.

“Mat khade raho phir! Waise bhi kya haasil-”

“Minaat kyun karwa rahi ho?! Raat khatam nahi hui hai–tumhe samajh nahi aa raha?! Thodi si der kya ho gayi… main nahi kar sakta tha isko ignore.” His tone rose while he attempted to bargain weakly.

“Kar sakte the, Uzair.”

“Tumhe zyada pata hai?” He snapped at her audacity.

She blinked, wounded by his insinuation; This conversation was spiraling.

“Nahi… mujhe kuch nahi pata hai, lekin itna zaroor bol sakti hun ki tum humein…” she pointed between their heavy souls, “…prioritize nahi karte.”

“Ky-” He faltered at her accusation, eyebrows drawn in disbelief. “Kaam sambhal raha tha– isme mujhse kaunsi galti ho gayi? Batao.” He seethed.

She knew he wouldn’t listen to her words; far too prideful to engage, so she retreated. As always.

“Kuch nahi hai batane ko. Main…” she sighed and nodded apologetically, “main jaa rahi hun apne ghar…baad main baat kar lenge… khayal rakhna.” She crossed past his shoulder and reached for the door handle.

“Zyada nata-”

“Uzair, bas!” she cried “Bohot ho gaya. Nahi hota mujhse ab intezaar.” admitting agonizingly, blurry eyes meeting his unfocused ones. “Zindagi ruk gayi hai meri tumhare peeche bhaag bhaag ke. Thak gayi hun main!” She finally faced him, pleading for relief.

“Y/N-” he tried calling for her, shocked at her outburst.

“Aur kitna wait karun main…” Her lips trembled, hoping he’d understand her plight. 

Something flickered across his face at her admission: worry, fear. What did she mean? Red tinted his gaze as he stared at her worn-out frame, struggling to make sense of the pain she was insisting upon. Wait? Wait for what? He had always been there for her- day and night. Whenever she needed him. What more could she want from him? Everything was hers already.

These thoughts ached inside him, fueling his growing animosity for the wasted night even more.  How could she dismiss his efforts so easily…especially when he was trying to make up for their lost time. Before his heart could make sense of anything, his ego took over, twisting her words into a misunderstanding he no longer wanted to address.

“Theek hai. Jana hai to jao. Main nahi rokunga.”

She finally took a breath in relief. He heard her for the first time.

“Lekin tum aaj gayi, to phir wapas aane ki jurat mat karna.” He shrugged detachedly, hiding his trembling hands in the cold pockets of his kurta.

Y/N’s eyes widened at his ultimatum. Did he just…He did not mean that. He couldn’t have. 

“Uzair tum yeh k-” she tried to amend but was only met with his averted gaze and taut shoulders. 

Uzair couldn’t have cared less to hear her out. 

Her posture stiffened at his uninterest. He was far too old to be playing these games with her but if he wanted to end it right here-right now…so be it. 

“Theek hai. Behtar hoga,” she agreed curtly. This was it. “Ab tumhe apna keemti waqt mujh pe zaya nahi karna padega…” she noted while exiting his room without turning back.

Uzair felt paralyzed at those words. He hadn’t expected her to concede… shit.

The door remained slightly ajar, swaying faintly as the sound of her heels faded farther into the distance. He simply stood there, eyes foggy yet fixed on the spot where she had stood seconds ago. His heart recoiled-feet scrambling past his barricading bedroom door, hoping to catch the glimmer of his favorite saree and drag her back to him- beg for her forgiveness, but he was met only by the flickering candlelight decorating the haveli hallways.

His body had moved too late.

She was gone.

Y/N had left…and he had let her.

Month 19 [Day 30] Lyari – Karachi, Pakistan

A month had passed by since that night. A month since he had seen her. heard her. held her. Uzair hadn’t been functioning well since that hour. Restlessness clinging to his nerves- eyes frantically searching for her in everything he did. 

Walking through the market with his bhabhi? He would lead himself astray–stopping at the shops she was a regular at. 

Driving past any hospital? He would slow down his jeep, hoping to catch her walking home after class. 

Playing football with Faisal? He would miss the goal. Body unmoving; convinced she was nearby because he was being drawn by her perfume–lillies.

Uzair’s descent to madness didn’t go un-noticed. His friends found him taking detours during their drives- conveniently driving past her streets. Rehman bhai often caught him writing scattered syllables on work order receipts: her name etched in his conscience. Ulfat bhabhi noticed his worst: when the jittery tremors tugged him to her college. Every Wednesday. 6:30pm. Sharp. Making him wait outside the rusted metal gates–a make shift hurdle– just for a glimpse of her. A fleeting chance to have her back. Yet when his drunk form was dragged back into the haveli on those nights…Ulfat knew he had lost himself again. 

Most nights he’d settle in his balcony, after the familial commotion had hushed. A cup of chai rotting cold on the table as two cookies lay limp in the tray–as though the accessories were chosen to lure her back to him. He’d wait. Patiently. Succumbing to his guilt. Legs crossed on the sofa, cushion hugging tightly against his gnawing heart like a hopeful kid–fighting sleep in fear that he would miss her in case she did come back, to him the peace offering, during the silent hours. But she never did. And by dawn the chai and cookies were cleared–as was his himmat. 

Uzair was running desperate. Her untouched jewellery glimmering under the dull bathroom light haunted his every sleep. How had he said those words so easily? Why didn’t he take them back? What else could he do? He would give her space - he would give her anything, dammit, if only she would let him. If only he could find her again.

He had left no stone unturned in his search across Lyari, seeking her warmth like a shivering puppy, but it was as though she had vanished. Where was she? 

He needed her.He needed her.He needed her. 

And if there was a god kind enough to answer his every waking, pitiful prayer, then Uzair’s sukoon would be brought back to him.

Month 20 [Day 18] Lyari- Karachi, Pakistan

Wednesday [7:30PM]

Uzair sat on the veranda floor, his back pressed against the couch for support. It was the first Wednesday he hadn’t rushed to her college…His energy had long since faded. He nursed his second glass of whisky (a surprisingly small amount for him these days) while mindlessly turning her necklace between his fingers, its engraving mocking under the setting sun. Another month had passed without her. He wondered if she missed him as much as he did. Did she lie awake at night, haunted by their words? Maybe she had stood outside the guarded haveli gates, unable to make herself step inside.

Rehman bhai and Ulfat bhabhi exchanged quiet whispers behind him, glancing wary looks in his direction, but Uzair remained lost to it all. He sat numb to his surroundings, deciding that his sorrows were worth more than reality. 

The haveli gates creaked as Donga’s entrance boomed across the open area where the family was dispersing. He whispered short salutations across while making a headway straight towards Uzair, settling on the couch against which the lonesome boy was frozen. Donga tilted his head in curiosity as he took in his friend’s unmoving state. He gave a quick, unamused, glance over to a retreating Rehman before grabbing Uzair into a chokehold and vigorously shaking him around.

“Ullu ke pathe, nikal iss dukh se-kitna rona dhona kaarega tu?” he loudly complained while giving Uzair a slap against the back of his head. Uzair just sat there, allowing himself to be swayed. Donga let go of the chokehold at Uzair’s lack of resistance with a sigh.

“Aa jaye gi bhabhi… chinta mat kar…” his voice softened. “Chal, bahar chalte hain.” He nudged while peering down to meet the wilted gaze staring blankly ahead. “Woh angrezi mein kehte hain na…‘my treat.’ Waahi hoga.” he coaxed further, forcing a cheeky grin and clapping his back in encouragement , hoping to break Uzair’s trance. Uzair reluctantly nodded and stood up. Maybe going away from Lyari for a bit wouldn’t be too terrible. Maybe his luck would finally shine. Maybe he’d come across her.

“Waise bha-” Donga continued, helping Uzair stand up when he was interrupted. Hamza stumbled through the entrance–wide-eyed. Breathless. panicked. His chest heaved violently beneath his kurta as he tried to find Rehman bhai, but Uzair barely noticed any commotion. His eyes locked onto the small red-tinted card crushed tightly in Hamza’s fist.

Something inside Uzair was unsettled.What happened? Did Hamza find her? Was she finally back? Was that a note from her?

He slowly stepped toward Hamza, unable to quiet the frenzy building inside him. “Woh kya hai, Hamza?” he asked softly.

Hamza instinctively tried hiding the card behind his back. Unmissed. Why would Hamza do that?

“T-tere li-”

“Hamza.” Uzair stepped closer. “Haath mein kya hai?” His voice came quieter this time.

Hamza looked toward Donga for help, subtly shaking his head no, as if warning him the conversation waiting ahead was not meant for Uzair to hear. Donga immediately picked up on it. Uzair stood between the two scheming men, eyes still glued to the red-colored paper hiding in plain sight.

“Uzair bhai, iska chhoro na, hum cha-” The glare Uzair shot at him was enough. Stay out of this.

“Mu band rakh.” Uzair snapped, gaze never leaving Hamza’s.

Hamza’s grip tightened around the now-crushed card, palm growing sweaty beneath it. Uzair continued stalking toward him slowly, hand extending out.

“Bhai, meri baat sun le-” Hamza retreated backwards. One step. Then another. Trying to create space between them.

“Kya chhupa raha hai tu mujhse?” Uzair’s agitation heightened with every step forward.

“Tere liye nahi hai, baat samajh” Hamza insisted weakly. But Uzair had reached his limit.

He grabbed Hamza by the collar roughly and shoved him against the nearest brick wall of the veranda. Hamza’s breath hitched. Uzair stared into his dilated eyes, already knowing his best friend was hiding something pivotal. His grip tightened against the collar as he tried snatching the paper away, but Hamza quickly hid his hand behind his back.

That only enraged Uzair further. “Hamze.” His jaw clenched. “Haath dikha.”

“Main nahi kar sakta… tere liye nahi hai yeh.”

“Yeh kya bakwaas laga rakhi hai tune?!” Uzair barked, shoving him harder into the wall. “Itni jaldi mein kyun bhaga andar aur card kyun chhupa raha hai?!”

Yet Hamza remained still. “Rehman bh-”

“Nahi hai yahan. Ab bol.”

“Uzair, please meri-”

“Dikha mujhe!”

Uzair pressed him harder against the wall, forearm tight across his neck before finally snatching the godforsaken paper from Hamza’s hand.

Hamza immediately tried grabbing it back. Too late.

Uzair stepped back slowly, letting go of his captive as he unfolded the crumpled red card. Donga glanced toward Hamza, ready to intervene, but Hamza widened his eyes sharply at him. No.Not now.

“Uzair, woh Rehman bhai ke liye ha-” Hamza tried again desperately.

“Bol m-” Uzair’s words died the second the card opened fully in his hands. Gold lettering sewn delicately across the center.

Y/N

Weds

Fawad.

Y/N. His Y/N. Weds…

The world went silent. Uzair stood frozen. Chest tight, breath hitched, fingers gripping the invitation for support. His heart had stopped, yet his mind ran rampant trying to make sense of the horror before him. Short breaths pulsed unevenly through him as the growing hollowness slowly spread through his being.

The card trembled faintly in his hands as his eyes dragged over the gold lettering again. Slower. Frequent. Burning. As if the words would disappear if he stared hard enough. Hamza noticed immediately, stepping forward to steady him, but halted the second he met Uzair’s ruined eyes.

“Y-yeh…” his voice cracked softly. “Kab?” ache carried through his tone.

“Aaj…” Hamza swallowed.

Uzair felt his nerves tremble violently beneath his skin, mind incapable of accepting that his sukoon could ever do something like this.

Two months. Two months of waiting. Aimless drives. Bloodshot eyes fixed on empty roads. He had mapped out the entire land for her. Had not slept for her. Had barely lived. Only for the hope he followed to lead him here?

No. Nononononono. He wouldn’t let this happen. 

Before either of them could stop him, Uzair shoved past Hamza and stormed toward his jeep. “Uzair!” Donga shouted after him.

The engine roared through the haveli grounds as Uzair tore into the streets, every thought leading back to her.

She would not walk towards that nikkah. Not unless it was him waiting at the altar. Not while he still had so much left to say. And not before she listened.

[8:45PM]--Karachi, Pakistan

Y/N sat before her vanity, wrapped in a soft maroon joda embroidered with gold that caught beneath the warm wedding lights. The scent of fresh lilies lingered around her as she adjusted her dupatta over her head, dark mehendi staining her hands, his name hidden within the patterns only meant for him.

For a moment, she truly looked at herself in the mirror. Adorned like every bride. Beautiful. Ready. Yet the ache settling deep within her chest didn’t let her believe that she was truly getting married.

Every vow, every prayer, every promise she had ever held carried his name. The card should have said the same, but it couldn’t. Not after that night. She hadn’t spoken his name in a long time now, choosing instead to bury every memory of him somewhere deep enough that it wouldn’t haunt her- because acknowledging him meant accepting that she had truly lost him.

Still, she remembered his words clearly. Spoken so easily. So dismissively. And no matter how desperately she tried to erase them, her rooh still ached for his warmth.

The realization tightened painfully around her chest as guilt slowly began to set in. Everything she had spent so long trying to build with him was now just an illusion- an alternate reality where she never reached.  

A shaky breath escaped her lips. Her fingers curled tightly around the edge of the vanity as her thoughts spiraled faster than her mind could contain. The room suddenly felt too congested, too loud despite the silence ringing in her ears. Tears blurred her vision as panic settled beneath her skin. Maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t destined for this night because she was losing herself again…to him. 

Her bedroom door slammed open, the sound tearing through her thoughts and making her flinch in surprise. She glanced her teary gaze toward the mirror to check who had barged in—only to meet a dark pair of eyes staring back at her.

His eyes.

Uzair Baloch.

Her breath hitched. For a second, she could only stare at his reflection, her chest heaving beneath the heavy jewelry resting against her skin. He looked almost unreal standing there, like a manifestation of every thought she was trying to forget.

Her grip loosened from the vanity. She squeezed her eyes shut, covering them with the heels of her palms as she shook her head in quiet dismissal. The faint tingling of her bridal jewelry echoed softly through the room, grounding her just enough.

This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

She sighed, hoping to clear away the tricks her mind was playing, but when her eyes flickered back to the mirror and caught his, she knew this wasn’t her imagination anymore. Her eyes widened at his looming frame, hair longer now, shaggy, as if a testament of his chaos. She tracked her view back to his tired face, eyes unrelenting of their storm. She hadn’t moved, couldn’t bring herself to, just stared at him through the reflection.

“U-”

“Tum shaadi kar rahi ho?” The suffocating silence shattered between them, his voice rough and breathless.

Y/N remained still, not trusting herself enough to stand, so she merely nodded meekly.

He stiffened at her confirmation-unbelievable. “Nahi.” he ordered

Y/N’s  breath caught, brows furrowing in confusion.What was he talking about?

He sniffled softly, shaking his head as though trying to reject the reality in front of him before taking another step closer. Y/N slowly turned in her seat, watching him stalk toward her, confusion deepening with every uneven breath that left him.

“Uzair?”

“Chalo, ghar chalo…” he beckoned impatiently. “Tum yeh shaadi nahi kar sakti.” He still refused to properly look at her, his gaze restless, avoiding hers entirely while Y/N sat frozen, unable to process the absurdity of what he was saying.

“Yeh kya-”

He finally looked at her. Eyes fierce. Unafraid

“Sunai nahi deta? Uttho, ghar chalo.” He pointed at her yet she didn't break, irritation washing over her

“Kya bol rahe ho tum? Kaunsa ‘ghar’? Andar ghuse kaise tum?” she retorted in agitation 

His jaw tightened instantly, tension coursing through his nerves -not appreciating her accusations as though he hadn't just given up everything to take her back- why was she turning this whole ordeal against him?

“Humara ghar…” he reminded firmly. “Haveli.”

A humorless scoff left her lips. “Wo mera ghar nahi hai.” Her voice hardened. “Na kabhi tha. Na kabhi hoga.”

“Kya bakwaas kar rahi ho-”His tone sharpened immediately at her declaration. Because in his mind, the haveli had always belonged to her.

“Pagal ho gaye ho tum?!” she finally snapped, pushing herself to her feet and stepping toward him. “Kamre se bahar niklo.” she pressed, not in the mood to deal with his bullshit. 

“Mein pa-”

“Bahar!” she yelled at him, grabbing his arm to force him toward the door, but before she could move him, his hand wrapped tightly around her wrist, pulling her back until barely inches remained between them.

The fire in his eyes was long gone, replaced with something unidentifiable. “Kyun…” he whispered looking down at her glossy eyes- dropping his heated guard. 

“Kya kyun?!”  she pressed immediately, searching his face for the arrogance he had walked in with, but she couldn’t find it anymore.

“Kyun kar rahi ho yeh shaadi?” His hand still burned against her wrist.

“Meri maarzi, rishta aaya tha, acha lad-”

“Jhoot..”

