Introduction

“They said time changes everything. But no one warned me that love changes too—especially when silence becomes the loudest thing between us.”

                                                                                                                    - Meera

There was a time when her world was small—just the length of his shadow under a streetlamp, the width of his palm around hers, and the sound of his laughter echoing in a school corridor. And somehow, that was enough.

Before they had wealth. Before they had a name that commanded respect. Before the marble floors and diamond chandeliers—there was just Arjun and Meera.

He was the boy who walked her home, one hand holding a half-torn umbrella and the other holding her innocence. She was the girl who collected moments instead of things, the kind of girl who smiled at stray puppies and thanked bus conductors. Ordinary to the world. Everything to him.

Or so she believed.

Their love was the kind that bloomed quietly, away from the noise. It wasn’t loud or attention-seeking. It didn’t need grand gestures. A glance across a college hallway, the brush of fingers under a table, stolen laughs during family festivals—those were the foundations of their forever.

But the world outside their bubble was not so gentle.

Arjun rose fast. From the shy, observant boy in glasses to the sharp-jawed, suited CEO who could silence a boardroom with a single look. His success was the kind that didn’t ask for permission—it just arrived, and the world bowed.

And with it came shadows.

A house that looked like a palace but felt like a cage. A mother who smiled with lips that never touched her eyes. A sister who mastered cruelty with elegance. Meera walked into that world with hope in her hands. And she held on. Tighter than she should have.

She stayed silent when the walls whispered against her. When every glance from Kamini felt like a measuring scale. When every sentence from Tanya was laced with disdain. She told herself it was temporary. That love would win. That Arjun would see.

But love doesn’t win when one person fights alone.

There are things that were never spoken between them. Words that choked her in the silence. Moments when she reached for him but found only distance. And the more she gave, the more she disappeared in the spaces he didn’t notice.

Until one day, the silence wasn’t hers anymore.

It was his.

His avoidance. His suspicion. His anger—cold and quiet, like frost settling on glass. He began to look at her differently. As if she were a stranger wearing the face of the woman he once loved.

Something had changed.

Something had been said.

And Meera never got the chance to explain.

Now, there’s an ache that lingers in every untouched corner of their mansion. In the untouched mug on the left side of the table. In the way Arjun still pauses at the balcony, waiting for a presence that never arrives.

This isn’t just a love story.

It’s a story of how love dies—slowly, quietly, under the weight of everything left unsaid.

And this… this is where it all began.

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