Page 24 of Born in Grief

Dhrithi didn’t say anything, her eyes still on Amay’s profile, almost like she was imprinting it in her memory. His heart gave a hard throb in his chest. He didn’t need to imprint hers. She’d been seared into his consciousness from the day his driver had dropped him off at boarding school, and he’d found her crouched on the steps leading to the front of the school. She’d been coaxing a butterfly with a damaged wing on to a leaf, whispering words of encouragement to it.

And Amay had stood there, his suitcases in a pile beside him, sporting a phenomenal black eye and a damaged heart wishing that she would whisper the same words of encouragement to him.

She’d spotted him and smiled, a bright, beaming smile which had warmed him like the first ray of sunshine on a cold, winter’s day. Once she’d been sure the butterfly would be okay, she’d turned to him, holding her hand out in greeting. He hadn’t known it then, but his broken heart had slowly started to stitch itself together again, her gentle friendship the balm that soothed his every pain.

Until the day, she’d ground that same heart into the dust, ensuring that there was no way for it to heal ever again.

“Dr. Aatre.”

Her soft voice pulled him back from his reluctant stroll down memory lane. He turned to look at her, the sound of his name on her lips, the sound of her calling him anything but Amay, a jarring contrast to the vivid memory still coursing through his brain.

He looked at her, their gazes catching and meshing, an endless connection that neither knew how to sever.

“Yes?” he asked gruffly, his hand fisting in the pocket of his scrubs.

“Please don’t tell my family that.”

His eyebrows shot up at the request. By his side, he heard his team shuffling their feet and riffling through papers, clearly as surprised as him at the request.

“You don’t want me to tell your family that you’re getting better?” he asked slowly.

“I don’t want you to tell them that I could get discharged soon, that I could go home.”

“Why not?” Amay’s second-in-command chimed in.

Dhrithi didn’t glance his way, her gaze forever focused on Amay. “Please?”

It was all she said, all she asked, and Amay nodded in response. He didn’t remember a day when he’d been able to deny her anything she’d asked. Not even the day she’d asked him to cut his heart out and offer it as tribute to her cause.

“But why?” His junior was persistent.

“Mrs. Gokhale is our patient, Dr. Chaman,” he told the other man. “If she wishes for her recovery status to stay confidential, then there is no need to know more. There is only the need to honour her wishes.”

“Yes Sir,” the other man murmured.

Dhrithi’s eyes shimmered, gratitude pooling in their depths as Amay stepped back, offering her a small, almost imperceptible nod. Their unspoken connection lingered for a heartbeat too long, a fragile thread stretched between them. Then he turned away, pulling the thread taut until it snapped.

Outside the room, the cluster of parents loitered, their tense silence not punctuated by any conversation. They parted like smoke as Amay and his team emerged, offering no questions, no glances, no acknowledgment of the man who had just been at their daughter’s bedside, helping her heal.

Not one of them asked how she was doing.

Amay’s lips curled into a sneer, a bitter taste rising in his throat. It was their indifference that stoked an anger Amay thought he’d buried long ago. He shoved it down, burying it under layers of professionalism, but the echo of it lingered as he walked away, the weight of his past pressing down on his chest.

The past was a poisoned shroud, one that covered his present with a patina of pain and regret. It was one he could never escape, not as long as a portion of his heart remained with the woman he’d left behind in that hospital bed. Another man’s woman but one who’d first been his girl.

She’d been his until she hadn’t.

Chapter Fifteen

DHRITHI

Apprehension filled her as the two sets of parents filed back into the room. Her glance flitted from one tight face to another. No one was smiling. Dhrithi sighed, wondering if she should have asked Amay to slip a sedative into her IV so she could sleep this mess off. That option seemed to be on her mind all the time nowadays.

“The police are asking questions,” Varun’s father, Bharat Gokhale, announced. He glared at Dhrithi like she’d asked his son to drive his car into hers. “Nothing has happened. You know that. We know that. What have you told them?”

“Nothing,” Dhrithi’s father answered on her behalf. “She has told them nothing and she will tell them nothing in the future too.”

“Have you made a complaint against him?”

---