“Kya matlab jhoot?!” she snapped, yanking against his hold. “Tumhe kya pata hoga?! Uss raat tumne mujhe nikala tha!” She tried pulling her wrist free again, but his grip only tightened.

“Do manhiney…puri layari ukhardi tumhare liye ki pata nahi kiss kone mein tum mujhe wapis miljaogi” he admitted painfully, his grief stricken eyes never leaving hers

Her words died in her throat, anger simmering down as she witnessed him surrender. Why was he telling her this? Why would it matter now?

“Galti ho gayi thi…” he whispered hoarsely. “Maafi mangna chahta tha-”

“Bas, Uzair.”

“Mera sukoon cheen liya tumne jis raat tum chali gayi.” Y/N’s face twisted instantly.

“C-chali gayi?” she repeated in disbelief. “Tumne mujhe jaane ko bola tha!”

“Ho gayi galti mujhse!” he snapped suddenly, his voice rising again. “Mujhe pachtawa hai uss baat ka! Har roz kosta hoon apne aap ko!”

“To apne ghar jake pachtao, meri zindagi aur maat kharab karo!” she tugged her gripped wrist again, finally setting herself free

He blinked at her audacity- her insinuation that he was the reason for her short-falling life, that it was him for all her failures

“Apni zindagi tum khud kharab kar rahi ho!” he fought harder trying to make her realize that this marriage would ruin her even more

“Tumhe kyun fikr hai?!”

“Mohabbat karta hun tumse.” he admitted angrily, inching closer towards her.

She scoffed. “Kaisi mohabbat? Woh mohabbat jisme tum mujhe apna waqt nahi de paate the? Ya phir woh jisme tumne mujhe kabhi suna hi nahi?”

Her lips trembled, eyes welling up, as she took a small step back. “Nafrat ke layak hai tumhari mohabbat…”

His heart seized. The tears gathering in her eyes hurt far more than her words ever could. Because for the first time, he realized she looked at his love and saw nothing worth fighting for.

“Aise maat bolo. Kya nahi kiya tumhare liye maine, hm? Apna pura wajood tumahre saamne rakh diya tha maine” he emphasized “Chalo mere saath, tumhari haar bat sununga, tu-main-” he stepped closer, unable to pour his feelings into words frustration bleeding through. 

He grasped her mehndi clad hands again, placing them right above his staggering heart. “Mere dil ki dhadkan ho tum…yeh kya rahega tumhare bina?..” tears spilled through her eyes as she took in his every confirmation, his every loyal word, hand clutching his creased kurta as he continued “main wada karta hun…baas tum he kush dekhna chahta hun– aapni sukoon ko wapis lana chahta hun”

“Kya faida iss wade ka?!” she cried. “Jab main roz tumhara intezaar karti thi tab kahan thi yeh mohabbat?” Her hand tightened against his kurta. “Kaise khush reh sakti hoon main tumhare saath agar tum mere saath rahoge hi nahi?” The words struck him harder than anything she'd said that night. Because her anger had been replaced by fear. Years of it.

“Aaj ho...” her voice cracked. “Kal nahi.”

Uzair froze. Y/N shook her head, fresh tears sliding down her cheeks.

“Kya guarantee hai, Uzair?” she whispered brokenly. “Kya guarantee hai ke tum mere saath hamesha ke liye hoge?” Silence swallowed the room. And suddenly he understood. This was never only about the missed time. It was about every conversation that felt like it could have been their last. 

Y/N let out a tired broken laugh. “Main aisi zindagi nahi bita sakti.” Her fingers loosened against his kurta. “Tum gaye toh mera kya hoga?” she questioned- trying to make him realize that his promises fell flat in front of their crumbling reality. 

Uzair’s anger showed his rational yet again this night- not willing to negotiate her loss “ek muka to do-”

“Muka tha! Pechele do saal se muka tha! Tumne wo gawaya-” she jabbed her finger against his rising chest “aur kya chahate ho tum mujshe- kya hai mere paas tume dene ko?!” 

“Maat karo yeh shaadi.” he begged harshly, eyes frantically searching hers. 

“Uza-” she tried to call in exhaustion

“Marr jaunga main!” The room fell silent at his pain and vulnerability. Uzair's chest heaved. “Nahi jee paunga apne aap ke saath...” he whispered brokenly. “Khali hoon main...”

She looked at him with a hard-stare–why now? Why had he chosen to say this now? 2 years. 730 days. 730 opportunities he was given to reassure Y/N that she was his for life. Why? now. 

Anger. Hurt. Remorse bubbled as she struck back “Marro.” The word left her lips in a whisper. Then louder. “Jao. Marro phir!” Her palms slammed against his chest. again and again and again “Kyun khade ho mere saamne?!” Another shove. “Jao na!” The lilies slipped from her haath phool one by one, scattering across the floor. Glass cracked beneath their feet as part of her chooda shattered from the force of her movements, but she didn't stop. Couldn't stop.  Her tear-filled gaze never met him as she kept pushing him. Kept hitting him. Forcing months of grief, years of disappointment on to him with every hit.

And Uzair let her. He didn't stop her. Didn't grab her wrists. Didn't move away. He simply stood there and took it. As though he deserved every blow.

“Aab batane ka kya faida?! Gaya humara waqat! Nahi wapis aayga-” she rambled as she continued to trash against him, tired–her light dimming.

Uzair inhaled sharply before finally catching her moving wrists, gently lowering them to her sides. She didn't resist. Didn't have the strength to as she sobbed helpless.

His arms wrapped around her before he could stop himself. One hand cradled the back of her head, pressing her gently against his chest while the other rubbed slow circles across her back.

And Y/N broke. She wept into his warmth–mouring what could have been tonight. 

The duo remained frozen, unable to move from each other's grasp, longing for this moment for months now. Uzair held her tighter as though keeping her close would maybe make her feel the true essence and worth of all the words he had confessed tonight. 

The heavy silence stretched between them. Resting his chin on top of her dupatta-covered head, Uzair glanced down at the destruction surrounding them. Her makeup ruined. Lilies scattered across the floor. The scent of them slowly fading with every shaky inhale. Broken pieces of chooda glinting beneath the wedding lights.

Uzair swallowed hard, maybe in guilt, maybe in exhaustion. Maybe because for the first time in his life, he had no idea how to fix something. He let out a deep sigh and whispered a final plea in the air “Y/N…” the words lost in defeat

Y/N hiccupped against his chest. The night that was meant to celebrate her future had instead forced her to mourn the one she had always wanted.  Her throat burning raw from all the words. She didn't fight his hold. Didn't fight his plea. She couldn’t. He had taken her very last breath. 

“Nahi hai aur himmat.” she whispered hoarsely 

 “Please. Jaane do mujhe.”

Uzair shut his eyes…knowing it was his time to retreat. He could not believe that loving him had become a burden to her; not when he had spent every waking moment of the past two years trying to brighten the only life that fueled his own. How could he let her go though? After everything…

He pulled away, looking at her streaked face intently. God, even now, looking at her face brought back his sukoon. He gently wiped her face, erasing their history one tear at a time. She let him. He tucked the fallen pieces from her bun which framed her anguished face behind her ear. She let him. He lifted her chin upwards, moving her face to meet his, both of their gazes bare of all their burdens. 

Y/N was a bride but not his bride…

Uzair took hold of her now-empty wrist, his touch cold, as he led her towards her bedroom door, his steps crunching over the glass of her broken bangles.

Y/N looked at him warily, panic settling at his unknown movements. She tugged at his hand to free herself, but his grip only lingered.

“U-uzair” she called out, continuing to tug as he led her through her home’s hallway.

“Y-yeh kya kar rahe ho tum, Uzair… mera haath chodo” she repeated as he weakly dragged her down the stairs, through the awaiting crowd.

Her fear grew as he remained silent—passing the staring aunties, passing Hamza, who had followed his best friend, helpless, unable to stop him either.

“Uzair! Pl-” her words stumbled as he finally released her hand, placing her at the edge of the embroidered carpet that led to her mandap.

“Main tumhara hoon. Hamesha tha. Hamesha rahunga” he reminded her, broken. And she couldn’t do anything but stand in the weight of it.

“Jao. Karlo nikaah. Nahi rok paaya tumhe…” he whispered as Hamza stepped in, trying to pull him back faintly, “lekin yaad rakhna… haveli ke darwaze hamesha khule rahenge… aur main intezaar karta rahunga.”

“Ghar hai woh tumhara.” he declared in finality, glancing down at her deeply stained mehndi hands, as Hamza pulled him away.

Y/N followed their every last move… until his presence disappeared behind the lavishly decorated gates.

And he did not look back. Not once.

Not knowing Y/N’s mehendi had hidden his name all along.

⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂ ⠂⠄⠄⠂☆

goodnight guys, im seriously hibernating after this phew

Nafisa swatted sharply at your hand as you reached up to scratch the bridge of your nose, her expression one of focused concentration.

"Hilna band karegi?!" she snapped, brandishing a liquid eyeliner like a scalpel.

You had been held hostage in the velvet-cushioned chair in front of her vanity mirror for the past forty-five minutes, undergoing a transformation that felt more like a reclamation project.

First, she had wrestled your hair into effortless beach waves that tumbled over your shoulders in glossy, textured coils, a look that required a dizzying array of tools and hair sprays to appear natural. Now, she was deep in the trenches of your face, working a brand of magic that made you feel like a stranger to yourself.

"Aur kitni partein chadhayegi tu?" you grumbled, squinting against the bright ring light that made your retinas ache.

From her sprawled position on the bed, Sana chimed in between the rhythmic shutters of her phone camera as she snapped a series of selfies.

"Aur kya! Meri baby toh bare-faced hi itni katilana lagti hai...I mean, Katrina Kaif who?" she teased, blowing a dramatic, pouting kiss in your direction. You managed a small, lopsided smile and threw a flying kiss back, momentarily forgetting the strict no movement policy.

Nafisa let out a sharp, derisive huff as she blended a smudge of shadow.

"Teri baby ke aankhon ke neeche gaddhe hain because she is busy sulking over a sadak-chaap gunda who does not deserve even a second of her precious time," she remarked, her voice dripping with the kind of brutal honesty only a best friend can wield.

"Nafisa!" you hissed, but she merely leaned in closer.

"Maine kaha na, hilna band kar!"

After a few more seconds of brushwork, Nafisa finally stepped back, exhaling a sigh of triumph. Sana let out a long, appreciative whistle as she caught sight of your reflection and even Nafisa looked proud of her handiwork.

Makeup wasn't exactly a foreign concept to you. Lately, you had become quite adept at using concealer as a mask to hide the exhaustion and the hollowed-out look that had become your constant companion. But this, this was an entirely different caliber of artifice.

The look was a sultry, sophisticated smokey-eye that transformed your gaze into something dangerous and deep. She had used a gradient of charcoal and espresso browns, blending them outward into a seamless haze that made your eyes appear larger and more piercing.

To balance it, she had opted for a muted, velvet-finish nude lip that complemented your skin tone without competing for attention.

You looked vibrantly alive.

You were dressed in a pair of dark flared jeans and a black kurti that functioned more like a fitted top, hugging your silhouette like a second skin. It clung to your waist and highlighted the swell of your breasts in a way that felt tantalisingly bold yet grounded.

You felt exposed, vulnerable in your own skin, yet there was an undeniable surge of confidence as you caught your reflection. You had finished the ensemble with heavy silver jhumkas that chimed with every movement and a stack of silver bangles on one wrist.

"Tu inn nikkame ladko ko chodh, mujhse hi shaadi karle," Sana said, leaning slightly forward to admire the view.

You turned around and winked at her, "Tere saath toh main aur bhi bohot kuch kar lungi, meri jaan!"

Nafisa snorted, rolling her eyes as she began packing away her brushes. "Yeh sab Lebanese harkatein mere kamre mein nahi," she remarked dryly, though the corner of her mouth twitched.

Sana immediately lunged for Nafisa, pulling her into a hug and nudging her shoulder playfully.

"Jealous mat ho jaana, tujhe bhi threesome mein include kar lenge!" she declared before planting a loud, obnoxious kiss on Nafisa's cheek. Nafisa swatted her away with an indignant harrumph, as all three of you dissolved into giggles.

"One look at you, and Zaid would be barking," Nafisa predicted and Sana immediately began making barking sounds, sending you doubling over in a fit of laughter that made your stomach ache.

Yesterday, after you had finally escaped your grandparents' barrage of inquisitive, hopeful questions by providing the most frustratingly vague answers possible, you had bolted to your room to call Sana.

At first, she had been convinced you were playing a cruel, late April Fool's joke. "April kab ka nikal gaya," she had deadpanned over the phone, her skepticism thick. It wasn't until you sent a screenshot of Zaid's contact info that the reality finally settled in.

The moment she realised you weren't pranking her, she had let out a squeal so high-pitched and ear-piercing that you had been forced to pull the phone away from your ear to save your hearing.

"Aisi tadakti-bhadakti tea in person deni chahiye!" she had shrieked before abruptly cutting the call.

You knew exactly what that meant.

You didn't even bother putting your phone down before you started heading toward the kitchen to prep for the inevitable invasion, gathering snacks and putting the kettle on for tea.

True to form, exactly ten minutes later, Sana's car was screeching into your driveway. She wasn't alone, Nafisa had been drafted into the mission with speed.

Once they were settled in your room, the floodgates opened. You divulged every detail, the aesthetic cafe, the long-overdue conversation where you talked your heart out and the way he had dropped you home.

You showed them the flowers and the miniature version of the pink teddy bear, though you carefully omitted the part about Uzair's intercepted phone call, keeping that piece of truth tucked away for now.

"Honestly, ab toh main uspe gussa bhi nahi hoon, for leaving without saying goodbye back then," Sana admitted, poking the plush fur of the miniature bear.

"Usne tumhare bachon ke naam already plan kar liye hain," Nafia remarked, her voice flat but her eyes gleaming with a knowing look.

You felt the heat rise in your cheeks as you tried to brush off the intensity of their focus. "You guys are overreacting! It was just a friendly meeting."

Nafisa looked at you judgementally.

"Overreacting? The boy only remembered  your number after so many years. He's been rejecting girls left and right and only agreed to a match when he heard it was you. He held himself accountable, he apologised, and he bought a specific, symbolic gift. An emotionally mature man in this economy? Bro, you better lock him down."

Sana nodded vigorously in agreement. "Lock him down kya, woh toh already taiyaar hai! Bachpan se hi isse apni begum maanta aa raha hai."

"And you are wasting your time over that roadside Romeo?" Nafisa added, her tone sharpening as she made a pointed reference to Uzair.

The name felt like a bruise and you were about to offer a weak, reflexive protest when Sana clapped her hands together, effectively cutting you off and shifting the energy of the room.

"We need a proper plan," she declared, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper.

"For what?"

"To murder that good-for-nothing—" Nafisa started but Sana held up a hand to silence her.

"Not now, babes. Usko hum baad mein dekh lenge. We have much more important things to do right now," she said, casting a long, appraising look at your current state.

You didn't even have time to ask for clarification before the two of them were hauling you off the bed and toward the door. The next thing you knew, you were being bundled into the car and dragged toward the mall.

By the time you reached the sixth store, your arms had started to ache due to being hoisted in and out of changing rooms. Yet, the discomfort was a small price to pay for the fun you were having, which lately, had been absent from your life for more days than you cared to count.

Watching Sana and Nafisa was a spectacle in itself.

Sana was currently parading outside the trial room in a vibrant, emerald green jumpsuit, twirling until she was dizzy, making exaggerated pouts while Nafisa was right behind her, adjusting the fall of the dress she was wearing with the critical eye of a stylist. For a change, even her stern exterior had cracked into a wide, triumphant grin.

Seeing them so happy, their faces glowing with nothing more complicated than the thrill of a good find, made a quiet resolve crystallise in your chest. You made a vow, that tomorrow was only going to be about them.

Your friends.

The people who, apart from your family, had been the scaffolding holding you up while your world crumbled.

As the day stretched on, you consciously chose to stop drowning in the guilt of your departure from the Haveli. The faces of Ulfat and Rehman and the innocent laughter of the children you had practically helped raise, often haunted your quietest moments. You hadn't stepped foot back in that house since shifting to your grandparents' residence, terrified that the mere sight of him would pull you back into a vortex of pain.

But today, you pushed those ghosts back into the shadows. You refused to let the weight of who you left behind tarnish the joy of the people who were currently standing right beside you. Today, the Haveli was another world, and you were a traveler who had finally found an oasis.

You also decided to shrug off the invisible mantle of your grandparents' expectations. It was a heavy, suffocating pressure but you chose to ignore the ticking clock of their wishes for a few hours.

Most importantly, you swore to stop dwelling on your insecurities and on Uzair.

Every time a tall, broad-shouldered man passed by or the scent of sandalwood wafted through the aisles, your heart would perform a treacherous, sickening leap.

