The snow was still falling the next morning when Meera awoke to silence—an unsettling kind that crawled into her bones and whispered, "You're alone now, truly."
Aarav was still gone. But now, it felt like something else had died too.
Not just a man. Not just a love.
But her identity.
She hadn't touched the box since the night before. It still sat on the kitchen table like a bomb no one dared defuse.
Every time she glanced at it, she saw not just papers and dates—but a story rewritten.
A story that turned a love story into a tragedy. A tragedy into a taboo.
Her skin itched with questions she couldn't silence:
Did Aarav fall in love with her before or after he knew? Did he hesitate? Did he want to tell her? Would she have still loved him if he had?
But the cruelest question of all—
Was it wrong? Even if it was real?
She wandered through the cottage barefoot, stopping at the mirror. The same mirror where he once wrote "You're beautiful" in fog. It still had a faint smudge where she had tried to wipe it away months ago but never fully could.
She stared at her reflection and whispered, "Who am I now?"
The girl in the mirror didn't answer.
Later that afternoon, Meera visited the town library. Not to research, but to hide.
She tucked herself in the farthest corner, next to a dusty shelf of forgotten biographies, and let herself cry quietly into a book she wasn't reading.
But then something odd happened.
A child—a boy no older than ten—walked past her aisle. He stopped, looked at her, and tilted his head.
"You look like someone who's really, really sad," he said innocently.
Meera didn't speak.
The boy walked closer, clutching a toy dinosaur. "Did someone you love die?"
She nodded slowly.
"My grandma died last year," he said. "I drew her picture and put it under my pillow. And then I had a dream that she came and said, 'I'm still in your bones.'"
Meera blinked. "Your bones?"
He grinned. "Yeah. I think it means I'm not alone. You're not either."
Then he ran off, as if he hadn't just changed something inside her.
That night, Meera sat down with the box again.
This time, she didn't avoid it. She read everything.
Not just Aarav's letter, but the documents, the adoption records, the court orders, and most importantly—the notes Aarav had scribbled in the margins of some of the printouts.
"I didn't look for her. I swear. I met her by accident." "What kind of God lets this happen?" "How do you choose between love and truth?" "She was the only real thing I ever had. That can't be wrong."
His handwriting slanted harder in the later notes. As if each word was written with a clenched fist.
"I wanted to tell her. I tried. But then she laughed, and I forgot how to ruin her."
Meera read that line over and over again.
She didn't cry this time. She didn't scream.
She simply placed her hand over the page, as if trying to touch the version of him that had suffered in silence. That had loved her in the middle of a storm with no name.
She returned to the cedar tree the next morning, carrying the letter and a matchbox.
She sat beside his grave and whispered, "You didn't betray me."
A pause.
"But you didn't protect me either."
She unfolded the letter one last time, read it aloud into the wind, then gently lit a match.
The flame caught quickly, curling the paper's edges into ash.
As the smoke rose, she said, "We didn't choose our past. But we chose each other."
And then, softer, "I forgive you."
Back inside, she opened her laptop.
The documentary was done.
But now, it needed an epilogue.
Something truer. Something messier. Something braver.
She recorded a final segment of herself—face raw, voice steady.
"You may watch this and think this is a love story about cancer. But it's not."
"It's a story about discovery. About how love doesn't always follow the rules. How sometimes, it enters through the wrong door, wearing the wrong name, and leaves you forever changed."
"We lived a truth we didn't know." "We made a home inside a secret neither of us asked for."
"And even now, I carry him in my bones."
"Not because it was right." "But because it was real."
Two days later, the studio wrote back.
They'd seen the new footage. They were stunned.
"We've never received a love story like this," the producer wrote. "It broke us. Then healed us. And that's all we could ever ask from art."
The documentary premiered online three weeks later.
Thousands watched it. Comments poured in.
Some angry. Some confused. Most deeply moved.
One person wrote:
"It made me question love. Then it made me want to love harder."
Another wrote:
"Sometimes, the most tragic love stories are also the most human."
And one message, anonymous, simply said:
"Thank you. You made me feel less monstrous."
Meera closed the laptop and stared at the fading light across the snow.
The world knew now.
And she was still here.
A survivor. A sister. A lover. A woman with ashes on her hands and fire in her heart.
And even though her past had cracked wide open— she was choosing to live forward.
That night, she began the first page of the book.
Not from grief. Not from shame.
But from truth.
To be continued…