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DO NOT FORGET TO PRESS THE STAR 🌟 ICON AS YOU READ.

Sahil's POV

At exactly 11:35 AM, the office phone rang—shrill and insistent, like it resented being ignored by me too and wanted to scream about it. I didn’t flinch, but something in me coiled tighter, a spring slowly rusting from overuse.

My eyes stayed on the screen, though I wasn’t reading anymore—just staring at the same goddamn email I’d skimmed over three times already. Numbers and graphs blurred into meaninglessness, client updates scrolling past like static noise on an old television. My fingers hovered uselessly over the keyboard, suspended in a strange limbo, unsure if I was meant to finish the sentence I’d started or delete it altogether.

The phone kept ringing with its shrill cry slicing through the thick quiet of my cabin until I finally gave in and snatched up the receiver with a lethargic motion that felt like dragging myself through wet cement.

“Yeah?” I muttered, voice rough with disinterest, maybe even edged with the exhaustion I no longer bothered to hide.

“Sir, uh, your lunch meeting with Mr. Khurana is at 12:30 today,” came Ms. Kadam’s voice, all breathy and skittish like she was afraid I might lash out.

I shut my eyes, slow and heavy, like pulling a curtain closed over a scene I didn’t want to see anymore. Simultaneously, trying to will away the irritation that kept clinging to me like cigarette smoke on a white shirt.

“It was moved to tomorrow, Ms. Kadam,” I said, my tone sharp, every syllable clipped clean. “Pratiksha updated the calendar weeks ago. Check the shared sheet, please.”

Then came the pause—that dead air laced with guilt and incompetence, the kind of silence that always preceded an excuse tasting like burnt toast and bitter coffee I had been surviving on lately.

“Oh. Right. Yes. Sorry. I… didn’t see that,” she mumbled.

Of course you didn’t.

I let the receiver drop back into place with a dull clack—not slamming it, not hurling it, just letting it fall like a weight I didn’t want to hold anymore. The sound echoed in the room like a punctuation mark to the useless conversation.

I leaned back in my chair, pressing the heel of my palm to the spot between my brows where this persistent ache had made a home. The dull, lingering throb, like a slow leak in a tire.

I couldn’t remember when it started. Three days ago? Four? Maybe longer. I didn’t keep track anymore. Not of pain. Not of time.

Yet I hated this.

I hated how everything now felt like dragging my body through molasses, how my default response to chaos was still the same old reflex:

“Ask Pratiksha.”

Or worse—

“Pratiksha, fix it.”

The words were ghosts now—no longer spoken but still loud in my mind. Like a phantom limb, the habit of reaching for her still twitched somewhere inside me.

But she wasn’t here.

Hadn’t been for two weeks. Fourteen days, but who’s counting?

I was.

Even if I pretended I wasn’t.

She’d quit—completely, irreversibly—and I had smiled at her farewell dinner like it didn’t hollow me out from the inside. Dropped her off at her parents’ place after treating her to that shared cup of handmade chocolate like it didn’t feel like a goodbye I wasn’t ready for. I hadn’t seen her since. Hadn’t heard her voice. Not even a message. The silence she left behind settled into my being, thick and quiet, like dust over a room that used to feel like home while I was dying to see her both in my home and office.

I hated how quiet everything had become. The office, once a tightly run ship with her at the helm, now felt like a sinking wreck. But more than the chaos, more than the missed meetings and mounting emails, what gnawed at me was the gaping emptiness she left behind.

She hadn’t just managed my calendar—she had managed me—her thirty-two-year-old boss who had two kids of his own to say but couldn't get through the day without my wife-slash-secretary.

My days, my moods, my temper. My chaos. She was the buffer between me and the world, the bridge between the hopeless beast and the heartless man I tried to be. Without her, I felt like a house with the windows shattered—every noise from outside was too loud, every gust of wind too biting, every shadow too intrusive.

I missed her in layers.

I missed the surface things first—the gentle clink of her bracelets when she typed, the way she’d breeze into my cabin with my morning tea like it was a ritual carved into time. I could still see her in that doorway, tilting her head with that perfect smirk and raising a brow as if to say, “Survived the night without choking someone out, boss?”

One grunt and she’d be grinning, like we’d just shared the punchline of an inside joke no one else in the universe was ever invited to.

That was our thing.

Now? That space felt like a vacuum. Too sterile. Too hollow. Even the air had changed. There was no faint trace of her rose-blossom perfume, no quiet humming as she stayed late beside me, typing away like the world outside didn’t exist.

And meals? Forgotten. Sleep? Elusive. Sanity? Hanging by a thread.