You fought the urge to look for his shadow in the crowds. You focused instead on the weight of the shopping bags in your hands and the vibrant energy of your friends, trying to convince yourself that you were finally free of his orbit.

But some things were easier said than done.

"Can you stop hitting me!" Zaid yelped, his voice cracking slightly as he performed a series of uncoordinated dodges to escape Sana's relentless onslaught.

Sana was making ample use of her heavy sling bag, swinging it with such ardour that it would have made a seasoned mace-wielder proud. Every thud of the bag against Zaid's shoulder was punctuated by his indignant shrieks.

"Teri toh aur kutai honni chahiye, saale dramebaaz! Bina btaye Dubai bhag gaya tha!" she yelled, her words cutting through the cacophony of the fairground.

She took another wide swing, which Zaid narrowly avoided by ducking behind a popcorn stand.

The onlookers had started to cast bewildered, judgmental glances at your group, making you wince in embarrassment. Nafisa stood a few feet apart, her posture rigid and her expression screaming, 'I am absolutely not with them.'

You and Nafisa were the only two people relegated to witness this one-sided boxing match in its entirety. The rest of your group had scattered into the landscape of the ground.

Javed, Sana's boyfriend, was currently anchored in a long line to secure seven tickets for the "Breakdance", a ride that was essentially a spinning death trap designed to test the limits of one's internal organs. Meanwhile, Nisha had dragged Yusuf towards a vibrant stall draped in shimmering glass bangles that caught the artificial glare of the neon lights.

"Bhaga nahi tha main, mere ammi abbu mujhe ghaseet kar le gye thay!" Zaid protested, his hands raised in a futile defensive posture.

"Ghaasitugi toh abhi tujhe main!" she countered, readying the bag for another blow.

You noticed two teenage girls nearby, their phones held aloft as they giggled and recorded the entire spectacle with glee. If you didn't intervene now, your two clowns were going to go viral on Karachi's social media before the night was over. You stepped into the fray, positioning yourself firmly between them.

You raised your hands, palms out, like a referee.

"Shant Mohammad Ali! Todha gussa baad ke liye bhi bacha le," you urged, offering Sana a look of sternness.

Zaid immediately took the opportunity to retreat, hiding behind you with a lack of shame that was almost impressive, though his height made the move entirely useless as his head poked out clearly over yours.

"You were supposed to save me," Zaid grumbled under his breath.

You threw a sharp look over your shoulder, your eyebrows raised in an expression that clearly said, 'You're lucky I'm even standing here.'

Nafisa finally broke her silence, stepping forward to check her watch with an air of immense boredom. "Yes please, you can hit him later. Abhi hum jaake dekhe ki tera banda tickets lene hi gaya hai ya bechni shuru kardi usni."

The mention of Javed acted like a reset button for Sana. She harrumphed, adjusting her disheveled hair and looked toward the looming structure of the Breakdance ride where Javed was finally nearing the front of the queue.

With a collective sigh of relief, the four of you made haste, cutting through the dense, sweltering throng of people, as Nafisa called Nisha and Yusuf to meet you all near the ride. You ignored the death glares from those you accidentally jostled, offering nothing but sheepish, hurried smiles as you pushed forward to join the rest of your group.

As you huddled around Javed, he began whining about the unfairness of his position.

"I am officially retired from ticket duties," he declared, wiping sweat from his brow. "I am not standing in another line for the rest of the night. If you want to ride the Ferris wheel, you're on your own." He was second in line now and the neon lights of the ride reflected off the sweat on his forehead, making him look like he was under a police interrogation.

You aimlessly scanned the surrounding crowd, until your eyes suddenly landed on two familiar faces, making them almost pop out.

Naieem and Faisal.

And there, standing directly behind them, was the very person you were trying to erase from your mind. He was flanked by Hamza and Yalina.

Two days ago Naieem had called you, asking if you wanted to go to the fair, his voice full of that earnest enthusiasm that always made it impossible for you to say no.

"Sab honge phuphi! Main, Faisal, Hamza bhai, Yalina! Apke exams bhi tab tak khatam ho jayege, ache se relax karna phir."

He had omitted mentioning Uzair, a deliberate silence that screamed the very name he was trying to hide.

"Iss baar tum sab chale jao, mere sath phir kabhi plan kar lena," you had lied, the words tasting like ash in your mouth. "Mujhe dadi ko lekar unki dost ke ghar jana hai uss din."

Naieem had been quiet for a long moment, the silence on the other end of the line heavy with the things left unsaid. He had disappointedly sighed. "Aap, main, Faisal aur Yalina bhi ja sakte hai. Chachu aur Hamza bhai ka toh vaise bhi mann nahi tha jane ka."

Your heart had fractured at his hidden implication. You knew Naieem. You knew that if it came down to it, he would have uninvited his own uncle, just to ensure you felt comfortable enough to join them.

The bond between you and Naieem was something else entirely.

Between you, words were often a secondary form of communication. Over the years, you had cultivated an unspoken language, where a mere shift in gaze conveyed more than a thousand sentences ever could.

You had been a child yourself when he was born and the moment you held that tiny, blissful infant in your arms, you were the one who had christened him with his name.

It wasn't that Faisal was any less dear to you. He had simply gravitated towards Uzair more while Naieem had always sought you out. So, you knew he was the last person you needed to lie to. That too over such a simple matter. But you did it anyway.

"Aese koi baat nahi hai Naieem, vo dono bhi sath chal sakte hai. Uss din main sach mien busy hu," you had assured him, doubling down on the lie to spare him the dilemma.

You couldn't bear the thought of making him choose between you, the stray that Rehman and Ulfat had taken in out of a sense of misplaced guilt and Uzair, his actual blood.

And now, standing in the middle of a crowded fairground with Zaid by your side and your friends laughing around you, you were paralysed by a soaring panic.

If you had just been honest, if you had told him you were going with your friends, he would have understood.

He always did.

But no, you had to be a coward and lie straight to the face of your nephew, who looked upto you so much.

Then, as if steered by a reflex your body was helplessly attuned to, your eyes drifted toward Uzair.

He stood amidst the swirling dust and neon haze, his hair perfectly tousled by the wind that swept across the fairground. The charcoal black Pathani suit he wore seemed to drink in the ambient light, its sharp tailoring accentuating his lean, athletic build, making him look like some ethereal god of war.

Despite the ache in your chest you felt yourself becoming star-struck, your breath hitching as you remained rooted to the spot, unable to sever the visual tether between you.

Even from this distance, you could see that he still wore that same characteristic expression of simmering annoyance, as if the very air people breathed around him was a personal affront. Yet, beneath the exterior, there was a visible air of exhaustion clinging to him.

The neon lights hit the sharp angles of his face, casting long, dramatic shadows that only heightened the magnetic pull he exerted over you, making the rest of the world blur into insignificance.

Nafisa followed your line of sight and you felt her entire body go rigid beside you. Her eyes widened as she saw Uzair's gaze begin to sweep in the direction of your group. Before his eyes could lock onto yours, she grabbed your hand and jerked you backward, obscuring your form behind a thick wall of passing strangers. The sudden movement jolted you out of your trance.

"Isne koi tracker-waker laga rakha hai kya?" Nafisa hissed as quietly as she could. "Jo isko pata chal jata hai tu kaha hai?"

"Abb main kya karu?" you whispered back.

Nafisa rolled her eyes. "Abb main kya karu matlab? Tu jail se farar hui qaidi todhi hai?"

"Usse nahi pata main yaha hu!" you blurted out.

"Tu kya saans bhi usse puchke leti hai?" she snapped, checking over her shoulder to ensure the path was still clear.

Just then, Zaid leaned closer, his brow furrowing with concern. "Kya hua? Everything okay?"

Nafisa looked between your pale face and Zaid's confused expression and immediately began herding you both toward the front of the line like stray sheep.

"Kuch nahi! Tum dono pehle jao, hamara number agya hai!" she declared, effectively ending the conversation. She gave you a firm nudge toward the ride, her eyes silently commanding you to play along and keep your head down.

As you and Zaid climbed into the ride and strapped yourselves into the seats, the world began to spin in more ways than one. He looked at you, checking the safety bar before glancing at your face.

"Are you sure you're okay? You look like you've seen a ghost," he noted softly.

You nodded your head vigorously, forcing a tight, artificial smile onto your lips.

"Main theek hoon, Zaid. I was just feeling a bit dizzy," you lied, though every fiber of your being was screaming for you to flee the fairground entirely.

But you couldn't just abandon your friends after they had gone to such lengths to cheer you up and a growing part of you was becoming fed up with the way Uzair inadvertently governed every decision you made.

You were tired of being a fugitive in your own life.

Still, the thought of hurting Naieem kept your heart in your throat. You spent the duration of the ride with your eyes squeezed shut, praying to every deity you knew that you wouldn't be spotted from the heights.

For the most part, the gods seemed to be listening. For the remainder of the evening, your paths didn't cross with them. Your friends, oblivious to the hide-and-seek you were playing, dragged you to every attraction.

There were moments of genuine sweetness with Zaid that almost made you forget the danger. While sharing a stick of pink candy floss, he had managed to get a smudge on your cheek and wiped it away with his thumb, his gaze lingering a second too long for it to be purely accidental.

Later, at the haunted house, when a masked actor jumped out from the shadows with a guttural roar, you shrieked and recoiled, your back hitting Zaid's solid chest. He had rested his hands on your shoulders, steadying you.

"Shh, it's okay," he whispered into your ear, his breath warm against your skin. Sana, while walking ahead had turned back and caught the moment, teasingly nudging your side with her elbow.

Zaid even spent an embarrassing amount of money at a claw machine until he finally won you a quirky mini lava lamp, presenting it to you like a hard-won trophy.

Despite these flashes of warmth, you couldn't bring yourself to fully enjoy.

Your eyes were constantly scanning the sea of faces, darting toward every charcoal-coloured kurta or tall frame that moved in the distance. Every time you were caught looking, Nafisa would fix you with a sharp glare, her lips thinning in silent reprimand.

Yet, even in her frustration, you caught her several times when she thought you weren't looking, her own head swivelling as she scanned the perimeter of the crowd, acting as a silent sentry to ensure you weren't ambushed.

By the time the neon lights of the fairground were fully competing with the bruised purple of the evening sky, the group was thoroughly exhausted.

The collective plan was to head for dinner but Nisha insisted that visiting a fair and skipping the Ferris wheel was nothing short of stupid. So, despite the aching muscles and the lingering humidity, you found yourselves once again congregating near the towering structure of the wheel, with Javed, grumbling under his breath but ever-compliant, reassigned to the ticket queue.

As you stood in the shadow of the massive wheel, you noticed Zaid looking up at the rotating cubicles. His throat moved convulsively and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. You remembered then that he was deathly afraid of heights. Taking a step closer to him, you spoke quietly, pitching your voice below the roar of the machinery.

"Main bohot thak gayi hoon, I don't feel like going on another ride. Hum yahin wait kar lein, if it's okay with you?"

Zaid's initial reaction was a visible wave of relief that smoothed the tension in his forehead but it was quickly replaced by a knowing, skeptical look.

"I know how much you love going on the Ferris wheel," he said with a gentle, appreciative smile, his hand coming to rest briefly on your shoulder to nudge you back toward the group. "Mere liye itna bada sacrifice karne ki zaroorat nahi hai!"

He was right, of course. In a different life, you adored the Ferris wheel but that love was inextricably tied to a specific memory.

You used to drag Uzair to this very spot, forcing him to ride with you while he constantly grumbled about how he wasn't a child and had "better things to do" than sit in a swinging metal cage.

Yet, in those rare moments when the cubicle reached the apex and you squealed with joy at the sight of the city lights below, you had caught him smiling. A smile that actually reached his eyes, a silent confession that he secretly loved the magic of the fair just as much as you did.

Now, with Uzair absent from your side, the wheel had lost its charm. It was just a mechanical contraption of rusted iron and flickering bulbs.

You turned slightly toward Zaid, tilting your head back to meet his gaze with feigned annoyance.

"Oh please, tumhare liye koi sacrifice nahi kar rahi. Main sach mein thakk gayi hoon."

"Y/N!"

"Zaid!" you mimicked him, a playful spark returning to your eyes. Before he could argue further, you reached out and grabbed his hand, physically dragging him away from the ticket line.

You turned back just long enough to shout to Javed, "Hamari tickets matt lena, hum kahin aur ja rahe hain!"

Once you and Zaid had put a comfortable distance between yourselves and the prying eyes of your friends, he leaned in closer, the scent of his mild cologne cutting through the smell of grease and popcorn.

"Thank you," he said softly. You looked up at him, momentarily confused by the sudden gravity in his voice.

"Mujhe laga nahi tha tujhe yaad hoga how afraid I am of heights," he admitted, a sheepish grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. "So thank you, for staying back with me."

You felt a warmth spread through you, a sense of genuine companionship that felt safe and uncomplicated. You gave him a bright, radiant smile and were just about to reply that this was the least you could do for someone who had been so patient with you, when your eyes caught a dark, immobile figure clad in black.

Your heart stopped.

At a distance of maybe twenty yards, Uzair was standing perfectly still and he was staring right back at you.

The sight of him was jarring.

You had seen Uzair in many states. His default setting of cold annoyance, his professional focus and even the explosive anger you'd witnessed at the factory when he was cussing out a negligent worker.

But right now, his looked downright murderous.

His eyes were trained solely on Zaid with a predatory intensity, tracing the way Zaid was angled toward you, noting the proximity and the easy intimacy of your stance. When his gaze finally shifted to you, the manic look softened for a fleeting second, a flicker of something that looked like pain, before the darkness returned with a vengeance.

To your absolute horror he began walking straight toward where you were standing. The only saving grace was that he appeared to be alone, Naieem and Faisal were nowhere to be seen, meaning the boys hadn't witnessed your presence yet.

He was getting closer, his silhouette growing larger and more imposing with every second and you could almost feel the temperature around you drop. Before he could reach the perimeter of your space, your survival instincts kicked in with a jolt of adrenaline.

Without thinking, you tightened your grip on Zaid's hand and started dragging him in the opposite direction.

"We almost forgot to go to the mirror maze!" you chirped with a sudden, forced burst of energy, your voice pitched an octave higher than usual. "Chalo chalo, wahan chalte hain!"

Zaid laughed, utterly oblivious to the storm approaching from behind, thinking this was just another bout of your childlike excitement. He followed willingly, unaware that he was being recruited for an urgent escape mission.

The universe seemed to offer you a momentary reprieve as a massive, boisterous crowd surged out from the nearby puppet show, providing the perfect barrier.

Seizing the opportunity, you dove into the thick of the throng, weaving through the aunties and excited children with a desperate urgency. Every few seconds, the back of your neck prickled, a phantom sensation of Uzair's murderous gaze burning through the crowd but you didn't dare look back.

As soon as the mirror maze came into your line of sight, you practically lunged inside, the heavy curtain falling behind you and plunging you into a disorienting world of infinite reflections. Only then, surrounded by a thousand versions of your own panicked face, did you let out a ragged breath you hadn't realised you were holding.

"Y/N, are you trying to set a world record for the fastest maze run?" Zaid chuckled, his voice echoing off the glass and pulling you back to the present.

To keep him from questioning your sudden energy, you launched into a whirlwind of forced chatter, frolicking through the labyrinth with a performance of spirited whimsy. You pointed at the distorted mirrors that made your legs look like stilts and laughed at the wrong turns, all while your mind remained anchored to the black-clad figure outside.

Finally, your friends called.

Nafisa's voice was sharp with a mix of exhaustion and impatience over the static-filled line. "Kahan ho tum dono? We're all in the parking lot. Jaldi aao, sab thak gaye hain aur bhook lag rahi hai!"

You quickly led Zaid out of the maze and toward the exit, your movements jerky and hyper-alert. Even as you navigated the asphalt of the parking lot, your eyes darted across every row of cars, scanning the shadows between the SUVs for a familiar silhouette.

You were terrified of Uzair's next move, of the storm that was surely brewing beneath that stoic exterior. The only reprieve you had was in knowing that if he told Naieem, and you were almost certain he would, you would simply weave another layer into your web of lies.

Yet, as the car slowed and pulled into the brightly lit parking lot of the restaurant, a heavy, sinking sensation settled in the pit of your stomach.

You had managed to slip through Uzair's fingers twice tonight but as you looked at the entrance of the diner, you knew the universe rarely allowed someone to escape the same shadow three times in a row.

The pressure that had been building since you first spotted that charcoal-black Pathani at the fair finally peaked, manifesting as a sharp throbbing behind your temples.

Once the group had navigated the restaurant's bustling foyer and settled into a corner booth, the cacophony of clattering silverware and overhead fans became too much to bear. Excusing yourself with a strained smile, you made a beeline for the washroom, desperate to find a few moments of peace and quiet.

You leaned against the marble vanity, staring into the mirror at a version of yourself that felt almost like a stranger.

