unfinished

Khushi* The email arrives on a Tuesday, which feels wrong. Life-altering things should announce themselves on a Monday, or a Friday — some day with weight to it. Not a Tuesday, sandwiched between a dentist appointment and a grocery list. *Subject: Estate of Rajesh Rajput — Requested Presence* I read it three times before the words stop rearranging themselves. "You're pale," Priya says from across the kitchen table, not looking up from her laptop. "What happened?" "Rajesh Rajput died." That gets her attention. She sets the laptop down slowly, like it might make noise. "Okay. And that's relevant to you how, exactly?" "His lawyer wants to see me." I turn the phone toward her. "Tomorrow. Ten a.m." Priya reads it twice, the same way I did, like the words might soften on a second pass. They don't. "Khushi." Her voice goes careful, the way it does when she's about to say something I won't want to hear. "Tell me this doesn't mean what I think it means." I don't answer, because I don't know yet. I only know that Rajesh Rajput's name hasn't been spoken out loud in this apartment in four years, and that the last time I heard it, I was standing in a driveway with everything I owned in two suitcases, watching a house I grew up next to get smaller in the rearview mirror. "It's probably nothing," I say. "A formality. Something about the old property line dispute." "You don't believe that." I don't. --- The law office is exactly as intimidating as I expected — glass, mahogany, the specific hush of a room where large amounts of money get decided. Advocate Malhotra is kind in a tired way, the way people get when they've delivered too much bad news for too many years to have any performance left in them. "Ms. Sharma. Thank you for coming." He gestures to a chair. "There's someone else joining us." I hear the door before I see him. I'd know the sound of it — unhurried, certain, like the room already belongs to him before he's finished entering it. Aditya Rajput. Eight years, and my body still remembers him before my mind catches up — the cold drop in my stomach, the old instinct to either run toward him or away, never anything in between. He's not the boy who used to climb over the wall between our houses at midnight because he couldn't sleep and didn't want to be alone in it. He's taller, harder, dressed like a man who has never once been told no and believed it. But his eyes find mine the second he's through the door, and for half a second — just half — I see him. The real him. Underneath. "Khushi." My name in his voice lands like something dropped from a height. "Aditya." I make mine flat. Unbothered. A lie, but a good one. Malhotra clears his throat, sliding a folder across the desk like he'd rather be anywhere else. "Your fathers' business dispute aside — Mr. Rajput's will contains a condition. The Rajput and Sharma companies are to merge. Both of you are named as required signatories. Effective immediately." The room tilts slightly. "That's not possible," I say. "My mother would never—" "Your mother already knows," Malhotra says gently. "She called yesterday. She wasn't happy either." I look at Aditya. He hasn't moved, hasn't reacted, like he already knew exactly what this meeting would say before he walked in. "You knew," I say. "I read the will three days ago." His voice is even. Controlled. The kind of controlled that used to comfort me and now makes my skin prickle. "I could have warned you." "Why didn't you?" He holds my eyes a beat too long before he answers. "Because I wanted to see your face when you found out you couldn't leave this time." The words land somewhere low in my chest, half threat, half confession, and I can't tell — I genuinely cannot tell — if I want to walk out of this office and never see him again, or if some old, buried part of me is glad, horribly glad, that I finally have a reason not