Chapter 20

Chapter 20 – The Storm They Never Faced

There's a storm in every love story.

The kind that doesn't scream with thunder, but lingers quietly—unspoken fears, misunderstood silences, missed moments that were too small to fight over and too big to forget.

Mehar and Aarav had one too.

But they never faced it.

They ran around it.

Smiled through it.

Pretended the sky wasn't grumbling between them.

Until now.

—

It was Aarav who brought it up first.

Not during a dramatic conversation or a tearful night.

But one quiet evening on call, when the words felt less sharp from a distance.

"Do you remember the day I bailed on your debate?" he asked, voice low.

Mehar paused. "You mean the one I prepped for two weeks straight?"

"Yeah."

She let out a dry laugh. "I waited for you in the hallway for almost an hour."

"I know."

"Why didn't you come?"

Aarav inhaled slowly. "Because I was angry. You said something a night before—something stupid, probably. And instead of talking, I thought, 'Let her feel my absence.'"

She was quiet.

He added, "I didn't think about what that day meant to you. I just wanted to win some imaginary battle."

Mehar finally spoke, voice even. "That was the moment something cracked. I stopped depending on you that day. Not out of strength, but out of fear."

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

—

They didn't cry.

But something inside them loosened.

Because saying it out loud didn't change the past—but it gave it a shape. A name.

The storm they avoided had finally passed—not because it stopped existing, but because they stopped pretending it never did.

—

Later that night, Mehar messaged:

> "Thank you for not defending yourself. Just listening. That meant more than any explanation."

Aarav replied:

> "Thank you for telling me the truth. I needed to earn that."

—

It wasn't a clean slate.

But it was a new page.

And this time, they weren't pretending it hadn't been soaked with rain.

They were just learning to write after the storm.

—