Despite the unforgiving Karachi humidity, Nafisa's handiwork had held firm, your hair tumbled in glossy, resilient waves and the smokey-eye makeup lent you a feline elegance you weren't used to seeing.

You took deep breaths, forcing your lungs to expand against the constricting fear that had settled in your chest like lead. You began to whisper a litany of positive affirmations to your reflection, trying to drown out the internal sirens.

'I had a good day. I am surrounded by people who actually cherish me. Zaid is back, and we have cleared all our misunderstandings.'

You reminded yourself that you looked beautiful today, not just "good for a girl from Lyari," but genuinely radiant. You were no longer the sad, ugly girl tethered to Uzair's whims. Your exams were over, the horizon was clear and soon, you would be a in a new city, reinventing yourself far from the reach of his shadow.

You caught a slight smudge on your right eyeliner. Reaching for your bag on the counter, you were rummaging through the depths of your purse for the kohl stick when the heavy wooden door swung open with a violent thud. You didn't even have time to look up before the click of the lock echoing through the small space sent a chill racing down your spine.

You whirled around, your heart leaping into your throat, to find Uzair standing there. For a heartbeat, you were convinced you were hallucinating. You blinked rapidly, expecting the vision of him to dissipate into the fluorescent light but he remained rooted to the spot, solid and imposing.

Your mind became a scrambled mess of panic and confusion, you had been so careful. How had he tracked you through the labyrinth of the city to this specific place?

"Kon tha vo?" Uzair growled, the sound vibrating through the small space like a warning.

"Tu-Tum yaha kya kar rahe ho?"

He took a slow step toward you, the charcoal fabric of his Pathani rustling softly. You instinctively retreated, your heels clicking against the tiles until your back hit the cold stone of the vanity.

"Kon tha vo?" he repeated, his voice dropping an octave, becoming a dangerous whisper.

He was closer now, his tall frame looming over you, casting a long shadow that seemed to swallow the light. You tried to summon every ounce of the defiance you had practiced in your head.

"I don't know who you are talking about," you lied, though the way your pulse thrashed in your neck surely betrayed you.

You knew exactly who he meant, the man whose hand you had been holding, the man who had dared to make you laugh.

"Vo ladka jo tumse chipak raha tha!" he said, the words laced with such anger, that it made your skin crawl. He had you cornered now, his body a literal wall of muscle, blocking any path of escape.

Desperation fuelled a sudden burst of courage. You straightened your shoulders, meeting his deadly gaze with a glare of your own.

"Tumse matlab? Chahe vo jo marzi ho! Honestly, get a life. Stop stalking me for fucks sake!" As you tried to sidestep him, his hand shot out with lightning speed, his fingers caging your wrist in a grip that was as unyielding as iron. He pulled you toward him sharply, jerking your body until it was inches from his.

His breath hit your face, as he looked deep into your soul, his eyes searching yours with a deranged intensity.

"Akhri baar puch raha hu Y/N...kon. tha. vo?" The grip on your wrist tightened, a physical manifestation of the territorial rage he had always masked as indifference.

You were done with the games, done with the fear. You pushed back against his chest with all your might, your voice coming out harsh.

"Zaid," you saw an unmistakable flicker of recognition that rippled across Uzair's features, "Vo wapas Karachi aya hai kyuki hamare nikaah ki baat ho rahi hai! Khush? Abb phuto yaha se!"

You tried to slip past his shoulder and into the safety of the corridor once again but you had tragically underestimated his reflexes.

Before you could even reach the handle, his hand shot out, catching your arm with bruising force and slamming you back against the wall near the door. The impact jolted your spine and the sheer fury radiating from him left you breathless and paralysed.

It was impossible to look away from him.

Uzair stood before you like a violent storm, his jaw clenched with a tension that made the hard muscles cord in his neck, eyes bleeding into obsidian pits of fathomless darkness, swallowing the light ot the room.

The icy, clinical bite of the stone against your spine clashed violently with the furnace-like heat radiating from his massive frame, leaving you lightheaded and desperate.

"Uzair—"

The words died in your throat before it could form a full thought as he moved with the predatory grace of a man who had already decided your fate.

One large hand snaked around your waist, his fingers digging into your flesh to haul your hips flush against the hard ridge of his own, while his other hand slammed firmly against the wall beside your head. The sound of the impact echoed in the quiet space, effectively caging you within his reach.

He leaned down, his face hovering mere millimeters from yours. For a heartbeat, you were certain he was about to crush your lips with his. His nose grazed yours and a manic, dangerous smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth.

But at the last second, he veered away, his lips descending instead to the vulnerable, curve of your neck. He began to press slow, open-mouthed kisses into your skin, the heat of his breath a searing brand that made your blood sing.

You arched off the wall involuntarily, your spine curving as you fought to stifle the moan rising in your chest. You reached up, your hands pressing against his broad, immovable shoulders in a futile attempt to push him away but you were trying to move a mountain.

"Uzair, what are you doing?"

He wasn't interested in answering you with words. Instead, he found the most sensitive cord of your neck and bit down, nipping at that sensitive spot. It sent a jolt of lightning straight to your core. Almost instantly, he smoothed the sting away with a long, wet stroke of his tongue, savouring the taste of your salt and skin.

A helpless moan tumbled from your parted lips this time, your eyes widening in the dim light. You could feel the blood rushing to the surface. The mark he was leaving was sure to be a vivid, bruised violet.

"Does he make your pulse race like this?" he rasped, his voice thick with a jealous hunger, before he pressed another possessive kiss into the center of the mark he had just claimed.

He continued trailing a line of stinging, wet kisses from the hollow of your throat up to the sharp curve of your jaw.

Every touch was an interrogation, a demand for a confession that you were still, despite everything, hopelessly his.

"Uzair!" you whimpered, a broken sound that was half-protest and half-prayer.

As you tried to push his shoulder away again, he caught your hand and guided your own palm to the swell of your breast, his larger hand covering yours, forcing you to feel the frantic thudding of your heart through the fabric of your kurti. He squeezed your breast, using your own hand as an instrument for his desire, making your eyes snap shut as a wave of heat flooded your core.

"Can he make your heart beat like this?" he challenged.

He abandoned your hand to cup you himself, his fingers digging into the soft tissue as he pressed his face into the swell of your chest, breathing you in as if you were his only lifeline. The hand at your waist tightened, hauling you upward until your toes barely touched the tiles, his groan vibrating through your ribcage as he lost himself in the scent of your skin.

Then, he pressed his leg firmly between yours, his thigh applying a delicious, rhythmic friction right against your cunt. You felt as though you were on fire and without realising it, your hands stopped pushing and started pulling, your fingers tangling in the thick, dark locks of his hair to draw him closer.

Your senses were saturated with him.

The rough scratch of his beard against your throat, the crushing weight of his body, the warmth of his touch.

"Does he make you feel like this?" he demanded, his lips ghosting over yours. "Can anyone make you feel this way except me?"

You were drowning, your head lolling back against the wall.

"Uzair, please!" you begged, though you didn't know if you were asking him to stop or to never let you go.

Finally, his lips left your skin and crashed into yours with a violence that made your teeth clink. It was a collision of teeth and tongue, Uzair pouring every ounce of his bottled-up frustration, his jealousy and his warped love into the contact.

Your mind screamed at you to fight, to remember the years of being an afterthought but your body had long ago declared its allegiance to him. Your hands tightened in his hair, pulling his head down as you met his aggression with a desperate hunger of your own.

He let out a low, muffled sound into the kiss as his hands moved to the swell of your ass, his fingers digging into the denim of your jeans before he hauled you up as if you weighed nothing at all.

Your legs instinctively locked around his waist, your heels digging into his back as he deepened the kiss, his tongue tangling with yours. He carried you the short distance to the marble counter, setting you down on the cold surface but never breaking the contact.

You were both fighting for dominance, a desperate struggle of breath and heat but it was clear that in this room, in this moment, he was the undisputed winner.

When you finally broke apart, gasping for oxygen, the air felt freezing against your damp skin. But the reprieve was short-lived. His lips latched onto your jaw again, peppering it with kisses, while his hands traveled upward, disappearing under the hem of your kurti. The contrast of his rough, warm palms against your soft skin made you gasp out loud. His thumbs flicked across your hardened nipples through the thin lace of your bra, making you almost arch off the counter, your head hitting the mirror with a dull thud.

You tried to push him away one last time, a weak, flickering spark of rationality reminding you where you were. You were terrified that someone would try the handle, that your friends would come looking for you.

"Uzair...someone will...," you panted, but he was deaf to anything but his own need.

"Do you have any idea what it did to me? Seeing you with him?" he asked between kisses.

His lips found the crook of your neck again, and his hand moved to the back of your head, his fingers tangling in your hair and tugging just enough to force your head back, exposing the vulnerable line of your throat. You hissed at the sharp sensation, but it only fuelled his fire.

"All I want to do right now is tear off these clothes and mark every inch of your body so that the entire Karachi knows that you belong to me," he growled against your skin. "You have always belonged to me. Meri Y/N. Sirf meri."

The heavy, metallic rattle of the door handle twisting echoed off the tiles and shattered the feverish illusion Uzair had built around you.

Reality crashed back in.

Violent, cold, and sobering.

You shoved against Uzair's chest and for once, he was caught off guard, stumbling back as you scrambled off the marble counter. Your feet hit the floor, the vibrations traveling up your spine like a physical rebuke.

Someone knocked sharply on the door, the wood vibrating under the force, before the handle was rattled with renewed urgency. Nafisa's voice rang out from the other side.

"Y/N!" she called, her voice pulling you back from the brink of a disaster.

You caught your reflection in the corner of your eye and a wave of nausea rolled over you.

You looked like a mess.

Hair in a wild, tangled thicket, lipstick smudged like war-paint across your mouth, and your kurti was crumpled and hiked up, bearing the unmistakable marks of a struggle you had stopped fighting.

Desperate to erase the evidence of your weakness, you tried to smooth your hair with trembling fingers. Uzair stepped up behind you, his large frame casting a shadow over your reflection as his arms wrapped around your waist again.

He leaned down, his lips ghosting over the sensitive skin of your neck, as he whispered, "We are getting out of here. Now."

You closed your eyes, hot tears of shame stinging your lids. A profound sense of self-loathing washed over you.

How could you have let seventeen years of insults, neglect and the crushing weight of his indifference vanish at a single touch?

While your friends and grandparents were busy trying to piece back the shards of your broken spirit, you were melting in the arms of the very man who had turned you into a hollow shell of your former self.

Nafisa's voice rang out again, closer this time, her patience clearly wearing thin. "Y/N! Tu andar hai?"

You swallowed hard, trying to force your voice to remain steady despite the chaos in your chest.

"Andar hi hu main Nafisa. Aa rahi hu," you called back.

With a surge of newfound resolve, you grabbed Uzair's heavy arms and shoved them away, turning to face him with eyes that burned with venom.

"Main tumhare sath kahi nahi ja rahi," you stated, your voice cold and final.

Uzair's brow furrowed, his jaw tightening as he tried to reclaim the space between you.

"Y/N—"

"Kya Y/N?" you snapped, cutting him off. "You can't undo 17 years of damage just by showering me with attention for a few days. You don't get to erase a lifetime of pain just like that."

He grabbed hold of you again, pulling you flush against his chest, his eyes desperately searching yours.

"Toh hamare beech mien jo bhi hai, vo tere liye kuch maiyne nahi rakhta?" he demanded, his voice thick with an unexpected vulnerability.

You looked him straight in the eye, burying the part of you that wanted to scream 'yes' under layers of hardened spite.

"Ha nahi rakhta!"

For a fleeting second, a look of genuine, soul-crushing hurt flashed through his obsidian eyes that almost made you take your words back. But the memory of the long nights spent crying into your pillow over his silence anchored you.

"Hamare beech mien kuch nahi hai!" you doubled down, your voice rising in the small space. "Na pyaar, na nafrat! Kuch nahi! Aur mere mann mien jo tere liye todhi bohot izzat bachi hai na, vo bhi kamm hotti ja rahi hai!"

You clasped your hands together, your voice shaking with the force of your rejection. "Toh Allah ke vaste, door reh mujhse!"

"Aur agar na rahu toh?" he challenged.

"Toh main chali jati hu tujhse door! Kyuki mujhe teri shakal bhi nahi dekhni hai!"

With that, you turned your back on him and wrenched the lock open. The door swung wide, revealing Nafisa and Zaid standing in the hallway, their expressions shifting from concern to absolute shock as they took in your disheveled state and the sight of Uzair standing behind you.

You wanted nothing more than for the earth to open up and swallow you whole, to hide you from the judgment and the pity. Tears began to track down your face, hot and silent.

"Sorry, mujhe ghar jana hoga, kuch zaroori kaam yaad agya!" you croaked out, trying to push past them.

Zaid reached out and gently caught your arm, his touch a soft contrast to the iron grip you had just escaped.

"Main sath chaltu hu, I will drop you home," he offered, his eyes full of a protective warmth.

"Abe oo lodu!" Uzair sneered, as he took an aggressive step toward Zaid, looking ready to tear him apart with his bare hands.

Nafisa stepped into the gap, shoving her palm against Uzair's chest with surprising force. "Oo hero, peeche! Peeche peeche!"

You gasped, your eyes widening in terror for your friend. "Nafisa!" you cried but she didn't even look at you.

"Tu chup reh! Zaid isko ghar leke ja," she commanded, her voice like steel. Then she turned back to Uzair, who was still fuming. "Iss nawabzade se toh main nipat ti hu!"

Nafisa snapped her fingers directly in front of Uzair's face, breaking the murderous stare he was directing at Zaid.

"Sun zang lage bijli ke khambe, gunda hoga tu apne ghar main theek hai na? 17 saal kha gaya tu uske," she hissed.

"Nafisa—" Uzair started, his tone a warning.

"Chup! Bilkul chup!" she yelled, silencing the man who silenced cities.

"She has developed an eating disorder because of you! Look at her! Hasti khelti rehti thi pehle, abb dekh usse. Aur ye sab tere wajah se hua hai!" You saw Uzair flinch as the truth of her accusations landed. She stepped closer, her voice dropping into a lethal tone. "Pyaar karta hai na isse tu? Toh isse baksh de abb. She has already suffered a lot because of you."

You stood frozen, shocked at Nafisa's bravery and at the sight of Uzair, who looked utterly helpless, tears of frustration shimmering at the corners of his eyes.

A small crowd of diners was beginning to gather in the hallway, whispering and watching the drama unfold.

Zaid leaned down, his voice a soft, grounding murmur in your ear. "Y/N, hume chalna chahiye."

You let him guide you away, his hand a steadying force as you navigated through the sea of curious faces. At the turn of the hallway, you couldn't help yourself, you sneaked one last look back.

Uzair looked like he had been stabbed, his hand reaching out instinctively for you before his fingers curled into a tight, trembling fist.

You turned away quickly, the image burned into your mind. You wouldn't break.

You had suffered for seventeen years and now, it was his turn.

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The final echoes of your exams had barely faded, replaced by the heavy, expectant silence of your grandparents' living room. You sat on the edge of the velvet sofa, looking from your grandmother's hopeful, wrinkled face to your grandfather's sheepish gaze.

Just minutes ago, they had dropped a proverbial bomb on you, a revelation that felt like a seismic shift under your feet.

On the polished mahogany table lay a photograph, not just any picture but a portrait of a man they considered the ideal match to anchor your drifting heart.

Your grandmother leaned forward, her voice a soft entreaty.

"Beta, ek baari mil toh le, apna Zaid hi toh hai," she urged, her eyes searching yours for a spark of recognition.

He was indeed "their" Zaid, a name that unspooled a thread of memories stretching back to the sun-drenched courtyards of your childhood.

In the tapestry of your youth, Zaid had been a constant figure who followed you around with the clumsy, earnest devotion of a puppy. Together with Sana, you had formed an eccentric trio, three souls attached at the hip, navigating the labyrinthine streets of Lyari.

Zaid's family lived just two houses down from the Haveli, making your lives a blurred entity of shared school benches, joint homework sessions and the innocent, fierce vows of children who believed that "always" was a promise the world was obligated to keep.

Even then, the future had been a game of pretend played with deadly seriousness.

Sana would often proclaim that you would all be at each other's weddings, to which Zaid would cheekily reply that of course you would be at his, because you were destined to be the bride. Sana would laugh, appointing herself the head bridesmaid, while you would smack Zaid lightly on the back of his head, rolling your tongue out at his audacity.

Even at ten, your gaze was always wandering toward the periphery, searching for the older boy who was hell-bent on ignoring you, the one whose scoff was the only music you truly wanted to hear.

But Zaid's devotion was legendary in the neighborhood, a persistent, sweet hum that you had eventually learned to treat as background noise.

