The news arrived on a completely ordinary morning.
Mira almost threw the test away.
She had taken it half-asleep, annoyed at her own suspicion. The apartment was quiet, sunlight slipping through the curtains, the city just beginning to stretch awake.
She looked down.
Two lines.
For a full ten seconds her brain refused to translate them.
Then her knees weakened and she sat on the bathroom floor, laughing and crying at the same time.
Life had entered the room without knocking.
Arjun was in the kitchen arguing with the toaster.
"Why are you like this?" he muttered.
"Arjun," Mira called softly.
He walked in, ready to complain, and stopped when he saw her face.
"What happened?"
She held out the test with shaking fingers.
He stared.
Looked at her.
Looked back.
Understanding arrived slowly, then all at once. The air seemed to leave his body.
"We're…?" he whispered.
She nodded.
He covered his mouth, a stunned laugh breaking through tears.
"Oh my God."
They stood there holding each other in the doorway, the burnt toast forgotten, the future suddenly enormous.
Nothing in their long war had prepared them for this kind of victory.
Pregnancy rewrote their world.
Every movement became careful. Every plan extended years into the future. Arjun walked beside her like she was made of glass and starlight.
"You're hovering," Mira complained.
"I'm protecting," he corrected.
She smiled.
Fear returned, but softer now. Protective, hopeful, shaped like possibility.
One night she lay awake, hand resting on her stomach.
"What if I don't know how to be a mother?" she whispered.
Arjun turned toward her in the dark.
"You learned how to survive a world that tried to break you," he said gently.
"You'll learn this too."
She let the sentence settle inside her.
Strength, she realized, was a skill she already owned.
The delivery room was chaos wrapped in prayer.
Pain came in waves that erased language. Arjun held her hand so tightly she thought it might bruise.
"Stay with me," he whispered, voice shaking.
"I'm right here," she gasped.
And then—
a cry split the air.
Sharp. New. Absolute.
The universe announcing itself.
The nurse placed a tiny, furious human in Mira's arms. Time stopped. The world shrank to the weight of that small body.
Arjun touched the baby's fingers in awe.
"She's real," he whispered.
Mira smiled through tears.
"So are we."
They named her Asha.
Hope.
Because she wasn't an accident or a symbol.
She was continuation.
Proof that love had survived long enough to become life.
That night, in the dim hospital light, Asha sleeping between them, Arjun murmured:
"We did it."
Mira shook her head gently.
"No," she said.
"We're just beginning."
And for the first time,
beginning didn't feel frightening.
It felt like a gift.