Page 74 of Scars and Crowns

The thought barely forms before guilt crashes into it so hard I almost flinch. Because that version doesn't have Sara. It can't. There is no life where I erase those years without erasing her too. No version where I somehow keep the greatest blessing of my life while removing the road that led me to her.

They're tangled together forever. The worst thing that ever happened to me. The best thing that ever happened to me. The same story. The same thread.

I look at my daughter.

She's laughing so hard over the pigeon story that tears have gathered in the corners of her eyes. She's tucked comfortably against Yuvaan, completely unaware that her mother is quietly falling apart beside her.

And I know. With absolute certainty. I'd choose her again. Every single time. If someone offered me the chance to rewrite my life . . . To erase those seven years completely . . . But asked me to give up her smile in return . . . I couldn't. I wouldn't. The only thing I wish I could rewrite was that Sara’s father be Yuvaan . . . in every sense he is right now . . . but biologically too.

But I'd walk every painful mile of that road again if she was waiting at the end of it. And yet . . . The question still comes.

The same question that visits me on quiet nights when sleep refuses to arrive.

At what cost? What exactly did surviving that year take away from me? Could there have been another path? Another version. One where I still reached her . . . Without first having to lose so much of myself.

There has never been an answer.

Maybe there never will be. I've stopped trying to solve it. Some questions aren't puzzles.

They're weather. You don't fight them. You simply wait for them to pass. I draw in a slow breath. When I lift my head . . . Yuvaan is already looking at me.

His expression doesn't change. He doesn't ask what's wrong. He doesn't interrupt the silence by trying to fix something he doesn't yet understand. He simply looks at me with that same quiet steadiness that's becoming so familiar. Like he's seen something flicker across my face. Not enough to know the story. Enough to know there is one. Our eyes hold for a long moment.

No words. None are needed. Then Sara claps both hands together. "Next page!" The spell breaks. Yuvaan smiles softly before turning another page. The moment slips away as quietly as it arrived.

Not gone.

Just . . . Folded carefully back into my heart.

Waiting for the day I'm finally brave enough to place the whole story into his hands.

FRIENDSHIPS

YUVAAN

The call comes a little after eight, just as I'm signing the last file waiting on my desk. I don't even have to look at the screen to know who's calling. Samrat is one of the last people I know who still believes in phone calls instead of messages. Everyone else sends a text first. He never has. If he wants to speak to me, he simply calls, fully expecting me to answer.

I pick up on the first ring.

"You've started doing that thing again," he says instead of greeting me. "Answering before the second ring. Makes it sound like you sit there staring at your phone waiting for me."

I lean back in my chair, rubbing absently at the bridge of my nose after a day that has felt twice as long as it actually was.

"I was finishing paperwork," I reply. "The phone happened to be on the desk."

"Hm."

I hear the scrape of a chair on his end before the faint clink of glass against wood. I can picture him without trying—feet stretched out, tie already discarded somewhere, one hand wrapped around a drink while pretending he's relaxing even though he's probably still surrounded by files of his own.

Samrat became Maharaja of Bhairavgarh the same year I inherited Devgarh. We were twenty-five, entirely too young to carry kingdoms our fathers had spent decades building. We met in college because neither of us particularly liked people, and somehow that turned into ten years of friendship.

He's possibly the most emotionally unavailable man I've ever met. He's also one of the only people who's ever looked at me and seen the man before the title. "So," he says after a comfortable silence, "how's married life?"

"Fine."

He lets out a slow, exaggerated sigh. "'Fine,'" he repeats. "That's genuinely the best you can do?"

"It answers the question."