I was holding the flowers, staring blankly at them as if they could answer the thousand questions clawing inside me. They weren’t just ordinary flowers, they were his. Aayushman’s. Meant for my wife. A simple gift, perhaps, in another world. There’s nothing wrong with giving flowers, of course. Not at all. But kneeling down in the middle of a crowded road and embracing someone else’s wife.MY WIFE— that’s something else entirely. That’s a wound dressed in petals.

Vidyut’s mother had told me about the incident. I had just returned from the company, weary and half-distracted, when she stopped me in the hallway, her expression tight, her voice trembling with something between pity and alarm. Then she showed me. The images. The headlines. Chahat’s face, caught between surprise and discomfort, surrounded by that man’s too-familiar presence.