Prologue
She didn’t remember the exact moment her heart stopped expecting anything from him.
Maybe it was the first night in that cold bedroom where he laid on one edge of the bed, back turned, pretending sleep. Or maybe it was months later, when he returned home after weeks away and didn’t notice she had cut her hair.
Or that she’d cried herself to sleep every night in his absence.
They weren’t strangers by name, but strangers in every other way that mattered.
Isha Agnihootri stood in the middle of a house that bore her fingerprints—on the meals cooked, the festivals kept alive, the wounds she healed in a family that never called her their own. Her love was everywhere, except in the one place she craved most.
Rudra Singh Rathore.
Her husband. In the legal sense. In the social sense. But never in the emotional one.
To him, marriage was duty. A box to tick. A home to finance. A burden to carry without complaint.
To her, marriage had become a slow erosion of self—of dreams, laughter, warmth. And yet, every morning, she woke up and carried on. Because someone had to. Because she thought... maybe someday he would see her.
But now, as the word Divorce echoed through the silence between them, louder than any fight they’d ever had, she realized something terrifying:
She wasn’t afraid to lose him. She was afraid she’d already lost herself.
