I walked away, my fists clenched so tight it hurt. How could he? Angry tears blurred my vision. He called me selfish, yet he was the one who had been a total prick to me from the start.
________
Chapter 41
KAVYA
I wasn’t just angry; I was incandescent. The fury was a physical weight, a white-hot stone sitting behind my ribs. Saurav had hurt me, not once, not twice, but with a rhythmic, casual cruelty that had finally snapped something vital inside me. The storm that had been brewing for months, held back by my own desperate hope, finally broke its banks. He spent months blaming me for his mistakes and putting his own problems on me, and I was tired of being the one he blamed for everything.
I paced the confines of the bedroom like a caged predator. My heels clicked a frantic, jagged rhythm against the hardwood, a countdown to a collision he didn't see coming.
Then, my eyes landed on the diary.
It sat on the vanity, its dark leather cover mocking me with a sinister sort of invitation. Mr. Chauhan had wanted his son to know the truth before he passed, but he had been too kind, too protective to deliver the blow. I didn't feel kind. I felt like an executioner. Saurav wanted the truth? Fine. I would give it to him, no matter how much it cost us both.
My hands trembled as I snatched it up, the old parchment smelling of dust and stagnant secrets. I clutched it to my chest, feeling the sharp edges dig into my skin as I marched downstairs. A small, flickering part of my soul, the part that still remembered the way he used to look at me, begged me tostop. But my rage was a rising tide, drowning out any lingering embers of love. He had broken me. Now, I would break him. Only then would we finally be equal.
I stopped at the edge of the dining table. Saurav was there, bathed in the soft morning light, looking entirely too peaceful. He was nursing a coffee behind the glow of his laptop, oblivious to the fact that his world was about to end.
I slammed the diary down. The table shuddered, and his coffee splashed over the rim of the ceramic mug.
“You want the truth, Saurav?” I asked. My voice was unnervingly, terrifyingly calm.
Saurav shut his laptop slowly, his gaze sharpening with that familiar, arrogant edge. “I want the whole truth, Kavya. No more games.”
“Well, here it is.” An ugly smile twisted my lips as I flipped open the yellowed pages of his mother’s journal. I was giving him the truth, just not the one he expected.
“This diary contains everything,” I said, my voice rising. I saw his brow furrow in confusion, his mouth opening to ask a question, but I didn't give him the chance. “August 4, 2001,” I read, taking a shallow, stinging breath. “I feel a loathing so deep it sickens me. He just turned two, and every time he looks at me, I want to scream. I don’t see a son; I see the parasite that aborted my dreams. He is a clever child, they say, but I feel nothing but a cold, hard wall between us. I will never love him. I refuse to… Neha Chauhan.”
The silence that followed was heavy, like the air before a lightning strike. Realization began to drown him, his eyes widening as the words sank in.
“What is that?” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Kavya, what are you reading?”
“Your mother’s diary, Saurav. She wrote down exactly how she felt about you the moment you entered her life.”
I flipped the pages, my fingers moving with a frantic, manic energy. I didn't care that his face was leaching color until he looked like a ghost. I didn't care that the air in the room was growing thick and suffocating. I wanted him to feel the vacuum where a mother’s love should have been.
“November 12, 2003,” I read, my voice dripping with poisonous poise. “He scraped his knee today and came crying to me. I looked at his bleeding leg and felt nothing but a dark, satisfying resentment. If it weren't for his existence, I’d be in a cockpit. I’d be touching the clouds. Instead, I am grounded in this tomb, rotting away while Shaurya treats the boy like a trophy. Saurav is the wedge that drove us apart. He is the cancer that killed my love life.”
“Kavya, stop,” Saurav whispered. The laptop was forgotten. His knuckles were ghostly white as he gripped the edge of the table so hard I thought the wood might splinter.
I ignored him. The storm was at full gale now, and I wanted him to drown in the surge.
“He’s six now,” I continued, skipping ahead, my voice growing louder to drown out his pleas. “Shaurya bought him a toy plane.The irony is vile. My husband loves the creature who stole my career more than the woman who sacrificed it. I look at Saurav and I don't see a child; I see weight dragging me to the bottom of the ocean. I hate his face because it looks like mine. I hate that I have to breathe the same air as the person who ruined me.”
“I said stop!” Saurav’s voice broke. It wasn't a command anymore; it was a desperate, guttural plea.
But I was relentless. I was the prisoner who had finally found the key to the cage, and I was going to make sure he felt every iron bar on his way out. I skipped to the final entries, the ones written from the hovel she had fled to, the place she chose over her husband, her wealth, and her only child.
“May 15, 2008,” I said, my throat tight, swallowing against the bile rising in my own neck. “I’m done pretending. Shaurya thinks I’m a monster, but the real monster is the boy who took everything from me. If I stay, I’ll end up killing him. So I choose myself. I’m leaving him with the only gift I have left: the knowledge that he was never wanted, never loved, and… ”
CRACK!
The sound exploded like a gunshot. Saurav surged upward so violently his chair flew backward and splintered against the floor. A primal, guttural roar of pure agony tore from his throat, a sound that didn't belong to a man, but to a wounded animal. With one blind, sweeping motion, he cleared the table. The laptop, the coffee, the ceramic vase, everything went flying. The glass shattered against the far wall, the shards skidding across the floor like uneven diamonds.
He wasn't finished. He kicked the wreckage of the chair, his chest heaving, his eyes bloodshot and wild with a pain that looked like the onset of psychosis.
Before I could draw breath, he was on me.