He stood in the doorway of the clinic as if the canvas itself could steady him. The morning light made his face look too young for the kind of guilt he carried; it carved hollows beneath his eyes that maps of exhaustion had dug. Whatever diplomacy he had practiced before was gone. He looked like a man who had rehearsed apologies in the dark and finally decided rehearsals were cowardice.
"Daiwik," I said, because names anchor me even when the world wants to tilt.
He came all the way in, closed the flap, and then, like someone lowering the hood of his own soul, said, "I have to tell you something. I can't hold it anymore."
I'd been waking to lieutenants and leaky radios and the corrosive news cycle; I had not expected the ache that arrived with this sentence. My pen stopped moving across the patient chart. The waiting room seemed suddenly too small for the two of us and for the words that would attempt to fill it.
"Go on," I said.
He sat on the farthest chair and folded his fingers together as though he were trying to stop them from shaking. "I knew."
"Knew what?" I kept my voice even. My training had taught me how to make a hollow sound useful to another's breath—calm to steady them, direction to give them. But this was not a clinical exchange. This was a moral rupture.
"That Shash—" his throat worked around the name. "He was alive after the ambush."
The words dropped like a stone in a pond. My pen clattered to the floor and I heard the tiny, ridiculous sound as if through cotton. For a second my brain refused to accept the meaning of the syllables: alive. Alive. Alive. I had clutched the "KIA" feed, the pendant photograph, the folder. I had let procedure and paperwork steady me into a shape I could live inside. Alive was a contraband word.
"You mean... you saw him?" I demanded before I could stop myself.
He closed his eyes and nodded. "I saw him. He was alive for a few hours after surgery. I assisted on his triage. I saw him breathe. He opened his eyes. He—" He paused, his hands twisting. "He told me things."
A thousand small images, a thousand small betrayals, flared bright. Episodes I'd accepted—the delayed transmissions, the careful silences, Daiwik's odd little hesitations—slotted into a pattern that hurt. "Why didn't you tell me?"
He flinched as if an invisible lash had struck him. "Because he asked me not to."
There was a kind of pause that is louder than any explosion. The clinic's generators hummed as if trying to fill the gap. Outside a runner shouted the usual orders and the life of the camp went on like a ridiculous ritual in which we were all complicit.
"You mean he told you to keep it secret?" The question was small and sharp.
"He asked me to obey orders," Daiwik said. "He said the mission was sensitive—covert. He said if I told you, I might compromise the operation, that a word could be the difference between a successful infiltration and slaughter. He... he begged me to keep silent for the greater good."
A soldier's reasoning slides easily into the grammar of orders. Duty, secrecy, chain of command—these words are the scaffolding on which entire lives hinge. But the man who'd held me in his arms that night in the grove had always folded duty into love, not used duty to fence love out.
"You promised?" I asked, because sometimes the simplest word explains everything.
Daiwik's head bowed. "I promised. Because I'm a doctor and a soldier and because he looked at me like I was the only person he trusted. And because I thought if I told you and something went wrong, you would be the one who bleeds."
His confession was a confession of both cowardice and courage, a tangle impossible to sort without tearing. All afternoon, I had rehearsed scenarios in which Shash had been truly gone—how I would grieve, how I would tend Sepoy Arjun and look after the clinic, how I would fold myself around the mourning. The idea that he might have been walking, breathing, thinking—alive—and that someone I trusted had bowed to secrecy rather than to me felt like salt poured into a fresh wound.
"You lied to me." The words left my mouth before I could soften them with the kind of clinical distance I used with patients. They had the weight of accusation I had not wanted to use; they shook the air regardless.
"I didn't lie to hurt you," he said immediately, and his voice was brittle with the effort to be honest now. "I thought I was protecting you. I thought if I told you his status and the operation was still sensitive, some handler would consider you a security risk—someone who could be used to lure him out. I thought that preserving operational secrecy preserved your safety."