She used to care when I spiraled. Nagged even. She’d appear in my doorway like some sort of guardian in kitten heels, arms crossed, eyes narrowed, demanding I eat something, drink water, and breathe.

Now, no one did. And I didn’t.

I didn’t breathe right. Not without her.

And yeah, I could admit it—not out loud, never out loud—but in the choking silence of my office, in the inky hours of the night when shadows stretch longer and thoughts get crueler, I’d begun to grovel.

Every damn day.

Silently. Pathetically. Desperately.

“Come back,” I had whispered once, voice cracking into the still air like a match struck in the dark.

But even the room didn’t flinch.

It was a fool’s plea. Because wanting her back meant doing something. It meant swallowing my ego, dialing that number, and saying the words I never let myself say. That I missed her. That I needed her. That this version of life without her—without her laughter, her touch, her chaos disguised as order—was unbearable.

But I hadn’t called.

Not yet.

Because what if she didn’t want to come back?

What if she’d carved out a version of life lighter without me and my children weighing her down—without my sharp tongue, my stubborn silences, my inability to say the things that mattered until it was too late?

What if she’d finally breathed—and liked the air more without me in it?

That thought settled in my chest like a stone in water—quiet, heavy, sinking slow.

And I let it. Because guilt, I’d discovered, was a better stimulant than caffeine. It kept me wired. Awake. Restless.

My phone buzzed, the screen lighting up with some forgotten meeting. Something about strategy. Finance. I didn’t even blink before swiping it away. Lately, everything felt like background noise in a film I didn’t want to watch.

Even my house—once noisy, cluttered, and chaotic with life—felt too damn big now.

Too clean. Too quiet.

Too empty of her.

The nights were the worst.

In the office, I could pretend. I could fake it. Could shove on that mask of the cold, clinical CEO. You know, the one who’s always in control, always has a plan, always knows what the hell he’s doing. I could drown in numbers, toss files at people, bark orders that made no sense half the time, and glare through meetings like I was actually listening. And they all bought it. They still called me “sir” and “boss” like I hadn’t turned into a walking corpse ready to lash at anyone who even dared to breathe louder anywhere near me in radius.

But the moment I stepped through my house's front door?

Everything came crashing in.

Her absence wasn’t just in the walls; it was in the air. It was in the way the lights didn’t feel warm anymore. In the scent of brewing coffee that had faded from the kitchen. In the fucking laundry—because yeah, her old red dresses weren’t piled on the edge of the sofa like they used to be. Her shoes weren’t cluttering the hallway. Her laughter wasn’t echoing off the damn tiles.

Everywhere I looked, she had been.

And now? She just... wasn’t.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

Nyesa doesn’t sit beside me at the dinner table anymore. She always asks for “Mumma’s chair” first.

Every. Single. Time.

“Uff, Daddy! How can I sit where Mumma sits?”

“She’s coming, right?”

“Should I keep it empty?”

And then her eyes dim—like some internal switch just flips when she no longer shows up—and she pulls her plate closer to the other end of the table, quiet. Small. Like she’s bracing herself to not cry in front of me again.

I don’t say anything.

Because what the hell do I even say?

That her Mumma might not come back? That I messed up so badly even time is afraid to fix it?

And then there’s Neel.

That boy stares at the door like it's going to open by magic. Like she's going to walk through, arms wide, hair messy from the wind, smiling like she never left and give him her magical hugs. And every time it doesn’t happen, I see it chip something away from him.

He doesn’t ask as often. But when he does?

God.

“When is Mumma coming back?”

“Did you fight with her again?”

“Did she leave because of me?”

That one... that one knocked the air clean out of me.

I remember I dropped to my knees right then, grabbed his tiny shoulders, and looked him right in those big, watery eyes. His thumb was tucked into his fist—something he only does when he’s trying hard not to cry. Like he’s telling himself he has to be strong. Like he saw me breaking and thought he couldn’t afford to break too.

“No, champ,” I said, and my voice cracked like old paint on a wall no one cared to fix. “She didn’t leave because of you. She left because I... because I messed up. Not you. Never you.”

I’d never said it out loud before. And God, it tasted like metal—like blood, like something sharp and ugly that wasn’t meant to be spoken.

My son didn’t say anything for a second. Just blinked. Then he did the one thing I didn’t deserve—he leaned in and hugged me. Arms tight around my neck like he was trying to hold my pieces together with his little heart.

“She still loves us,” he mumbled against my shoulder. “I know. You just have to say sorry properly, Daddy.”

I laughed. I actually laughed. It sounded like it was dragged out of my lungs by force.