He was the boy who would save his pocket money for weeks just to buy you the specific brand of imported colored pencils you liked, or the one who would stand outside your gate in the blistering Karachi heat just to hand you a single, wilted jasmine flower because he knew you liked the scent. He was your most ardent defender, a boy whose world revolved entirely around the axis of your whims, oblivious to the fact that you were looking past him at a much darker, colder sun.

The most vivid memory surfaced from your twelfth birthday.

Zaid had thrown a hissy fit, dragging his reluctant parents to one of the most expensive toy stores in the city. That evening, he had presented his gift with a grin that threatened to split his face in two.

It was the largest teddy bear you had ever seen, a plush giant of pink fur and a vibrant turquoise bow, your favourite colours. Its glass eyes seemed to mirror your own and it was so tall that hugging it felt like disappearing into the embrace of a real, soft-hearted bear.

You had been moved to tears, the sheer sincerity of the gesture cutting through your adolescent poise as you pulled Zaid into a tight hug, leaving him blushing a deep crimson.

When you finally let go, your eyes instinctively sought out the one person whose approval mattered.

Uzair was there, leaning against a far marble pillar, his arms crossed and his face a mask of chilling disdain. As you moved to excitedly show him the bear, he fixed you with a glare so venomous it felt as if your joy was a cardinal sin. Without a word, he turned and stalked upstairs, dragging a confused Hamza away from his third serving of birthday cake.

A cold weight settled in your stomach.

You wanted to follow him, to demand why he was angry but Sana had already seized your arm, dragging you toward a boisterous game of musical chairs.

The following morning brought a horror you hadn't expected. You walked into the courtyard to find the pink-and-turquoise bear lying in the dirt, a sacrificial lamb to the stray dogs that Ulfat took pity on. They were tearing at its limbs, growls punctuating the sound of ripping fabric.

You were certain you had left the bear safely in your room, yet here it was, being decimated before your eyes. You grabbed a stick, lunging at the dogs with a sob of fury but it was too late.

By the time the strays scattered, all that remained of Zaid's heartfelt gift was a tattered skin and handfuls of synthetic floof drifting across the stones like mocking snow.

As you stood over the remains, a long shadow fell over the wreckage. You turned to find Uzair standing there, his expression unreadable. For a fleeting second, you thought you saw an imperceptible smirk twitch at the corner of his mouth but it vanished instantly into his usual stony mask.

"Ek khilone ke peeche kab tak royegi?" he remarked, his voice devoid of any comfort. "Andar chali ja, isse pehle dhoop mein khadi khadi behosh ho jaye. Phir Rehman bhai mujhe hi dantege, ki tune dhyan nahi rakha 'meri pyari bachi' ka."

With that cold, mocking dismissal, he sauntered away, leaving you to mourn a gift you had failed to protect for even twenty-four hours.

The guilt of the incident followed you like a physical ache. You felt like a wretched friend. Zaid had poured his heart into that gift and you had allowed it to be destroyed. You spent the day sulking, avoiding the courtyard and even crying quietly in your room after school when Zaid asked you for the hundredth time if you still liked it.

You lied, your voice cracking as you told him it was the best gift ever, unable to find the courage to tell him it was currently being dragged through the gutters of Lyari.

Later that afternoon, you were playing with the neighbourhood kids in the local playground, trying to distract yourself.

Fate, however, was in a cruel mood.

A small puppy came trotting across the dust, its tail wagging proudly as it dragged a mangled, dirt-stained pink arm, the unmistakable remains of your teddy bear.

Zaid, who was sitting on the swings nearby, froze. You watched the realisation dawn on his face, as he looked from the toy to you. He realised in an instant that you had been lying and the hurt in his eyes was more than you could bear.

"Zaid, meri baat toh sunn!" you cried out, reaching for his arm but he flinched away as if your touch burned.

He looked at you with tearful eyes, his voice a broken whisper of defeat.

"Main kabhi Uzair bhai jitna acha nahi ban sakta tere liye, haina? Main chahe kuch bhi kar loon?"

The words were a serrated mirror held up to your soul, revealing a truth you weren't ready to face. Before you could offer a single word of explanation or apology, he turned and ran toward his house, his small frame shaking with sobs.

You were left standing in the dust, the mangled pink fur at your feet, feeling like the villain in a story you never asked to be in.

Sana tried her best to cheer you up, promising that she would talk to Zaid and even tell him that the dogs had gotten into your room but the heaviness in your chest wouldn't lift.

When you eventually trudged back into the Haveli, you found a new arrival waiting in the center of the hall.

It was a penguin plushie, your favorite animal, of such gargantuan proportions that it was almost the size of a wall. It had the softest, most luxurious texture you had ever felt and a face so cute it seemed to plead for a hug.

Even in your state of profound sadness, the sight was staggering. You assumed Rehman had seen your tears over the bear and had gone to extraordinary lengths to replace it.

Running around the house to find your brother, you collided with Ulfat. You threw your arms around her, thanking her profusely for the penguin but she only laughed softly, ruffling your hair with a knowing glint in her eyes.

"Maine nahi mangwaya yeh, aur na hi Rehman ne," she whispered, leaning down to your ear. "Yeh kisi aise ne bheja hai jisne tumhe rote hue dekha tha, par usse batana mat ke maine tumhe bataya, warna woh phir se nakhre dikhayega."

So it was Uzair.

He had seen your grief and in his own silent way, he had tried to mend what was broken. The haze of sadness over Zaid lifted slightly, the thought that Uzair cared enough to notice your tears felt like a secret treasure.

If only you had known that the hand that provided the penguin was the same hand that had stolen the teddy bear from your bedside, casting it to the dogs as a common chew toy just to erase another boy's mark from your life.

The next day, your grandparents arrived to whisk you away for the summer holidays. Usually, you dreaded leaving the Haveli but this time, the tension with Zaid made the departure feel like an escape. Rehman had coddled you into agreeing, promising that the city air would do you good.

Before you left, you and Sana went to Zaid's house to say goodbye, hoping to mend the fractured bridge. However, the house help informed you that Zaid wasn't home.

As you turned to leave, you happened to glance up at his bedroom window and saw him. A small, lonely silhouette peaking from behind the curtains, refusing to come down and face the girl who had broken his heart.

Sana, squeezed your hand and reassured you.

"Main samjahugi isse," she promised. "Jab tak tum wapis aaogi, main Zaid ko mana loongi."

Throughout the long, hot summer at your grandparents' house, you hovered by the telephone, dialing Zaid's number until your fingers ached.

No one ever picked up.

The ringing would echo into a void, a hollow sound that matched the growing pit in your stomach. Sana wasn't much help either, she had been sent to her maternal aunt's house, leaving you isolated in your guilt and the fading memory of a pink bear and a tearful boy.

A week before you were due to return to Lyari, Sana called. Her voice was uncharacteristically sober, stripped of its usual bubbly energy.

She had returned to the neighbourhood and gone to check on Zaid, only to find the house locked and the nameplate removed. His family had shifted to Dubai a few days ago, his father had taken a job transfer and they had vanished without a single goodbye.

The news felt like a physical weight settling onto your shoulders, a final, cold door slamming shut on a part of your childhood.

Zaid had left the country carrying the weight of that hurt, believing you had discarded his heart along with that toy, and that made you feel physically ill.

You had inadvertently wounded the one person who had been nothing but kind to you and now the ocean lay between you, making an apology impossible.

You felt like a bad omen.

A girl who brought destruction to those who cared for her.

This lingering feeling became a permanent ghost in your heart, a silent reminder that your obsession with Uzair had already begun to cost you the people who truly deserved your love.

The return to Lyari that summer had felt like walking through a house where all the furniture had been moved in the dark.

You and Sana had spent weeks asking around, knocking on the heavy doors of neighbours and corner-shop owners but the trail had gone cold. No one had the new contact information for Zaid's family, they had vanished into the shimmering skyline of Dubai as if they had never existed.

Slowly, the visceral sting of guilt was blunted by the relentless march of time.

Life took over, school, family gatherings, and the intensifying bloom of your feelings for Uzair. That crush had ripened into an all-consuming love that left little room for ghosts. You and Sana grew even closer and the boy who had looked at you as if you had personally hung every star in the sky was relegated to a quiet, dusty corner of your heart.

Until now.

You reached out, your fingers trembling slightly as you picked up the photograph from the mahogany table.

He still possessed that same, radiant grin, a smile that seemed to possess its own luminosity, capable of lighting up the darkest corners of a room.

His face had leaned out, the soft puffiness of childhood replaced by a strong jawline and a straight, noble nose. But it was his eyes that caught you. They were warm, amber pools of kindness that seemed to look right through the lens.

Looking at him evoked a tidal wave of bittersweet nostalgia and a crushing sense of unworthiness. He looked whole, vibrant, and untainted by the bitterness that had become your daily bread.

If it had been any other time, or any other man, you would have declined your grandparents. But you seemed to be inhabiting a version of yourself that was unrecognisable lately.

You were doing things the old you would have considered impossible, even sacrilegious.

The girl who used to cling to the walls of the Haveli had moved out to live with her grandparents. The girl who had worshipped the ground Uzair walked on had actually raised her hand and slapped him, her Uzair, her everything.

You were keeping him at a calculated, icy distance, when previously you would have folded and disintegrated at the slightest crumb of his attention.

Safe to say, the girl you used to be was lost and this new, hardened version was running on autopilot.

You found yourself wanting to say yes because of a debt that had been accruing interest for nearly a decade. You wanted to meet Zaid because you owed him an apology.

No, you owed him much more than that.

You needed to acknowledge that you had seen his heart and, in your haste to chase a man who didn't want you, you had stepped all over it.

Yet, even with the desire to make amends, the thought of a formal meeting made your stomach curdle with a familiar, acidic dread.

You imagined his family inspecting you like a piece of flawed ware, dissecting your insecurities with the practiced ease of jewelers looking for cracks. The last thing your fragile ego needed was for people who were once a staple of your everyday life to remark on how you weren't thin enough, beautiful enough, or accomplished enough for their golden son.

You already knew the verdict, you weren't good enough for Zaid.

At least, not for the version of him that lived in your memories, that selfless, kindhearted boy who deserved a girl whose heart wasn't already a battlefield.

Your grandfather, ever the silent observer of your internal storms, must have seen the turmoil flickering across your face. He spoke with a gentleness that nearly broke your resolve.

He explained that Zaid had been steadfastly refusing every match his parents suggested, rejecting girl after girl until your name was mentioned. He had only agreed to this meeting because it was you.

Furthermore, Zaid had insisted that he didn't want a traditional parade of families, he didn't want all the scrutiny. He had strictly requested that the meeting occur only between the two people who were supposed to consider a life together.

Your grandfather handed you a small, unassuming slip of paper. On it, in a firm, elegant script, Zaid had written his phone number and the address of a quiet, upscale cafe.

Your grandmother quickly chimed in, her voice hushed and hopeful.

"Sirf ek baar mil lo, beta. Agar vo pasand nahi aaya, toh hum bilkul bhi tumpar zor nahi dalenge. Baat yahin khatam ho jayegi."

As you took the slip, you heard both of them exhale a synchronised sigh of relief, as if they had just managed to pull you back from the edge of a precipice.

You were convinced that Zaid had only agreed to this meeting to gloat and frankly, you couldn't blame him.

You had become the neighbourhood joke, the girl who had wasted the prime of her youth pining for a man like Uzair, who treated her like vermin.

You were now a warped, broken version of yourself, a girl who couldn't even swallow a morsel of food without the phantom weight of Uzair's past insults making her retch it back out.

Meanwhile, Zaid had grown into a radiant, successful young man who had just established his own architectural firm in Lahore.

The contrast was humiliating.

Still, despite the power dynamic having shifted so violently, the core of the matter remained, Zaid had always been exceptionally kind to you.

So if he wanted to stand across from you and see exactly what your obsession had cost you, if he wanted to witness the hollowed-out version of the girl he once loved, then he, out of everyone in the world, deserved that satisfaction.

If he wanted to gloat, you would stand there and take it.

The silence in the room stretched until it became heavy, demanding a response. You forced your muscles into a performance, plastering a fake, porcelain smile onto your face, a mask you had perfected in the weeks since leaving the Haveli.

"Theek hai," you said, your voice steady despite the chaos in your chest. "Mil toh sakti hi hoon main."

Your grandmother let out a joyful exclamation, her face lighting up with a radiance that made you feel like a liar

and she pulled you into a fierce, suffocating hug.

But as you felt the warmth of your grandmother's embrace, you wondered if Zaid would even recognise the girl sitting across from him, or if he would only see the wreckage that Uzair had left behind.

To say you were nervous would have been a gross understatement. You stood outside the newly opened cafe in Dolmen Mall, a space that felt entirely too polished for your current internal state.

For the hundredth time in the span of a few minutes, you took a deep breath, trying to steady the tremors in your hands. You reached down to flick an invisible speck of dust off the navy blue Anarkali you were wearing, the same outfit you had meticulously selected and saved for what was supposed to be your first official date with Uzair, a night that had lived only in the naive corridors of your imagination. That date was never going to happen, you knew that now with certainty.

It felt poetic, in a tragic sort of way, to wear the shroud of a dead dream to meet a man who represented a life you had discarded.

Anyways, you weren't here to find love, you were here to offer a long-overdue apology.

You had considered calling Zaid first, your finger had hovered over his number a dozen times but it felt like a cop-out. You wanted the first time you heard his voice after all these years to be in person, where you couldn't hide behind the safety of a digital signal. Or perhaps, you mused bitterly, you were just a coward who needed the pressure of a public setting to keep from fleeing.

You were mentally bracing yourself to finally push through the heavy glass doors and step into the air-conditioned interior when someone called out your name.

The voice was a rich, smooth baritone that lacked any of the gravel or bite you had grown accustomed to in the streets of Lyari. You turned around, your breath hitching and there stood Zaid in the flesh.

If the photograph had been impressive, the man in person was a revelation. He looked even cuter, his presence radiating a gentle, grounding energy that felt like a balm to your frayed nerves.

Zaid looked as if Clark Kent had accidentally stumbled into the chaotic heart of Karachi and decided to stay. He looked like the absolute antithesis of Uzair, soft where the other was jagged, approachable where the other was a fortress.

You shook your head internally, a wave of self-loathing washing over you.

God, it was pathetic.

Even standing in front of a man who was the literal embodiment of a second chance, you were still using Uzair as a measuring stick. You were still letting his shadow darken a moment that was supposed to be light.

Zaid was staring at you with wide, unblinking eyes, his expression a mixture of awe and sheer disbelief. It took you several seconds to realise that you hadn't actually replied to his greeting, leaving a vacuum of awkward silence between you.

"Oh...um...hiiiii!" you finally blurted out, the greeting coming out a bit more high-pitched than you intended.

You took a tentative step toward him, extending your hand in a formal gesture that felt stiff. He remained paralysed, his gaze fixed on your face as if he were trying to reconcile the woman in front of him with the girl who had haunted his memories. You felt the heat rising in your neck as the seconds ticked by.

"Umm...Zaid?" you prompted, waving your extended hand slightly in front of his face to jolt him back to the present.

The movement seemed to break the spell. Zaid blinked rapidly, a deep, flustered red coating his cheeks as he realised he had been gawking. He nervously adjusted his glasses with his free hand before finally reaching out to take yours.

"Y/N," he breathed, the sound of your name on his lips feeling like a bridge finally snapping into place.

"It's really nice to see you, after so long!" you said, trying to inject some genuine warmth into your voice.

Zaid merely nodded, looking momentarily at a total loss for words. He continued to hold your hand, his thumb grazing your knuckles as if he were checking to see if you were real.

You smiled awkwardly, the silence stretching out once more. You had expected him to act haughty but he seemed completely out of his depth. When he still didn't release your hand, you cleared your throat pointedly.

"Oh, sorry!" he exclaimed, laughing nervously as he finally let go. He ran a hand through his hair, which was neatly styled but now slightly mussed from his nervous fidgeting.

"You must think, kya pagal insaan hai yeh? I'm so sorry, I just...I've had a very busy morning and my brain is a bit scrambled."

"Oh, thank you for taking some time out to meet me," you replied, your voice softening.

Zaid's eyes widened behind his lenses, his expression turning frantic. "Wait, sorry, I hope it didn't sound like I was showing off my schedule or anything! I...I didn't mean it like that, I was just—"

You couldn't help but smile. He was still the same endearing, over-thinking boy you remembered.

"Zaid, it's fine. It didn't seem like that at all," you reassured him.

He let out a long, relieved chuckle, the tension finally beginning to bleed out of his shoulders.

He smiled then, that characteristic, brilliant smile that had always been his trademark.

"It's good to be back here," he said softly, his amber eyes searching yours. "And to finally meet you."

His gaze flickered across your face and for a moment, you felt a pang of self-consciousness. You knew you looked like a mess despite the effort, you knew the dark circles under your eyes were visible and that your face had lost its healthy glow. But all you saw in his expression was his blush intensifying, his gaze eventually dropping to his feet.