The logic was military-laced, neat in a way that my heart would not accept. I saw, too, the other terrible truth: he had not told me because he was afraid of my reaction. That fear was not noble; it was the kind of selfish calculus that men in white coats sometimes perform when love and duty collide. He had decided to take the moral load himself.
"You made that decision without me," I said, my voice smaller now because the edges of it had been cut away by fatigue and betrayal. "You decided I could not bear to know. To have some agency in what happened to my life."
His fingers found mine across the table and squeezed like someone trying to salvage a bridge that might be collapsing. "Please try to understand. He was begging. The surgeons were asking for absolute silence because of the operation's sensitivity. There were orders to restrict information. I believed—God, Kavya, I believed—by staying quiet I was obeying a chain that would keep him alive."
He sounded like a man repeating a prayer that had failed to keep the thunder away. I wanted, in that moment, to use the tools I knew—breathing exercises, grounding techniques—to make him find a place of calm. But this was not a panic attack. This was a betrayal. It required a different kind of first aid.
"He asked you to lie." The words had turned into a small, relentless metronome.
"He asked me to follow orders," Daiwik corrected softly. "He put his trust in me. I failed you. I failed him. I'm sorry."
You can forgive a man many things. You can forgive his fear, you can forgive his poor choices under duress, you can forgive the things trauma makes men do. But forgiveness lives in stages. There is shock. There is fury. There is reckoning. Then sometimes, later, there is a soft release.
I could feel the fury mounting like steam, the way drops on a kettle gather and grow hot until the lid rattles. I had tended wounds with my hands, watched men die with my eyes, been called into rooms where truth and myth were separate in the way only soldiers' stories allow. I knew treachery when I smelled it; I also knew that mistakes born of love could be terrifyingly close to betrayal.
"You thought you were protecting me?" I asked. "From what? From the truth?"
"Yes." His face was a map of exhaustion. "From becoming a target. From the press. From people like Rathore weaponizing any information to make him someone else's martyr. I thought if I kept this from you until the mission concluded, you'd be spared the pain he would create publicly. I thought I could keep both his operation intact and your heart calmer. I was wrong."
"You think keeping me in the dark was an act of mercy?" The sarcasm slipped out more cruel than I intended.
"I don't know what I think anymore," he whispered. "I only know I—" He stopped, swallowed, fought to shape words that weren't half-cowardice. "I loved you. I love you. And I was afraid of losing you to whatever would happen if the truth leaked at the wrong time."
His eyes were wet. The thing about love is that it is both the very softest thing and also a sharp instrument. It can hold a man and it can justify him doing violent things in its name.
"You loved me," I echoed, because saying the thing out loud is sometimes the only way to test whether it's still solid or whether it's turned into smoke. "And you chose to make a unilateral decision about my life because of that love."
He leaned forward and the movement was immediate, humble. "If I could undo it I would. I would have told you. I would have let you decide what to do with the truth. I panicked—and then orders came, and then the leak happened, and I thought silence would be easier than a hundred reasons to kill what we had. I was wrong. I am so, so wrong."
I wanted to strike him. Not because his body had done anything to me, but because the betrayal was physical in the way it mapped onto my bones. There are betrayals that snip a line; there are betrayals that saw through a bridge. This one had the cunning sound of a saw.
And then, as if the world had been holding its breath for the single act that would divide us formally, I did something I had not planned on. Perhaps it was anger, perhaps shock, perhaps the pure animal hurt that arrives when someone turns your love into a tactical consideration. My hand moved on its own—one hard, reflexive motion—and my palm met his cheek with a sound that snapped silence into pieces.
He reeled—not dramatically; rather, the slap landed with the absurd intimacy of two people who understood each other's flesh. His eyes widened, not with rage, but with a sudden comprehension of how I had been wounded. There was a small white mark rising on his skin where my hand had struck.
For a moment the world stopped. The clinic's hum resumed like a rehearsed response to pain. Daiwik's expression folded into something like stunned gratitude—he reached up to touch his cheek as if to confirm the bruise was real.
