The house had quieted. The children had gone to rest after the long day, the halls of the Ahir estate humming softly with the weight of reunion and new beginnings. For the first time in decades, Avni and Raghav found themselves alone—two souls who had once been inseparable, then torn apart by cruelty, silence, and years that refused to stop passing.
They sat across from one another in the dimly lit courtyard, a lantern between them flickering in the night breeze. The silence was heavy but not empty—it was filled with unsaid words, buried questions, and emotions neither knew how to release.
Raghav was the first to break it. His voice was low, almost trembling. "Avni… no, Meera. For twenty-two years, I've carried your name in my heart like a prayer. Every sunrise was a reminder that you were out there, suffering, and I wasn't beside you. I failed you."
Avni's eyes glistened, but she held his gaze, her voice steady. "Failed me? Or abandoned me? Do you know what it was like, Raghav? To carry a child inside me, with five little ones clinging to me, while your mother's hatred spat in my face? To be thrown out of my own home and left to starve? And in all that darkness, you were gone. Now you tell me you were searching, but for twenty-two years, where were you when your children cried for their father?"
Her words were sharp, but beneath them lay a pain that begged for answers.
Raghav's shoulders shook as he bowed his head. "That night, when I returned to the house and found you gone, I swore to Savita that I would never forgive her. I told her I would find you no matter what it cost me. But fate was merciless—I met with an accident before I could even begin. I was in a coma for seven years, Avni. Seven years of silence, trapped between life and death, while you thought I had abandoned you."
Avni's breath caught. Her fingers clenched her sari tightly. "Seven years… and after that?"
"When I woke," Raghav said, lifting his tear-streaked face, "I had nothing but one purpose: to find you and the children. I built my own network, my own intelligence wing. Every resource I gained, every step I took, it was for you. I never went back to the Ahir house except as a guest. I cut ties with my mother, refused to speak her name. My life, Avni, was only the search for you. And though I couldn't reach you directly, every piece of help, every invisible shield around you and the children—it was me. I was there, even if you never knew."
Avni's tears fell now, unrestrained. Her voice cracked. "Do you know how many nights I hated you? How many times I told myself that you chose your family's pride over me? That you left me to suffer alone? My children grew thinking their father had forsaken them."
Raghav reached across the small table, his hand trembling. "And yet, despite all that hate, you are here. You are still the mother who raised six extraordinary children with courage I could never match. You carried my love even in my absence, whether you admit it or not. I failed to be beside you, Avni, but I never stopped being yours."
The silence that followed was no longer suffocating. It was tender, raw. Avni looked at him—the lines on his face deeper, his hair streaked with gray, but his eyes… his eyes still held the same devotion she remembered as a young bride.
Slowly, hesitantly, she placed her hand over his. "Raghav… I cannot erase the pain. I cannot forget the nights of hunger, the fear, the humiliation. But hearing this, knowing you did not abandon us willingly… it softens something in me. Maybe, after all these years, we can begin again. Not as broken souls, but as parents standing together for our children."
Raghav's tears turned into a trembling smile. He bent his head, pressing her hand against his forehead. "That is all I ever wanted—to stand beside you again, not as the man who lost you, but as the husband who will never let go."
Above them, the stars stretched wide across the night sky—silent witnesses to a love wounded but unbroken, scarred but enduring. For the first time in twenty-two years, Avni and Raghav sat not as strangers or exiled lovers, but as two halves of a whole finally piecing themselves back together.