Some marriages begin with love. Ours began with silence.
Married for two years.
Two years of sharing the same house, the same dining table, the same surname... yet living like strangers.
We were husband and wife only on paper. Behind closed doors, we were nothing more than roommates bound by an arrangement neither of us had chosen wholeheartedly. Bitterness had settled between us long ago, so quietly that it had become a part of our everyday lives.
Dhruv never looked at me with affection, and I had stopped expecting him to.
Perhaps it was easier that way.
Our marriage had been arranged by our families. We both had our own reasons for saying yes, reasons we never spoke aloud. Maybe we feared that giving those reasons a voice would force us to confront the people we had become.
So we didn’t ask questions.
We didn’t share dreams.
We didn’t fight.
We simply existed.
People often say marriage changes everything.
For us, it changed nothing.
Life had already exhausted me long before I became Meera Joshi. Somewhere between heartbreak, loss, and responsibilities, I had stopped wishing for more. I didn’t crave a grand romance or fairy-tale promises. All I wanted was a quiet life—one where no one expected anything from me and I expected nothing in return.
Freedom.
That was all I wanted.
But freedom has a strange way of demanding payment.
Mine came in the form of loneliness.
Dhruv was always occupied—with meetings, deadlines, and the company he had built from the ground up. He rarely noticed whether I was home, whether I had eaten, or whether I smiled. At first, his indifference stung.
Eventually, it became comforting.
His distance gave me room to breathe.
His silence protected the secrets I carried.
And maybe...
Maybe that was exactly why neither of us ever tried to close the distance between us.