"I don't know how to forgive this," I said, low. The words were hot, they were honest. "You told me the man I loved might be dead and then said nothing when you could have told me he was alive. You decided for me. That is not medicine. That is not friendship. That is violence."
"No," he whispered, eyes squeezed shut. "It was not right. I know. I am sorry."
The apology felt inadequate as a blanket against the night, but it was the only thing he had to offer. It was small and human. It was not, I realized with a cold clarity, going to be the last time the two of us had to reconcile love with the awful demands war made on men's souls.
Later—much later when the initial fury cooled enough to become a bitter, workable grief—he pushed himself to speak again, softer, steadier. "He trusted me," he said. "He gave me a locket and said, if anything happens, keep the woman I love from harm in whatever way you can. He gave me an order wrapped in a man's hands. I tried. I failed."
"I don't doubt your intent," I said. "Intent does not absolve harm."
He nodded, tears finally joining the exhaustion he'd been carrying. "I'm not asking you to absolve me. I want you to know everything, because you deserve to choose how to respond. I will accept whatever you do."
There was a time I trusted that love would protect us from the worst of the world. That time had been a brittle superstition. Reality had teeth. I felt them nibble at me now, small bites that would leave marks.
"You should have told me then," I told him. "Not later. Not when the story was already written by men who wanted their names in the papers. You should have trusted me to be what I am—a woman who can hold terrible facts and still live. You assumed my fragility was a liability you could manage."
"I made a coward's choice," he said. "I own it."
Ownership is the first step toward repair. It does not equal forgiveness, but it is a necessary scaffolding. I did not want to be scaffolded right now; I wanted the ground to feel solid and for him to have answered with different courage. But there it was: ownership. And beneath that, the ache of both of us: for a man who might have been alive and for the fact that men in uniform had chosen secrecy over a woman's right to the truth.
Later, after the clinic quieted and the day flattened into the pale hour between dusk and night, I went to the grove. The cherry trees stood as they always had: patient, skeletal, their branches like fingers tracing a history I had made with a man who both promised and betrayed. I sat on the stump and pulled out the little sheet I had found in the evidence folder—the one that had only said Forgive me in his cramped hand. For the first time since I'd read it, the two words felt like a conversation starter rather than a conclusion.
Forgive me for what? I asked the paper silently. For dying. For pretending. For asking someone else to take custody of the truth.
The grove's lanterns were cold. I folded the note back into my pocket and pressed my fingers into the wood until the rough grain stung. In that pain, there was an honesty I could accept: I was no longer the calm clinician who could separate grief from procedure. I was a woman who had been lied to by someone she loved. I was a woman who would have to decide whether that lie was something she could stitch into the patchwork of our lives or whether it tore the fabric beyond repair.
I stood and walked back to the clinic with the chill in my lungs and the slur of the day's decisions heavy on my shoulders. Daiwik sat by the small heater, his face bowed in a way that suggested both repentance and waiting.
"I will need time," I told him simply. "Not to decide forgiveness because that is ridiculous now. But to speak the truth aloud and to demand the paper trail you refused to make public."
He nodded without question. "I will give you all the time you need."
And I knew, as the night pressed against the tent flaps, that time was something we both had too little of. The war would not pause for our heartbreak. Rathore would not stop chasing headlines. The evidence would continue to be processed, and somewhere beyond the ridge a man's life would be argued over like a ledger entry. But in that small, finite hour, we had done something irreversible: we had moved from unexamined loyalty into a place where secrets had to be aired, names had to be called, and choices had to be faced with eyes open.
I folded my hands in front of me, as I always did when I had to gather courage—like a physician swallowing a bitter pill for someone else's sake. I would be the kind of ruthless person duty demanded when the machinery of war tried to eat a life alive. I would demand chain of custody records, forensic timelines, witness statements. I would insist that if the world wanted to fasten his name to a headline, they would have to answer to me and to the evidence. And if there was truth to be had—if Shashwat was alive somewhere—I would find him.
But first, I had to reconcile the man I loved with the man who had put a secret between us. That would be the slowest, hardest surgery of all.