She found him in the empty café, the one down the lane where the barista remembered her order and never tried to guess. It was late afternoon; gold light slanted across tables and pooled in the corners. Aarav sat at the window, hands wrapped around a mug, eyes on the street like someone watching a memory pass by.
For a moment Meera considered turning back. She had rehearsed scenes for this in the quiet of her apartment—verbal parries that would make him flinch, a list of wrongs to read aloud like indictment. But rehearsals never captured the rawness of someone sitting across from you with the look of a man who had been pared down by consequence. The arrogance was gone. What remained was an exhaustion that looked almost human.
"You came," he said without surprise.
"You came," she echoed. Her voice sounded steadier than she felt. She set her bag down with a careful motion and sat opposite him.
They ordered nothing. The mug steamed between him and the window; light caught in the curl of his hair. For a while neither spoke. Silence, once a weapon between them, now felt like a proof they were still learning how to be present without dominating.
"Why did you do it?" she asked finally. She didn't soften the question. She didn't preface it with anything pretty. "Why did you decide for me?"
Aarav folded his fingers into the mug as if holding himself together with porcelain. "Because I wanted to keep you safe," he said quietly. "Because I couldn't imagine you being hurt by other people the way I was. Because—" He swallowed. "Because I thought I knew how to stop the worst parts of the world for you."
"Stop," she said. The word came out like a cracked note. "You didn't stop anything. You rearranged everything. You made my choices theatrical and then told me to be grateful for the applause."
He closed his eyes a fraction. "I see that now."
"You think saying that erases the nights you chose for me? The files you kept? The way my life was reframed without my consent?" She leaned forward. Her pulse thudded in her throat. "Do you have any idea how small that made me feel? How invisible?"
He met her eyes. There was no flinch. "I do now. I didn't then." His voice, when he spoke, was the gravel of someone confessing a long-buried truth. "And for that—" He couldn't finish it; his fingers tightened around the mug until the porcelain creaked.
"You kept my Freedom," she said. The name still tasted sharp in her mouth. "You kept what I chose to delete, and then you set it on a shelf as if it were some artifact you could curate."
He sighed, a soft, hopeless sound. "I thought I was preserving you," he said. "I thought I was keeping the raw parts safe until you were ready. It was selfish, yes. It was wrong."
"Selfish," she repeated, listening to the echo of the word. "Wrong is small, Aarav. What you did was theft."
He flinched, not from the word but from the honesty behind it. "Maybe I deserved that."
"You deserve better than this weird martyrdom," Meera said. Her voice was a cold blade now, but under it was something else—worn-out sorrow. "You don't get to make yourself the only actor in the story and then play the hero who rescues everyone. That's not love. That's scriptwriting."
He watched her as if cataloguing grammar. "I can't defend myself because I don't think I should. I did what I did because of fear—fear of losing you and fear of being powerless. I thought power could be used as repair. I was wrong." He swallowed. "If you want me to be punished for it, I will accept it. I will not make arguments to save my image."
Her laugh was short and humorless. "You became the image."
"I became something I thought would keep you intact, even if I had to be the one to break," he said. There was no flourish, no manipulation—only the brittle admission of a man who'd counted himself out of any decent future.
Meera's hands in her lap had gone numb. The list of grievances she'd rehearsed—exposure, erasure, manipulation—sat like cold stones around her chest. There was also another list she hadn't rehearsed: small moments of tenderness that had felt like theft and solace both; a plate of warm food left at her door, a single framed print of a childhood photograph he'd returned to her. They complicated things with the cruel efficiency of memory.
"How do you expect me to trust you again?" she asked. The question wasn't theatrical. It was raw and small and the thing that had been her only shield.
He looked at her for a long time. When he spoke, his voice had the low, adult timbre of someone who had learned rules by breaking them. "I don't expect trust overnight. I don't expect anything. I only want to show you I can be different. Not better. Not perfect. Different in ways that won't remove your agency." He exhaled. "You tell me where I cross the line. You tell me when I fix things for you without asking. If I ever do it again, tell me and I will stop. If I breach you, I will walk away. If you want time—take it. If you want me gone—say so."
Her throat tightened on a protest that felt both fierce and tired. "You want me to give instructions on how not to own me?"
"No," he said softly. "I want you to teach me consent. I want you to raise the bar and I want to fail publicly if I must—because private corrections never seemed to work for me."
The honesty was disarming. She wanted to hate him; instead she felt exhausted. The notion of teaching a man who'd built walls to unlearn them felt absurd and monumental. Who did she think she was—professor of his conscience?
"You want absolution through labor," she said, almost a statement of fact.
"I want accountability," he corrected. "And I want to learn how to be in a life without erasing the other person."
Meera considered this. There were people who could be reformed only by consequence. There were people who would perform repentance to win again. There were people who would use pain as currency. Aarav's hands had once moved like instruments of design; now they sat inert, clasped around their own edges.
"Why should I even try?" she asked. "To teach you? To give you steps to follow? Maybe it's easier to walk away and start over."
He didn't implore. He didn't beg theatrically. He simply said, "Because I would rather be less wrong than loved for the wrong reasons. Because if I'm to exist in your life, I want it to be because I earned a place beside you by honoring your choices—not because I smoothed them into something I could control."
Something in him felt irreparably altered by consequence. He had chosen suffering rather than denial. She felt it as a new currency, not redeeming but real.
"You keep saying 'I know,'" she said, voice thin. "You say it like a talisman."
"Because I do," he replied. "I know I took. I know I hurt you. I know I was selfish. And I know I want to be unlearned."
She looked at him until the lines around his eyes made sense: fatigue, regret, the slow architecture of someone remade by truth. The fight in her had shrunk to a more particular demand—proof, not words.
"Then show me," she said. "Not in declarations. Not in public stunts. Show me in the small things. Let me see you choose not to act for me when I've not asked. Let me see you accept that some of your fixes don't help."
Aarav gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. "Start with the file," he said. "Destroy it, if you want. Or keep it. But come to the decision without me making it for you."
She thought of the CD she'd kept, the word Freedom burned into plastic and memory. She thought of the private photographs and the moments he'd claimed as his. She thought of the ache and the odd gratitude that threaded through it.
"I'll listen to it," she said, surprising herself. "And then I'll decide."
He exhaled, a shuddering, small sound. For the first time since the photo, he did not attempt to smooth or guard. He simply allowed consequence to sit with him like an honest guest.
When they stood to leave, the light outside had turned to that thin silver that comes before evening. They walked out side by side, not touching. No grand reconciliation, but neither was there the coldness of strangers. It felt like progress—unelegant, slow, perhaps perilous—yet real.
As she crossed the street she felt, for the first time, the unfamiliar possibility that a man who had once chosen for her could learn to choose with her. Whether she would let him was a question that would take more than words to answer. But for now, in the hush of a city preparing for rain, the confrontation had been honest. That, in itself, was a fragile, trembling victory.