Page 49 of Mrs. Rathore

I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. His absence lingered, a quiet heaviness pressing on me. I tried to shake off the thoughts, but they kept returning.

His face. His laugh. His questions. His concern.

I hated this.

I shouldn’t be thinking about him like this. He ruined me. No matter how kind he had become recently, I couldn’t forget that night. The night he shattered everything.

I considered calling Noor or Kavya, but it was too late. I still remembered our old routine dance practice till eight, walks home together, dreams shared in quiet corners.

We were unstoppable once.

I closed my eyes and whispered a small prayer for sleep. But it wasn’t sleep that found me. It was a jolt.

The bedroom door slammed open, and Rhea burst in, her face soaked with tears.

My heart dropped. “Rhea?! What happened?”

“Ira…” she sobbed. “Ira got into an accident!”

“What?” I gasped, pushing myself up, the blood draining from my face.

Rhea nodded, shaking her head, her whole body trembling. “I don’t know what happened… Bhai was there when it happened. Ira’s mother called… she’s blaming him.” Her voice cracked. “She said it was Bhai’s fault.”

No.

No.

God, no.

It was my fault.

All of this… was because of me.

_____

Chapter 18

ARYAN

I paced the corridor like a man possessed, each step heavier than the last. The fluorescent lights above buzzed faintly, mocking the silence that hung in the air. I kept waiting for a doctor to walk through those doors and tell me she was out of danger. That was all I wanted. To hear it from the damn doctor. Not a nurse, not a passing assistant. From him. From the one who had looked her broken body in the eye and pieced her back together.

But the longer they asked me to wait, the more the pressure inside me built, like a volcano ready to burst. My hands were clenched, jaw tight. If they showed up with that same solemn face I’d seen before eyes lowered, lips pursed in false sympathy I swear I would lose it. I would grab him by the collar, smash his face into the wall, and force him to swallow his own grim words.

Goddammit.

This couldn’t be real. It felt like a nightmare. A sick, twisted nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. But it was real, her blood was proof of that. I could still smell it on my shirt, dried and clinging like a curse. It was on my hands, under my nails, staining my skin as if marking me guilty.

I hadn’t even noticed at first. I’d been too stunned, too lost in my own terror to realize just how much of her was on me. Nine hours. Nine fucking hours in that waiting room, replaying every second in my mind like a broken record, and still no one had the guts to come talk to me.

“It’s your fault. It was all your fault.”

The words cut through the air like a knife. For a moment, I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone.

Ira’s mother was sitting across from me on one of the plastic hospital benches, her body curled into itself as she sobbed quietly. Her voice, though soft, carried a weight that slammed into me with brutal force.

I closed my eyes and ran my fingers through my hair, gripping the strands tight as if I could rip the frustration out of my skull. I wanted to yell at her “Can you just shut the hell up?” But I didn’t. Because one look at her face, at the pain etched into her features, and the anger in my chest cracked open into something far more unbearable, it was guilt.

How did it come to this?

---