THE PROMISE HE KEPT

EPISODE 5: Three Weeks of Silence

Hii my lovely readers! 🌸💛 Thank you so much for the love on Episode 4! Here's Episode 5, hope you enjoy it. Let's continue... 📖✨

The funeral was small, military-quiet, the kind of ceremony that tries to compress an entire person into folded flags and correct procedure. Aakash stood at the back, in uniform, and watched Naina in the front row — smaller than he remembered from Vikram's photos, one hand resting on the curve of her stomach, her younger sister Sanjana gripping her other hand like she was the only thing keeping Naina upright.

He didn't approach them. He told himself it was respect, giving them space, but some more honest part of him knew it was cowardice wearing a nicer name — he had no idea yet how to be near Naina without also being the last person who'd held her husband's hand, and he wasn't ready to find out.

Sanjana looked at him once, across the crowd, her expression unreadable, and looked away again.

Three weeks later he was home. Meera opened the door and he held her so tightly and for so long that she laughed, a small startled sound against his shoulder.

"Careful, the war's made you sentimental," she said. "I liked the version of you that just grunted hello."

He didn't laugh back. He couldn't. And he felt her feel that — felt the exact moment her body registered that something in him had changed, the way you feel a change in air pressure before you understand it's about to storm.

"Aakash?"

"I'm fine. I'm just glad to be home." He kissed the top of her head the way he had the morning he left, but it didn't land the same way this time, and they both knew it.

That night she made his favorite dinner and he ate almost none of it. She asked about the base, about Rohan, about the food, and he answered in the shortest sentences he could manage without seeming rude, and when she finally asked, gently, "Is Vikram all right? You haven't mentioned him once," he had to leave the room for a full minute before he could make his face behave well enough to come back and say, "He's fine," in a voice that didn't sound like his own.

She didn't push that night. But she lay awake long after he'd fallen into the restless, twitching sleep of a man who wasn't really resting, and she thought: something happened over there that he isn't telling me, and she filed the thought away in the part of her mind reserved for things she wasn't ready to look at directly either.

[End of Episode 5]

PLease enjoy the story ,,more roller-coaster ahead.. That's Episode 5 done! 😭💕 "I hope this one hit you hard" ,..