Chapter 4 - Eight Months of Silence
Maya moved to another country for treatment.
She told friends that she had accepted a temporary design contract in Europe. She changed her phone number and asked Elena not to reveal her address.
The first treatment was difficult, but the doctors remained hopeful.
Maya rented a small apartment near the hospital. Every morning, she sat beside the window drinking tea from a chipped white mug that reminded her of home.
She wrote letters to Arjun but never sent them.
In one, she told him she still slept on the left side of the bed because he had always stolen the blankets from the right.
In another, she apologized for turning his devotion into something she feared.
When her first round of treatment ended, the doctors told her that the results looked promising.
Maya allowed herself to believe the sacrifice had worked.
Arjun, meanwhile, accepted the promotion and became everything she had wanted him to become.
He traveled constantly. His name appeared in business magazines. His parents praised his discipline.
No one saw him return each night to the apartment Maya had left behind.
He never replaced the hallway photograph. He simply found it in a box and placed it back on the wall.
His closest friend, Nikhil, visited one evening and found him reading the divorce documents.
“You need to let her go,” Nikhil said.
“I don’t understand why she left.”
“Maybe there was no reason.”
“There is always a reason.”
Arjun remembered the weeks before the divorce. Maya had looked tired, frightened and strangely careful. Her cruelty had sounded rehearsed.
He hired no investigator and made no attempt to invade her privacy. But he kept every message she had ever sent him.
Months passed.
Then his company sent him to a conference in the same European city where Maya was receiving follow-up care.
Arjun almost declined.
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A delayed meeting changed his schedule, forcing him to take a shortcut through a hospital complex connected to the conference center.
That was where he saw the woman he had been trying and failing to forget.