'Must be the summer heat,' you thought, trying to rationalise the way he was looking at you. You stood there for another awkward moment, the bustle of the mall swirling around your quiet island of history, until Zaid suddenly seemed to remember where he was.

"Where are my manners?" he muttered, quickly moving past you to grip the handle of the heavy glass door. He pulled it open with a flourish, bowing slightly. "After you, m'lady," he said with a playful lilt, gesturing for you to enter first.

You couldn't help but giggle, it was so theatrical and so sweet that for a split second, the heavy weight of Lyari felt miles away.

As he moved to step in next to you, the cool air of the cafe enveloping you both, you stole a look at him from the corner of your eye. Despite the years and the way things had ended, there was a profound sense of comfort radiating from him. He carried an aura of safety that was entirely foreign to your life.

You wondered if he felt the same. Surely being around you was dredging up all the bad memories. He seemed so incredibly nervous that you were convinced he was reliving the sting of your old rejections.

Zaid navigated the space with a quiet confidence, leading you toward a secluded table in the far corner. It was a perfect spot, tucked away near a large window that offered a scenic, elevated view of the main street below.

He reached for the chair, pulling it out for you with a silent, courtly grace. You gave him a thankful nod, settling into the seat and smoothing down the navy silk of your Anarkali, before he finally sat down in the chair opposite you, his glasses catching the light as he looked across the table at the girl he had never quite managed to forget.

The silence between you stretched, fragile and fraught with the weight of a decade, until the tension snapped.

"I'm sorry!" you both blurted out in unison, the words colliding in the air like two panicked birds.

You blinked, momentarily stunned into a stupor, "Why are you sorry?"

Zaid shifted in his chair, his fingers nervously tracing the rim of his porcelain cup.

"For...for the way I left. Disappearing without so much as a proper goodbye...it was incredibly immature of me," he confessed, the guilt evident in the downward tilt of his head.

"You were just a kid, Zaid." you countered softly but he shook his head with a rueful smile.

"And so were you! I'm sorry for cutting you off so harshly. I don't even know why I convinced myself you would deliberately throw away my gift like that. I should have known you better."

The sheer earnestness in his voice made your heart clench with a painful tightness. It was so rare to hear a man take accountability without a trace of venom or defense that it left you momentarily breathless.

Compelled by his honesty, you finally unburdened yourself, explaining the chaotic truth of that day, the stray dogs, the shredded pink fur and the stick you had wielded in a futile attempt to save his gift.

When you finished, he let out a heavy sigh and face-palmed, his glasses nearly sliding off his nose. "See? This is exactly what I was saying. I'm such an idiot for ever doubting you."

"You really need to stop apologising!" you laughed, though the sound was tinged with a lingering sadness for the years lost to a misunderstanding.

"You know, after a few days, jab mera gussa finally thanda hua and I was missing you so terribly that I couldn't control myself, maine Haveli call kiya tha," he revealed, "I only remembered that one landline number. In fact, mujhe Sana ke ghar ka number bhi yaad nahi tha."

"I called a couple of times. The first time, no one picked it up and I thought, maybe I'd forgotten the digits. I called again after two or three days. A house help answered and told me you weren't home. I left a message, begging him to tell you I'd called. When no one called back, I tried again the next day." He paused, his jaw tightening slightly, "Tab Uzair bhai ne phone uthaya. Unhone bola ki tumhe mujhse baat nahi karni aur main roz-roz Haveli phone karna band kar doon. He cut the call after that. Uske baad toh meri himmat hi nahi hui, dobara try karne ki."

The air seemed to vanish from your lungs, replaced by a searing rage that tasted like copper. A wave of shock washed over you, followed closely by a surge of pure anger directed toward the man who had loomed over your life like a shadow.

No one had told you.

Not the house help and certainly not Uzair. He had intercepted your chance at closure, deliberately withholding the information that your best friend had reached out. Uzair had let you drown in your own guilt.

"Tumhe...kisi ne nahi bataya, that I had called?" Zaid asked softly, noticing the color draining from your face.

"No!" you exclaimed, your voice rising in a sharp spike of disbelief. A few patrons at the nearby tables turned to look and you quickly lowered your tone, though the intensity remained.

"No! Agar mujhe kisi ne bhi bataya hota, then I swear, I would have called back. Sana and I searched every nook and cranny of Lyari. We asked every shopkeeper, every neighbour, every classmate, no one had your new contact info."

Zaid leaned back, a look of profound relief washing over him, though it was tempered by the gravity of the lost years.

"I left without saying goodbye to anyone. My parents only broke the news a few days before we moved. They knew I'd have put my foot down and made a scene about leaving my friends behind. By the time they told me, I was so distraught over our fight that I didn't even have the energy to argue with them."

Your eyes softened, the anger at Uzair momentarily eclipsed by the immense sadness of two children being manipulated by circumstances beyond their control.

Without thinking, you reached across the table and squeezed his hand, your fingers anchoring him to the present. "I'm really sorry for everything that happened, Zaid. Truly."

He looked up, the cheeky, boyish grin you remembered so fondly finally breaking through his composure. "It's okay. You've more than made up for it by agreeing to come here! Even though, again, I'm sorry, your grandparents probably emotionally blackmailed you into this meeting."

You smiled, and for the first time in a long time, it wasn't a forced mask.

"They didn't. The only reason I agreed to come to this 'potential rishta meet' was because it was you. If it had been anyone else, I wouldn't have even considered it."

Zaid's eyes sparkled behind his glasses, a flush creeping up his neck. "Oh, I'm flattered! To be honest, jab ammi ne tumhari tasveer dikhayi, I was genuinely shocked that you were still single. The way Uzair bhai used to be so territorial over you...he used to watch you like a hawk, and how you used to follow him around...mujhe laga tha abhi tak toh tum dono ka nikaah ho gaya hoga."

Your smile faltered, leaving your face neutral and distant. You took a slow sip of your water, trying to steady your voice to sound as nonchalant as humanly possible.

"Uzair and I aren't on talking terms now," you said, the finality of the statement hanging in the air between the brass fixtures.

Zaid's eyebrows shot up, "What? Really? I thought...I mean, everyone in the neighbourhood thought it was only a matter of time."

You gave a short, stiff nod, refusing to let the bitterness seep into your tone. "I don't even live at the Haveli anymore. I live with my grandparents now."

"You have really changed," Zaid remarked softly, his amber eyes searching yours with a depth that made you feel exposed.

Oh, he had no idea.

Changing the trajectory of the conversation with a forced smile, you gestured toward him. "And you haven't changed at all. Still a walking ray of sunshine!"

Suddenly, his phone vibrated against the tabletop, an insistent buzz that caused him to groan audibly. The caller ID flashed "Ammi," and with a practiced flick of his thumb, he silenced the device without a second thought.

"Shouldn't you pick that up? It might be important."

Zaid leaned back, a look of exhaustion crossing his handsome features. "She is only calling to make sure I'm putting on a good impression. She's probably timing how long it takes for me to say something incredibly stupid."

You couldn't help but feel a flicker of warmth at his humility. "Really? She doesn't have to worry. You are well...you, after all."

He chuckled, though there was a self-deprecating edge to it. "This is exactly why she is worried! My parents don't hold nearly as high an opinion of me as you do."

You found yourself giggling as he began to describe his current predicament. He explained that he had absolutely no inclination to get married anytime soon. His singular focus was the architectural firm he had established just two months ago. Yet, his parents were hell-bent on trapping him in the golden cage of matrimony and he was currently being bullied, as he put it, into this parade of prospective brides.

Seeing his mood dip you tried to steer him back toward laughter using the only tool left in your arsenal, a self-deprecating joke.

"Look on the bright side, aaj tumhe zyada problem nahi ayegi. You can just go back and tell your parents that you didn't like me at all. Problem solved!"

"Yeh toh woh kabhi nahi maanenge because they know how much I—" He stopped abruptly, a violent blush creeping up from his collar to his ears. "—I missed you...and Sana!"

"Sana and I missed you a lot too," you replied, choosing to ignore the heavy pause that had preceded his correction. "Speaking of her, have you had the chance to meet her yet?"

Zaid shook his head, his fingers drumming nervously on the table. "Not yet. You are the first person I'm meeting since coming back. But obviously, plan toh hai. I'm actually a little scared because I know mujhe bohot galiyaan padne wali hai."

"Just a heads up, gaaliyon ke saath ho sakta hai woh tumhe thoda peet bhi de."

The shared laughter felt like a bridge being rebuilt, stone by stone. Caught in the momentum of the moment, you perked up with a sudden idea.

"Actually, some of my friends were planning to go to the fair tomorrow and we were going to grab dinner afterward. Why don't you tag along if you're free? It'll be just like old times."

Zaid looked hesitant, his eyes searching yours for any sign of pity. "Really? I don't want to intrude on your circle. I'd be the odd one out."

"Come on," you insisted, waving away his concerns. "You know half of them from school anyway. Everyone would be genuinely happy to see you there."

He finally gave in with a reluctant, charming smile. "Okay, fine. But I'm holding onto you to save me from Sana's wrath."

You grinned, leaning back into the plush velvet of your chair. "No promises!"

The conversation flowed with a natural ease that you had forgotten existed. He caught you up on his odyssey in Dubai, describing how his fascination with the skeletal beauty of skyscrapers led him to architecture. He spoke with a quiet, fierce pride about establishing his firm immediately after his bachelors, despite his father's skepticism that he should have "labored under an expert" first. Zaid's confidence in his own business acumen was a sharp contrast to the boys you knew in Lyari and you found yourself admiring the steady, calm fire in his eyes.

In return, you caught him up on the small, mundane details of life in the neighbourhood, though you were meticulous in cutting out any mention of Uzair, leaving the center of the story hollow, refusing to let the man who had broken you haunt this sanctuary.

You didn't even realise how much time had slipped away until the golden light of the afternoon began to stretch into the long shadows of evening.

When it was finally time to leave, Zaid insisted on dropping you home despite your protests about the distance. The ride back was filled with merry chatter, a stark contrast to the heavy, suffocating silence of your recent trips in Uzair's jeep.

When he finally pulled up outside your grandparents' gate, you gave him a quick side hug and finalised the details for the fair. You were about to unbuckle and step out when he reached into the backseat, his face set in a look of intense shyness.

"Wait, Y/N," he murmured. He produced a bouquet of fragrant jasmine and delicate lilies but tucked into the center of the blooms was something that made your breath hitch. It was a miniature version of the pink-and-turquoise teddy bear from your twelfth birthday.

Zaid's hands were shaking slightly as he handed them to you. "Yeh maine tumhare liye laya tha...itna nervous tha ki gaadi mein hi bhool gaya," he confessed, his gaze fixed on the steering wheel to avoid your reaction.

A wave of shame washed over you for having thought, even for a second, that he was here to gloat or mock your downfall. Throughout the entire afternoon, he had been nothing but ecstatic to see you, his every word a testament to a friendship that had survived time and distance.

"Zaid... you really didn't need to do this," you whispered, clutching the small bear to your chest. The softness of the fur felt like a reproach to your own hardened heart.

"Nahi, zaroori tha," he said, "You could have chosen not to come today and I wouldn't have blamed you after the things I said that day. I know that if you had been in my place, you would have at least listened to me instead of assuming the worst. So really, thank you for always being so understanding and kind to me, even back then."

You were speechless, the air in the car suddenly feeling thick with an emotion you couldn't name.

The transition from being Uzair's shadow to being Zaid's priority felt like stepping out of a dark room directly into the blistering glare of the midday sun, it was blinding, disorienting and physically overwhelming.

For years, your self-worth had been a currency that Uzair devalued daily with a surgeon's expertise. You had learned to make yourself small, to anticipate the sharp sting of a joke about your appearance before it was even uttered, and to accept the role of the reliable bridge that boys crossed to only to get to the more radiant girls standing beside you.

You had become so accustomed to the callous remarks about your weight and the indifferent shrugs that they had become the very foundation of your identity, you didn't just hear the insults, you believed them.

When Zaid looked at you, there was no calculation in his eyes, no hidden agenda, and no cruelty. Your brain, conditioned for defense and self-deprecation, struggled to categorise this alien feeling.

You were a person who had been taught to expect crumbs, and Zaid was offering you a feast. The disparity was so vast that your first instinct wasn't joy but a desperate, panicked need to flee back into the familiar safety of your own solitude.

As you stood there, clutching the flowers and the small, plush bear, you watched his car pull away until its taillights disappeared. You fought back the tears that were finally beginning to shed.

But as the warmth of the flowers seeped into your skin, an ugly, cruel voice reared its head in the back of your mind, the voice of your own insecurity. It whispered that now that Uzair had discarded you, you were simply using Zaid's kindness as a bandage to cover the rot he left behind.

You let out a broken sob, frantically wiping at your eyes with the back of your hand. You felt like a fraud, a girl who didn't deserve the sunshine Zaid brought because your soul was still stained with the darkness of a man who didn't love you.

"Y/N? Beta, tum aa gayi?" your grandmother's voice called out from the porch, her tone laced with a hopeful curiosity that felt like a weight.

You took several deep, shuddering breaths, trying to compose your unravelling form before stepping into the light of the house.

With one final, shaky exhale, you pushed the door open, forcing the wreckage of your heart into the shadows as you stepped toward the warmth of your grandmother's voice, haunted by the terrifying possibility that you were actually loved, just not by the man who still occupied your heart and your every waking thought.

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They say your first love is supposed to be your epic love.

Maybe that's why my life feels less like a story and more like a sentence I never finished writing. Like someone opened a book, read the first chapter with tremendous attention and care, and then set it down — distracted, pulled away by something louder, something more urgent — and never came back. The book is still there. The story is still technically happening. The pages are turning on their own, slowly, in some quiet room.

But the reader is gone.

That is what it feels like, loving Jaskirat Singh Rangi. Not like grief, exactly, because grief at least has a body. Grief has a funeral, a date, a before and after. What I have is something else entirely — a question mark at the end of every thought, a story without a full stop, a love that was never named and so cannot be mourned properly and cannot be ended properly and cannot be done with, even if I wanted to be done with it, which I am not entirely sure I do.

I am thirty-two years old. I am in my second year of law school. I make aloo paranthas on Sunday mornings for a family that is not mine, in a kitchen that belongs to a woman I call Auntyji, whose son I loved and whose son I have not seen in more than a decade.

This is my life.

I find it, on most days, enough.

I should start at the beginning. That's what they teach you in law school — when you're building a case, when you're trying to convince someone of a truth they don't want to accept, you begin at the beginning.

You lay your facts down like bricks, one after another, solid and sequential, and you do not let feeling get in the way of the argument. You do not let the way something felt contaminate the clarity of what actually happened.

But the problem with Jassi — the particular and persistent problem with Jaskirat Singh Rangi — is that feeling is the argument. Feeling is the whole of the evidence. I have nothing else. No documents, no witnesses, no formal record of anything we were to each other.

What I have is the memory of an October evening and a laugh I have not heard in twelve years and a kiss that lasted approximately four seconds and changed the entire shape of my interior life.

Go ahead, try submitting that to a judge.

Jaskirat Singh Rangi. Even now the full name feels strange in my mouth, too heavy, too formal, like wearing someone else's coat. He was always just Jassi. He was the boy from the house three lanes over who used to race his bicycle down the slope near the old flour mill and crash into the ditch at the bottom because he never learned to use the brakes. He was the boy who argued with everyone — with his mother, with the shopkeeper, with stray dogs who wandered too close to his gate — not out of belligerence but out of a deep and genuine conviction that if you had a point to make, you made it, regardless of whether the other party was capable of understanding you. He once argued with a crow for ten minutes about a piece of roti.

I watched from my rooftop, and I laughed until my sides ached, and he never knew I was watching, and even now I think that is the truest image I have of him. Fully committed to something that made no sense. Absolutely certain of his own rightness. Laughing at himself when the crow flew away undefeated.

We were from the same gully in Pathankot. You know how it is in those places. You grow up knowing everyone's business before you know your own business. I knew his mother made the best aloo paranthas in the neighbourhood — the kind where the dough is thin enough to be almost translucent but holds together perfectly, where the filling is not too salty, not too bland, where she always put in exactly the right amount of ajwain.

I knew his father had a short temper and a longer shadow, the kind of man who took up more space in a room than his physical body should have allowed, who had opinions about everything and the volume to enforce them.

I knew he had two sisters — Harleen, who was older and had their mother's eyes and a laugh that could be heard three houses away, and Jasleen, who was younger and quieter and who had a way of watching the world with a steadiness that made you feel seen even when she wasn't speaking. I knew all of this the way you know geography — just backdrop, just the shape of the world you inhabit, unremarkable because it has always been there.

Then one summer — I must have been seventeen, maybe eighteen — I actually looked at him.

