THE PROMISE HE KEPT

EPISODE 6: The Sentence He Practiced

Hii my lovely readers! 🌸💛 Thank you so much for the love on Episode 5 — Here's Episode 6, hope you enjoy it. Let's continue... 📖✨

Two days later he told her.

They were sitting at the edge of the bed, the ceiling fan clicking overhead the way it always did on its third setting, and he was looking at the crease in the bedsheet over her knee because he couldn't make himself look higher than that.

"I want a divorce."

The silence that followed had a texture to it. He would remember that silence for the rest of his life — the specific quality of it, the fan's clicking suddenly the loudest sound in the world.

"Say something," he said, when he couldn't bear it any longer.

"What do you want me to say?" Her voice came out very quiet, very controlled, which was somehow worse than if she'd screamed. "Three weeks ago you came home and held onto me like you'd drown if you let go. Now you're asking me for a divorce and you can't even look at me while you do it. What happened over there, Aakash?"

"I can't be the husband you need right now."

"That's not an answer. That's a sentence you practiced in the mirror."

She wasn't wrong. He had practiced it, badly, in the field tent and on the transport plane and in the taxi from the airport, and it had sounded like an explanation each time until he said it out loud to her face and heard how empty it was.

"Is there someone else?"

"No." This, at least, he could say with his whole chest. "Meera, there is no one else. There will never be anyone else. That isn't — that isn't what this is."

"Then what is it? Because I am asking you, and you are giving me nothing, and I don't know how to fight something I can't see."

He almost told her. He got as far as opening his mouth around Vikram's name. But some old, stubborn part of him — the same part that had sworn an oath over a dying man's body — decided that Vikram's secret, Naina's situation, the shame a young widow might carry into a hospital waiting room without a husband's name to give, belonged to them, not to him to spend on his own defense.

So he said nothing.

Ritu arrived the next morning without calling first, the way she always did when she sensed something was wrong before she had proof of it. She found Meera sitting at the kitchen table with two cups of tea gone cold, one of them untouched.

"Okay," Ritu said, sitting down across from her, dropping the bright, teasing register she usually kept for Meera entirely. "What happened."

"He wants a divorce."

Ritu didn't gasp, didn't reach for dramatics, just went very still. "Did he say why?"

"No."

"Meera." Ritu's voice sharpened. "No man comes home from war holding his wife like she's the only solid thing left in the world and then, two days later, asks for a divorce over nothing. Something happened there. Something he's not telling you."

"He said there's no one else."

"I believe that part. I don't believe the rest of his silence is nothing." Ritu reached across and took Meera's cold hand in both of hers. "Whatever this is, you are not going to sit here and blame yourself for a story you don't even have. You hear me?"

Meera didn't answer. She was looking at the second, untouched cup of tea, the one she'd poured for Aakash out of habit before remembering he'd already left for the base that morning without saying where he was going.

[End of Episode 6]