That night I couldn’t sleep and sat in my study like an idiot, pen in hand, blank paper staring back at me like it knew I had no clue what I was doing.

I’ve drafted deals worth billions. I’ve written NDAs that could rival poetry in their ruthlessness. I've penned speeches for mergers, eulogies for board members, and resignation letters sent without thinking twice about.

But writing a letter to her?

To the woman I’d loved in silence, failed in action, and pushed away with my stupid, stubborn pride?

Yeah. That was a whole different battlefield.

Still, I tried.

The first word was as easy as her name.

And then?

Blank.

What do you even write to someone you broke?

"I miss you."

Understatement of the fucking year.

"I’m sorry."

Too late, too hollow.

"Come back."

A prayer I had no damn right to whisper.

I stared at the page for hours and started again.

Tried writing about the things that mattered. The way her laughter felt like color in a grayscale world. The way she fought with me, not against me. The way she held me even when I pretended I didn’t need to be held.

I tried writing about the kids. About how my daughter folds her hands like her when she’s on her rebellious streak. About how my son still tucks his chin into his chest when he gets shy—exactly like she does.

I wanted to tell her the house misses her. The walls miss her. I miss her.

But I couldn’t write it.

Not because I didn’t feel it. But because writing it meant I had to admit it to myself.

And saying it out loud?

It meant I had to accept the weight of everything I’d destroyed.

Still... I kept trying.

One scratchy, ink-stained line at a time.

Because maybe, just maybe, if I wrote the truth enough... it would matter, or maybe it would just bleed. Either way, it was still better than the silence.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

The scratch of my memories dissonantly halted the moment I heard the tentative knock at my office door.

My voice lashed out before I could stop it, each syllable soaked in a bitterness I didn’t have the energy to sugarcoat. “What?”

“Sir?”

The ruins of the past had me rooted to the ground, buried under the ghosts I’d invited into my office each day. My hands were idle, but my mind was caught in a slow-motion collapse. And Ms. Kadam's interruption felt like a cruel twist in a moment I had carved out solely for my private descent.

“If you’ve messed something up again, just cancel everything.” I muttered, eyes trained on nothing and everything all at once. “I’m done for the day, and I’m going home.”

There was a beat of silence along the faint, mocking tick of the clock that had counted every second of my guilt for the last few years.

“No, sir, it’s just—” The nervous shuffle. “There’s a call for you. From… Pratiksha. I mean, Ms. Naik.”

Her name fell into the room like a stone into still water—disrupting everything. And in that instant, I was no longer a man seated behind a polished desk in a high-rise office. I was bare, breathless, stripped of the armor I wore every day.

The sound of her mere mention pulled me backward—through years, through regrets, through the thousands of hours I’d spent trying not to remember the shape of her voice or the lull of her laughter.

Through every second I’d stared at the blinking cursor of a half-written letter that felt more like a prayer.

“What?” I croaked, the word barely surviving the distance between my lungs and my lips.

“She said she tried calling, but you didn’t pick up. She asked me to tell you…that she left a message and asked you to check your phone.”

I was already on my feet before the sentence finished, the chair screeching on the marble like a protest. The chaos of the desk I’d once prided for its neatness was now a trench of strewn papers and open files.

My hands found the phone soon enough, and her name lit up like a beacon in a storm.

Two missed calls.

One voicemail.

Multiple messages.

The floor didn’t vanish beneath me, but it felt close.

She had called.

She had called.

I felt Ms. Kadam still lingering at the doorway, uncertain whether to step in or back away. Her presence flickered at the edge of my focus, like a ghost caught between witnessing something too raw and pretending it wasn’t happening at all. Her silence was respectful, but it crackled with questions she didn’t dare ask.

I turned toward her, “Cancel everything.”

“But sir, there’s a board—”

“I said cancel it,” I repeated, the finality in my voice landing like the closing of a steel gate without raising my voice.

The letter I couldn’t finish had become an epitaph I wasn’t ready to write.

That letter?

It was nothing but ink and cowardice.

It wasn’t done.

It never could be.

Because the words I needed to say didn’t belong on paper. They belonged in the tremble of my voice when I said her name. In the way my hands would cradle the faces I had missed. In the long, silent pauses where apologies bloomed too late but still bled sincere.

Maybe the letter had been the beginning.

A bridge between guilt and redemption.

But the story?

The story wasn’t done. Not yet.

God help me—it wasn’t allowed to end.

Not with my regrets.

Not with my silence.

And certainly not with a man too afraid to chase after what he’d already lost once.

This time, I would not let the past dictate the ending.

This time, I was going to fight for the pages I’d left unwritten.

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Lots of Love,

ANKITA