It happens like that sometimes, and I'm not sure there's any real explanation for it. The neuroscience people would tell you something about pattern recognition, about novelty bias, about the brain suddenly registering something it had previously categorised and moved past. The poets would tell you something more useful. Whatever the mechanism, the experience is identical: someone you have always seen becomes someone you suddenly see, and nothing is quite the same shape afterwards.

He was standing at the edge of the fields at dusk, arguing with a goat — specifically, with a brown and stubborn goat that had pushed through a gap in the fence between Mohan Lal's property and ours and was eating with great enthusiasm and zero remorse. Jassi was trying to reason with it. He was actually making arguments. He was telling the goat that this was not its grass, that there were social contracts involved, that the goat needed to consider the broader implications of its behaviour. The goat did not care. The goat had not read the social contract and found it unpersuasive.

Jassi looked up at some point and realised I was standing there watching him lose a debate to livestock, and something moved across his face — embarrassment, amusement, a quick calculation — and then he laughed. A real laugh, full-bodied and unguarded, the kind of laugh that doesn't care how it looks, and he gestured at the goat as if to say can you believe this and I laughed back, and that was it.

That was the whole of it.

That laugh.

I have spent a lot of time, over the years, trying to locate the precise quality of it. Why that laugh, why that evening, why that particular convergence of dusk light and absurdity and a boy who was completely unashamed of himself. I don't have a satisfying answer.

I just know that I walked back inside my house and everything felt slightly rearranged, like someone had moved all the furniture an inch to the left — technically the same room, technically still habitable, but requiring constant small recalibrations.

[If only she had known — if only she could see, across all those miles and years, what else that laugh would one day do. How it would surface in Karachi, of all places, in a courtyard she cannot imagine, in a language she does not speak. How a woman named Yalina Jamali would hear it for the first time across a crowded room — not even directed at her, just a laugh happening nearby — and feel something rearrange itself inside her too. How history repeats not because it has to, but because some people carry their most essential selves so completely that even underneath twelve years and a false name and an entire fabricated life, the laugh comes through the same.]

[If only she had known what that laugh would build, far away from her. What it would make possible. What it would make inevitable.]

We never talked about what we were. I want to be precise about that, because precision matters — I've spent enough time now in rooms where language is everything, where the exact word used in the exact context can mean the difference between freedom and ten years in prison, to understand that the thing you don't say carries as much weight as the thing you do. Silence is a choice. Ambiguity is a choice. We chose both, deliberately and continuously, and I have spent a long time thinking about what that choice meant, and I still don't have a clean answer.

We never said love. We never said us. We never said what are we or what does this mean or where does this go. We had only the spaces between words, and we filled those spaces with glances and small careful movements and the understanding — unspoken, never confirmed — that some things are safer without names. If you name a thing, it becomes real. If it becomes real, it becomes something that can be lost. If you keep it nameless, it stays in the realm of the possible, which is a more comfortable place to live.

I understand that now. I did not understand it then. I just knew that when he looked at me a certain way, the world contracted to a very manageable size.

He would find reasons to walk past my house at particular times of day. I would find reasons to be near the window at those particular times. It was elaborate in its casualness — the care we took to appear like we were not doing anything intentional was itself a kind of intimacy, a collaboration, a small private choreography that only made sense if you were both participating.

His sister Harleen noticed, I think. She had those mother's eyes — perceptive, slightly amused, not unkind. Once, when I was visiting the house to return a borrowed pot, she said something about how Jassi had been unusually helpful with chores lately, and then she looked at me in a way that made my face go warm, and she laughed and moved on. That was all. She never said anything directly. She was too generous for that.

I think about Harleen a lot.

She was twenty-two or twenty-three that summer, I think. She had a way of carrying herself that suggested she had already figured out things that the rest of us were still circling around. She wasn't tough, exactly — she was settled, which is a different quality entirely. The world was not always easy for women in our neighbourhood. Harleen had decided, apparently, to simply live in it without apologising for taking up space. I found that remarkable. I tried, in the years that came after, to imitate it.

The October evening I keep returning to.

The light in Pathankot in October — I don't know how to describe it to someone who hasn't been there. It has a quality that photographs always fail to capture, this particular warmth that makes everything look like it's been gilded from the inside, like the air itself is made of something softer than usual. We walked out past the edge of the fields, far enough that the village was behind us and the sounds of it were muffled, just the wind in the sugarcane and somewhere a bird settling in for the evening.

Jassi talked.

That was the thing about him, the thing I keep coming back to when I'm trying to reconstruct who he was before everything happened — he could be closed for days, buttoned up, operating at the surface level, and then something would shift, some internal latch would unlock, and he would just talk. Not the performative talking that men sometimes do, the version that is really about demonstrating intelligence or securing admiration. The real kind.

He talked about his sisters first, always his sisters first. He talked about wanting Harleen to go to the city for further education, about how she was the smartest person in the family and how that smartness was being wasted in their gully when it could be doing something in the world. He talked about Jasleen, who was still young then, who was full of a restless energy that reminded him of himself in ways he found slightly alarming. He wanted things for them — not vague general wanting, but specific, detailed wanting. He wanted Harleen to have a job she chose. He wanted Jasleen to have room to grow into whatever she turned out to be without the neighbourhood deciding for her.

He talked about the military. He had applied to training, he told me that evening, and part of me understood for the first time that he was going to leave. Not immediately — the training wasn't approved yet, the process was long — but eventually. I had always known abstractly that people left Pathankot, that the boys from our gully had options that involved becoming something other than their fathers, but knowing it abstractly is different from knowing it specifically, with a name and a face and a particular October evening attached.

I asked him why the military. He was quiet for a moment — the kind of quiet that means someone is actually thinking about the answer rather than reaching for the nearest available one — and then he said something I have carried with me for twelve years.

He said: "Because I want to be useful in a way that counts. Not useful like fixing someone's generator. Useful like making something safe."

I didn't ask him to clarify. I understood, in the way you understand some things without being able to explain the mechanism — he meant his family. He meant his mother and his sisters and his neighbourhood and the particular vulnerability of people who are not protected by money or status or connections, people for whom the system works only intermittently and on a good day. He wanted to stand between them and the world.

He wanted to matter in a large way.

He talked about the system — the way it worked, the way it failed to work, the relationship between power and protection and how those two things were not always pointed in the same direction. He had a political mind, Jassi did.

He was not educated in the formal sense — not yet, he would have gotten there if things had been different — but he thought structurally, he thought about cause and effect, he thought about the distance between how things were supposed to work and how they actually worked. I found it riveting. I was seventeen or eighteen and I had never met anyone who made thinking feel like something active and urgent.

And then, at some point, in the middle of a sentence about water rights, he stopped and looked at me.

Not the looking he did when he was trying to appear casual. The other kind.

"Nothing will happen to them," he said. Quietly. Not to me, exactly — to the air, to himself, to whatever listening presence you address when you're making a promise you intend to keep. "I won't let it."

I believed him. I need you to understand that. I believed him without qualification, without reservation, without the small skeptical voice that usually runs underneath my thoughts like a footnote. I believed him the way you believe certain fundamental things — gravity, the sunrise, the premise that the world is basically navigable if you try hard enough. That kind of belief.

That is not naivety. Please do not call it naivety. Naivety is believing something without evidence. What I had was evidence — I had watched him, I had listened to him, I had seen the quality of his love for his family, which was not the passive affectionate love of most people, but something with load-bearing structure, something you could build on. I believed him because he had given me reason to believe him.

He kissed me that evening. Or rather — I should be precise, as always — something that was almost a kiss happened. We had stopped walking, and we were standing close, closer than the occasion technically required, and the light was doing its October thing, and he turned to look at me and I turned to look at him and the distance between us, which was already small, became smaller, and then —

It lasted four seconds. Maybe five. It was clumsy and brief and immediately followed by him pulling back and looking at me with an expression I can only describe as caught — not ashamed, exactly, not regretful, but aware that something had happened that he did not have a framework for managing. He started talking about something else almost immediately. I think it was cricket. The specifics don't matter.

What matters is that I let him talk, because I understood that he needed the conversational cover, and I provided it without comment, and somewhere in the middle of his sentence about a match I wasn't following, he looked at me sideways and the corner of his mouth did something that was not quite a smile but was in the same family.

I have thought about that not-quite-smile approximately four thousand times.

We walked back to the village in the early dark, not touching, not speaking much, and we parted at the turn in the road, and I went home and sat on the edge of my charpoy and thought: so that happened.

It happened.

And neither of us ever mentioned it again.

[She did not know — she could not have known — that years later, in Karachi, Jaskirat Singh Rangi, who by then had ceased to exist and been replaced entirely by Hamza Ali Mazari, would kiss a woman named Yalina Jamali for the first time in a garden in the evening, and that the evening light in Karachi in October is completely different from the evening light in Pathankot, and that none of it would feel the same, and that he would not pull back afterwards.]

[She did not know that Hamza — Jassi, always Jassi underneath — would not manage to keep Yalina at the distance that the mission required. That she would catch him off-guard in ways nobody else had managed to, least of all himself. That the man who had spent years becoming somebody else would, in the presence of a woman who looked at him with a particular kind of directness, feel his edges blurring.]

[If only she knew: the kiss in Pathankot was the first. The kiss in Karachi was not.]

He left for military training.

I won't romanticise the leaving. There was no dramatic farewell. We had not established the kind of relationship that permits dramatic farewells. What there was: a morning when I knew he was going, and I made an excuse to walk past his house at the time I calculated he would be leaving, and I saw him in the street with a bag and Harleen's hand on his arm and his mother's face doing the thing mothers' faces do, and he looked up, and we looked at each other for a moment — three seconds, four — and then he nodded, and I nodded back, and he walked away.

That was it.

I stood at the end of the lane and watched until he turned the corner and was gone, and then I went home and helped my mother with the dishes, and I did not cry, because I had not been given the right to cry, because we had never named what we were.

Then he left.

And then — while he was gone, while he was becoming something new somewhere else, while Pathankot went about its ordinary business of seasons and harvests and children growing and old people dying — the world broke.

I will not write the details at length. Some things resist the case-file treatment. Some things should not be reduced to sequential bullet points and clinical language. What I will tell you is this: the Rangi family became the target of a powerful man's greed and cruelty, and the word powerful in our context does not mean something abstract. It means a man with MLA status and connections and the specific kind of impunity that comes from years of watching the law bend around you without breaking. Sukhwinder Singh. The name sits in my mouth like something rotten. A land dispute — which sounds almost banal, the sort of thing neighbours sort out over a cup of tea, which is how little the phrase captures the violence underneath it.

Jassi's father was hanged. I need you to sit with that. Not shot, not beaten — hanged. The specific choice of method tells you something about the message being sent. About the contempt behind it.

Harleen — Harleen with her mother's eyes and her settled, spacious way of moving through the world — Harleen was murdered. Before that, she was violated in ways I will not describe because describing them serves no purpose except to make concrete what I already know, which is that the men responsible destroyed something irreplaceable for a reason that was never about her at all, that was only ever about territory and power and the demonstration of what happens when you do not comply.

Jasleen survived. In the way that sometimes means the physical body continues while other things become uncertain. She was found. She was brought back. She was alive. And survival is not nothing — survival is, in fact, the most important possible outcome — but in those early days, when she was quiet in a way that was different from her previous quiet, when she would not eat and would not speak and would not look directly at anything, the word survivor felt like the wrong shape for what she was.

She was someone who had been unmade and was going to have to figure out, slowly and without a map, how to be remade.

I was there for this. I want to say that not for credit — I was there because there was nowhere else to be, because the Rangi women were family in every way that mattered even without the paperwork — but I want to say it because it is part of the record. I was there for the nights that followed, which were the kind of nights that change your understanding of what a night can contain.

And Jassi didn't know any of it yet.

Jassi was somewhere, training, becoming whatever the military was making of him, and he did not know that his family had been destroyed in his absence, and that inability to know was its own particular cruelty, independent of everything else.

He came back.

I was in the courtyard of his mother's house when he arrived, carrying a bag and a new posture — he held himself differently after training, wider across the shoulders, more deliberate in his movements, as though he had learned to take up space on purpose rather than by accident. And then he walked through the gate and his mother was there and something in his face said that he already knew, that news had found him before he found home, and I watched the new posture — the military posture, the disciplined posture — I watched it crack.

Not break. Crack.

A distinction I have held onto.

He held his mother for a long time. I stepped away — some moments belong only to the people inside them — and I heard rather than saw what came next, which was his voice, low and terrible, asking questions and receiving answers that no one wanted to give or hear.

I saw him later that day. Just for a moment, passing through the corridor. He looked at me and the look was — I don't have the language for it still. It was not grief, though grief was in it. It was not rage, though that was in it too. It was something more total than either of those things. A man who had decided.

I should have been frightened.

I was not frightened. I understood.

I am spending years in law school now learning to be more precise about the relationship between justice and vengeance, about the systems that are supposed to channel the first so that people don't have to resort to the second, about what happens when those systems fail so completely that the choice becomes: do nothing, or do the thing the system exists to prevent. I am learning this in the academic sense.

Jassi learned it in the applied sense, alone, in the dark of his own certainty.

He found his friend Gurbaaz. He acquired weapons. I did not know the specific details then, though I have pieced them together since — it is not difficult, when you are studying law, to read between the lines of what the prosecution eventually presented in court. He went to Sukhwinder Singh's house one night. He went with the precision and the deliberateness of a man who had planned carefully and was not acting out of emotion, or not only out of emotion. Twelve people died.

Twelve.

I have held that number in different ways at different times. In the early years, I held it as a price that was paid. Now, with more education and more complexity, I hold it as a weight — not a justification, not a condemnation, but a weight, something that has to be acknowledged and factored and not simplified in either direction. The law would have a clean answer. The law would say: twelve deaths, regardless of who the twelve were, constitutes a crime. The law would be right, in the way that correct things can also be insufficient.

Jassi brought Jasleen back himself. And then they arrested him.

The trial was brief by the standards of trials. Briefness in that context usually means the outcome was decided before the proceedings began. He was convicted. He was sentenced to death. The courtroom — I was in the gallery, I watched — had the atmosphere of a formality rather than a reckoning. The judge's face told you that he had processed more important things today and would process more important things tomorrow.

I stood on the courthouse steps afterwards and the sky was doing something ordinary — just being a sky, clouds and light and the usual indifferent blue — and I thought: this is how it ends.

Not in the fields. Not in the October light. Not with a name finally put to what we were. But here, on these steps, with a verdict already handed down and a sentence already calculated and the whole bureaucratic machinery of state violence beginning to move.

I thought about the four-second almost-kiss behind the banyan tree and I thought about the not-quite-smile and I thought about what it means to love someone you never named and I thought: now what.

He was moved to prison. Awaiting execution.

I went to see him once. Once was all I was permitted — I had to represent myself as a family connection, a cousin, a category flexible enough that the guards didn't scrutinise too closely. He looked the same in a way that surprised me, and also he looked entirely different. The same face, the same posture — the military posture, the deliberate width of his shoulders — but behind his eyes something had settled that hadn't been there before. Not peace, exactly. Resolution.

We sat across a table and we spoke through a grille and I told him about his mother and about Jasleen and he listened to every word the way he listened to things when they mattered, with his whole attention, nothing wandering. When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.

Then he said: "Take care of them."

Not a question. Not a request. A transmission — information being given in the trust that it would be received and acted on. He was passing something to me, some responsibility, some sacred ordinary duty.

I said: "You know I will."

And he looked at me — really looked at me, the way he had looked at me that October evening before everything happened — and he said, very quietly, so quietly that I had to lean forward to hear it: "I know."

That was the last conversation we ever had.

[Two years passed.]

[In those two years, while she was learning to make his mother's aloo paranthas, while she was sitting with Jasleen through the nightmares and the silences, while she was beginning to ask herself what she was going to do with the particular fury that had taken up residence inside her chest — in those two years, Jaskirat Singh Rangi was still alive.]

[He was on death row, which is its own specific geography of waiting, and then in 2002, something changed.]

[A prison transfer was arranged. Not the kind of transfer that goes somewhere — the kind that goes nowhere, officially. The kind that removes a man from the public record and places him in a different kind of custody entirely. Two intelligence officials. A conversation that was not a conversation so much as an offer with extremely limited alternatives.]

[His name was removed. His file was closed. Jaskirat Singh Rangi ceased to exist in every document that a government produces.]

[And in the space left behind, something new began to be constructed.]

He disappeared.

Not death — I knew it wasn't death, though I couldn't have explained why I knew, only that the official silence around his case had a different texture than the official silence around a death would have had. Death closes. This silence had the quality of a door left ajar, a chapter interrupted rather than finished, an ellipsis rather than a full stop.

The prison said: transfer. And after that: nothing.

His mother asked, of course. She asked for years. She wrote letters to departments that did not reply. She found, at last, an advocate — a young man who took her case pro bono and ran headlong into the specific bureaucratic wall that certain cases construct around themselves, the wall that says: there is nothing here to see, there is no information available, the file you are requesting does not exist in any accessible form.

I watched that advocate fail and I thought: I need to learn to do that better.

But that comes later.

First: the waiting.

I should tell you what the waiting looked like, because I think people imagine waiting as a passive thing, as the absence of action, as someone simply sitting in a room watching the door. That is not what it was. Waiting, when you do it seriously, when you do it across years, is one of the most active things I know. It requires constant maintenance. It requires you to be always slightly braced, always slightly unfinished, always holding a small space inside you that is reserved for the moment that will eventually — maybe — arrive.

I took care of Jassi's mother. I did this with intention and consistency — not out of pity, because Auntyji did not want or need pity, she was one of those women who would have found pity insulting, but out of — I'm not sure I have the right word. Solidarity is too political. Love is too vague. Something in between. An understanding that she was someone Jassi loved, and that Jassi had asked me to take care of them, and that promises made across prison grilles to men on death row carry a particular obligation.

I made the paranthas. I sat with her in the evenings. I listened to the stories she told about Jassi as a child, the same stories cycling back in different orders, and I listened to each repetition as though it were the first time, because each repetition contained something I might have missed, some detail that might help me understand more completely the person I had loved imprecisely and briefly and probably not finished loving.

I took care of Jasleen. This was more complicated, because Jasleen was working through something that required more than company and paranthas, that required a kind of patience I had to develop deliberately because it did not come naturally. She had nightmares. She had days when she could not leave the house.

She had a way of going blank in the middle of conversations that used to frighten me until I learned to simply sit quietly nearby and wait for her to come back. She came back, always. She is resilient in ways that make me ashamed of my own small difficulties.

Gurbaaz helped — Gurbaaz, Jassi's friend, who had been with him at the end and who carried his own complicated grief about what had happened and what they had done. He and Jasleen were good for each other in a way I had not anticipated. Some griefs need someone else who was there. Some recovery requires a witness.

I enrolled in law school at twenty-eight.

My mother thought I had lost my mind. My aunts thought I had lost my mind. The neighbourhood had several theories about why a girl my age was making choices that did not include a husband and children, and none of the theories were particularly accurate, but they circulated freely and enthusiastically, the way neighbourhood theories do. One aunty suggested I had become depressed and needed a husband as a cure. Another suggested I was making a political statement, which was closer, but still not quite right. My mother, bless her, simply asked whether I was sure, and when I said yes, she sighed in the specific way she reserves for things she has accepted but does not endorse, and made me tea, and that was that.

The admission process was not simple. I was twenty-eight, which is not old by any rational standard but is old by the standards of the particular institutions that prefer their students young and unformed and easy to shape. I had to argue for my own place, had to submit letters and sit for examinations and make a case for myself to a committee that was not entirely sure what to do with a woman from Pathankot who had spent her twenties caring for someone else's family. One professor on the admissions board asked me why I wanted to pursue law at my age — he said your age in the way that made clear he thought it was a polite way of saying this late.

I told him about the Rangi case. Not everything — I am not in the habit of distributing my interior life to strangers — but enough. The land dispute. The MLA's impunity. The speed and decisiveness with which the state moved to convict the man who responded to injustice, compared to the absolute immobility of the same state when it came to the injustice itself. The specific cruelty of a system that punishes the response more efficiently than the provocation.

The professor was quiet for a moment and then he wrote something in his notes and said: admitted.

I enrolled because of Jassi, but not in the way that might be assumed — not out of some romantic notion that I would march into court and present a surprise argument and he would walk free and come home to me. I am not a person who lives in romantic notions. I enrolled because I had watched what happens when the system fails, what it does to people, what it leaves them with, what choices it forces them to make when the official channels are closed and the powerful are protected and the vulnerable are left with nothing but the decision to either accept it or do something the law will then punish them for.

I wanted to understand that system well enough to find the places where it could be held accountable. I wanted to be able to stand in the path of the next Sukhwinder Singh — to build the kind of argument that could stop a man like that before he needed stopping in other ways. I wanted to be the thing that Jassi never had access to. A person who knew the right words, who understood the architecture of the law well enough to find its load-bearing walls and also its structural weaknesses, who could stand in a courtroom and make the case that needed making.

Maybe it was too late for Jassi. But someone else's Jassi was out there right now, standing at the edge of a field somewhere in Punjab or Haryana or UP, watching the system fail someone he loved, calculating what it would cost to make it right. Someone else's Harleen was still alive and could still be protected if the right argument was made in the right room at the right time. Someone else's family was standing at the edge of the cliff that the Rangis had been pushed off, and maybe — maybe — a person who knew what to do could reach out and pull them back.

I wanted to be that person.

I still want to be that person.

It is not simple. Nothing about law school is simple, but the specific difficulty of being there at twenty-eight, with the things I know, with the history I carry — it is a particular kind of difficult. My classmates are bright and earnest and they believe in justice in the way you believe in something you have not yet been given serious reason to doubt. I find that beautiful, actually. I am careful not to damage it. But when we argue about theory — about the ideal function of the law, about what justice is supposed to accomplish, about the relationship between morality and legality — I bring something to those arguments that they don't have yet, and I can feel the difference in the room.

My professor of criminal procedure said to me last semester: "You argue like someone who has a personal stake."

I said: "Yes."

He nodded. He did not ask further. Some things communicate themselves without requiring explanation.

I sit in those lecture halls and I learn the architecture of justice — where it holds, where it crumbles, where you can wedge something open. I argue moot cases with a precision and a fury that my professors find notable and my classmates find slightly alarming, and I am the best in my class not because I am the most naturally gifted — I am not — but because I am arguing from something that they are not arguing from yet. They are arguing from principle. I am arguing from memory.

From Harleen's face. From Jasleen's nightmares. From a verdict handed down in a room that had already decided before the proceedings began.

From a man who believed in something large enough to lose his own life for, and who asked me, across a prison grille, to take care of the people he was leaving behind.

I'm taking care of them, Jassi. I am learning how to do it better. Every case I argue, every concept I absorb, every time I find the gap in an argument that looked airtight — I am getting closer to being the kind of person who could have helped. Who might still help someone like you, in whatever form that takes.

I carry you like a methodology. Like a reason. Not a burden — I want to be precise about that. A burden is something that slows you down. This is something that moves me forward. There is a difference, and the difference matters.

[While she argued moot cases, while she made paranthas on Sunday mornings, while she learned the architecture of a justice system she intended to hold to account — he was building something else entirely.]

[By 2004, Jaskirat Singh Rangi had been recruited into a covert programme that required him to become someone who had never existed. The identity of Hamza Ali Mazari was constructed with the kind of care that goes into building something intended to last. A name, a history, a set of stories that could survive scrutiny, a personality that was not entirely unlike Jassi's own — there is only so far you can travel from yourself — but different enough to pass.]

[He was deployed to Kabul first. And then, eventually, to Karachi.]

[In Karachi, in the specific geography of Lyari — a place as different from Pathankot as one place can be from another while still existing on the same planet — Hamza Ali Mazari began the work of becoming someone the criminal networks would trust. This required things that we should not dress up with euphemism: it required deception on a scale that most people will never experience. It required Hamza to be believable, and to be believable he had to be real, and to be real he had to find the Jassi underneath the alias and let enough of him show to be human.]

[And into this situation walked Yalina Jamali.]

[Daughter of Jameel Jamali, who was himself a more complicated man than anyone suspected, but that is another story.]

[Yalina was — if we are being precise — extraordinary. This is not a competition. It is simply the truth that the person waiting in Pathankot would have deserved to know, even though knowing would have broken something in her that has so far remained intact. Yalina was educated and fierce and capable of seeing through people with an accuracy that should have made Hamza's mission impossible. The fact that it didn't — the fact that she looked at him and saw Hamza and also saw something truer than Hamza, something real moving underneath the alias — says everything about both of them.]

[He fell in love with her.]

[This is the part that the girl in Pathankot should not read, and the part that she would read anyway, and the part that would break her quietly and without drama, the way some breakings happen — not with a sound, just with a sense of something shifting irrevocably.]

[He fell in love with Yalina the way people fall in love when they have no business doing so, when the timing is catastrophically wrong, when the falling is its own kind of mission failure and also its own kind of truth. He built a life with her. A real life — not a cover story, or not only a cover story. A marriage, in the context of the identity he was inhabiting, which made it legally a fiction but emotionally something else entirely. A son. Zayan. Who had his eyes, someone who knew them both told him once, which was simultaneously the best and worst thing anyone had ever said to him in Karachi.]

[A family. He built a family.]

[If only she knew: the man she was waiting for was not suspended in time the way she was. The man she was waiting for had kept living, fully and completely, in the ways that matter. He had loved someone else. He had made a child. He had constructed, in the ruins of his original life, something new and inhabitable and real.]

[He had not waited. And who could blame him?]

I do not have children.

People ask. I am thirty-two and unmarried and childless and living in my parents' house, and people ask, and I tell them I am too busy with my studies and my work, which is true. I do not tell them the rest. Some truths require a context that would take longer to build than the conversation allows.

How do you explain to someone that you are still in some sense waiting for a man you never officially loved, who has been gone for more than a decade, who may or may not still be alive, who left you with nothing but a four-second kiss and a look across a prison grille and the weight of a promise made in passing?

How do you explain that the waiting has become part of the structure of your life, that it is not pathological but functional, that it has in fact made you more rather than less — pushed you into law school, into Jasleen's life, into the habit of making paranthas on Sunday mornings, all of which are good things, generative things?

You can't explain it. The explanation would take too long and require too many prerequisites and end without a satisfying conclusion. So you say: too busy. And you go back to your books.

I keep a single photograph of him. It is not a romantic photograph — it is a photograph someone took at a community gathering when we were both young, a group photograph that includes half the neighbourhood, and Jassi is in the back row, slightly blurred, caught mid-laugh. He is not even looking at the camera. You would not pick him out as anyone special if you did not already know him.

I have looked at it approximately ten thousand times.

I know every blurred pixel of his mid-laugh face.

[There was a moment in Karachi — one of many, but this one in particular — when Yalina looked at her husband and said something that landed differently than she intended.]

[She said: "I think you have people at home who miss you."]

[She meant it simply. She had begun to understand, by then, that Hamza's story was not the whole of his story, that underneath the alias there was a history with a different shape. She did not yet know the full shape of it. She was finding the edges.]

[Hamza — Jassi — sat with that sentence for a long time. The people at home. His mother. Jasleen. The girl from the gully whose name he did not allow himself to think about too often, because thinking about it was a form of going somewhere he could not go.]

[He said: "Maybe."]

[He said it in a way that closed the subject, and Yalina, who was intelligent enough to know when a subject was being closed, let it close.]

[He thought about Pathankot for three days after that. He thought about a girl standing near a window and a laugh about a goat and October light and a promise made out of doors with nobody watching. He thought about the kiss that lasted four or five seconds and the not-quite-smile that followed it and the fact that he had never told her anything directly and probably never would.]

[And then he returned to being Hamza, because that was the work, and sacrifice is the highest duty, and some things you let yourself feel for three days and then you put away.]

Last month I defended my first moot case against a professor who has been practising for thirty years and who is known for being genuinely difficult to argue against, and I won. Not comfortably — he found every gap in my argument, and there were gaps — but I held the core of it, I held the line that mattered, and when it was over he looked at me across the room and nodded, which is what he does instead of saying well done, and I felt something.

Not pride, exactly. Something quieter. A sense of adequacy — of having become, incrementally, the person I decided to become in the aftermath of everything.

I called Jasleen that evening. She has children now — two, a boy and a girl, and the girl has Harleen's eyes, which is a thing that could break you if you let it, and which I have decided to find beautiful instead. Jasleen has built something careful and solid, the way people build when they know how quickly things can be undone. She asked me about the moot case and I told her about it and she listened the way she listens to things now, with the steadiness she always had and more patience than she used to, and when I was done she said: "Jassi would have been proud of you."

I did not reply for a moment.

And then I said: "I hope so."

[The ending of the story that she does not know:]

[In the climax of Operation Dhurandhar, in a LeT camp in Muridke, Jaskirat Singh Rangi — Hamza Ali Mazari — fought Major Iqbal of the ISI in the kind of confrontation that operational briefings refer to with clean clinical language and that in reality is brutal and desperate and close-quarters and decided not by training alone but by something harder to name.]

[He survived. He was captured. He was eventually released, through mechanisms too convoluted to recount here.]

[And then, having abandoned everything — the mission, the alias, the cover, and also Yalina, and also Zayan — he returned to India.]

[He was commended. He was debriefed. He was told that his service had mattered. These things were true. They were also insufficient.]

[And then he went to Pathankot.]

[He stood outside his childhood house in the early morning. His mother was inside — he could see through the window, the shape of her moving through the kitchen, older than he remembered, slower than he remembered, but moving, present, alive. Jasleen was there too, with her children, the little girl who has Harleen's eyes.]

[He stood outside and he watched them and he wept. Quietly and alone, in the way of men who have spent years learning to feel things privately, without audience or acknowledgement.]

[And then he walked away.]

[Because sacrifice is the highest duty. Because he had been dead to them for a long time. Because coming back would require explanations that would destroy more than they repaired. Because Zayan is growing up in Karachi without his father, and Yalina is navigating a choice she did not make, and his mother has built a life around his absence that his presence might rupture rather than complete.]

[Because some stories don't end with the return.]

[He did not see the girl from the gully. He did not know whether she was still there. He did not let himself find out.]

I walked past the mango tree outside Auntyji's house this morning.

It is still there. Mango trees are stubborn things — they outlast almost everything. The house is quieter these days, with Jasleen living in a place of her own now, though she visits often, but Auntyji is still there, still making paranthas on Sunday mornings, still sitting in the evening with her glass of chai and her particular brand of contained grief, which she wears so habitually that it has become indistinguishable from her general expression.

She does not speak about Jassi often anymore. She spoke about him constantly for the first several years — the stories cycling, the details kept precise, the act of talking about him a way of keeping him present. Now she speaks about him rarely, and when she does it is usually something small, something mundane, something connected to everyday life: Jassi used to like this particular kind of dal, or Jassi had a way of eating mangoes that made a mess of everything. The sacred ordinary.

I stood at the mango tree this morning and I thought about everything.

I thought about Harleen, who is gone, who is irreplaceable, whose absence I still feel as a shape in the world rather than just an absence. I thought about Jasleen, who is here, who has built a life that is genuinely her own, who is more than what was done to her, who is also, sometimes, exactly the girl I remember from before, laughing at something and taking up space without apologising for it.

I thought about Gurbaaz, who kept the promise Jassi gave him, who has been a steadiness in Jasleen's life that neither of them expected.

I thought about the advocate who couldn't crack the case, who failed in the specific and honourable way that people fail when they run into walls that are there by design, and I thought: I will not fail in the same way.

I thought about the courtroom where I stood at twenty years old and watched justice perform itself without actually occurring.

I thought about a prison grille and a quiet voice saying I know.

And I thought about Jassi — where he is, what he looks like now, whether the laugh is the same. I have let myself wonder, in recent years, whether the disappearance was something other than death. The texture of the official silence. The way the case was sealed rather than closed. The specific vocabulary of the court documents, which I have read now with the trained eye I didn't have before, and which suggest — suggest, not confirm — that there are things that did not end the way they were stated to have ended.

I wonder.

I let myself wonder, now, more than I used to. Not with hope exactly — hope requires a future, and the future I might have imagined at seventeen or eighteen is no longer possible in the shape it once had, too much time has passed, too much has changed, he is not the same person and I am not the same person and the world between us is enormous and full of things I don't know. But with something. A curiosity. An unfinished attention.

An open window.

I pick up my books. I go back to studying. There is a case next semester about land acquisition and the rights of families in rural constituencies, and I am preparing for it with a focus that my professor has called almost aggressive, which I take as a compliment. I am almost aggressive on behalf of families like the Rangis, who were failed by the systems designed to protect them. I will be almost aggressive on behalf of every family like that.

The mango tree outside Auntyji's house is still there.

The lights are still on.

I am still here.

[In the end, what she does not know, and will perhaps never know, would both destroy her and release her. He is alive. He is in another city, at a military facility, relearning how to be Jaskirat Singh Rangi after years of being someone else entirely. He carries Zayan's photograph in a pocket he checks approximately once a day, which is as often as he allows himself. He thinks about Yalina in the specific way of a man who has done something irreversible and has decided to live with it rather than be consumed by it, because the alternative is not useful.]

[And sometimes — not often, not every day, but sometimes — he thinks about a girl near a window and October light and an argument with a goat and the quality of his own laugh caught unguarded.]

[He does not know she became a lawyer. He does not know about the paranthas or the moot cases or the letter she wrote to a government department on his mother's behalf that finally got a form processed after seven years of refusal.]

[He does not know that she is still there.]

[And she does not know that he is.]

Jassi, tu ghar kab aayega? Bohot samay ho gaya.