"Until My Last Breath"
The most terrifying thing about falling
is not the fall itself.
It is the moment you realise
you stopped trying to hold on —
and you cannot remember exactly when.
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
"Can you be?"
Two words.
Two words, and my entire chest had rearranged itself around them like furniture after an earthquake — everything technically still present, nothing quite where it used to be.
I wanted to say yes.
That was the part that terrified me most — not his question, but the speed and certainty of my own answer rising to meet it before my brain had even been consulted. Yes was right there, immediate and unambiguous, waiting at the back of my throat like it had been there for longer than made any logical sense.
But how do you love someone when you don't know who you are?
How do you offer yourself to another person when the person you're offering is still missing large, critical portions of herself? When the map of your own life has entire territories marked unknown and you have no idea what is buried there — what decisions you made, what people you trusted, what versions of yourself you have already tried and discarded?
I could not give him something I hadn't finished finding yet.
"N — no," I said.
The word arrived smaller than I intended. My eyes stung. I pressed both palms to my face — the universal, embarrassing gesture of someone trying to contain feelings that had already exceeded their container.
Don't cry. Not here. Not in front of him.
Then I heard it.
Laughter.
Not polite, restrained, socially acceptable laughter. Full, unguarded, delighted laughter — the kind that builds on itself, the kind that doesn't particularly care who is watching.
I lowered my hands.
He was laughing so hard he was bracing himself against the table edge, like the joke had physically compromised his structural integrity. The glasses were still on the table between us. The evening light was still gold and soft and completely indifferent to my humiliation.
"I was just joking," he managed, between the laughter.
The silence that followed was significant.
He was joking.
He had been joking.
And I had sat here and let my eyes fill with tears and pressed my hands to my face like the answer mattered — like I mattered — and he had been joking.
The anger arrived like a second wave after the first has already knocked you down.
"How," I said, with a precision that surprised me, "can you joke about something like that?"
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. I refused to be embarrassed about the tears. I chose fury instead — it was a significantly more comfortable place to stand.
"You absolute idiot," I said, and the words came out with a warmth I hadn't intended, which made the whole thing worse.
He was still laughing.
"A joke," he said, the laughter finally finding its edges, his voice settling back into something more controlled, "that will soon become a reality."
The laughter was gone now. Completely. In its place was that face — the serious one, the one that arrived without warning and changed the quality of the air between us like a shift in weather. His eyes on mine, direct and unhurried and certain in a way that made certainty feel like something you could actually stand on.
My heart performed its now-customary act of complete insubordination.
"Dream on," I said.
"Always a pleasure," he replied, the smirk returning, "to dream about my princess."
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
I looked at him for a moment. Gathered myself. Set down every deflection I had been reaching for and decided, instead, on honesty.
"I have something important to tell you."
Something shifted in his expression — the performance dimming slightly, attention sharpening. He settled back in his chair and looked at me properly.
"If you're about to reject me again," he said, "I should warn you in advance — it won't work. I'll still pursue you."
"You still need to hear the reason," I said.
"Is there someone else?" The lightness evaporated from his voice instantly — replaced by something quiet and significantly less comfortable. "Because if there is, I will—"
"There is no one," I said. Only you. But you need to wait. I swallowed the second half. "Can you please just — listen?"
A beat. He exhaled.
"Okay."
I looked at the table between us. At the food he had arranged because he somehow knew exactly what I liked. At the glasses he had set aside because he had decided to let me see his face without anything between us.
"I don't remember parts of my past," I said. "Significant parts. I don't know who I was before a certain point, and I don't know who I'm supposed to be now, and it genuinely feels like — like there's a version of my own life that I haven't been given access to. Like there's a puzzle and half the pieces are missing and I can't even tell what the picture is supposed to look like."
I stopped. I had not planned to say that much.
He was quiet. The kind of quiet that was thinking rather than withdrawing — I was learning to tell the difference.
"Why does it matter?"
I looked up.
"Let the past be the past," he said. Not dismissively — carefully, like he was choosing each word for a specific reason. "Treasure who you are right now, in this moment. You are complete exactly as you are, Shreya." A pause. "Maybe you lost your past because that isn't who you were supposed to become."
The words moved through me slowly. Like something warm in cold water.
I wanted to believe him.
I wanted to reach across the table and take the comfort he was offering and simply — accept it. Let it be enough. Let him be enough.
But there was another reality somewhere. A version of my life that existed whether I remembered it or not, with consequences and decisions and people who had mattered — people who apparently still mattered, in ways I couldn't see or measure or protect myself from. Percy. The accident. Adithya — and whatever existed between us in the chapters of myself I couldn't read.
What if I accepted him — accepted this — and then remembered?
What if what I remembered changed everything?
"It matters to me," I said quietly. The tears came again. I had stopped being able to prevent them.
He moved.
Not suddenly — deliberately. Picked up his chair, set it down beside mine, closed the distance between us until there was none left. His hands found my face the way they had in the hospital — careful, unhurried, like this was simply where they belonged.
I tried to pull back.
He didn't let go.
"Then I'll wait," he said.
His eyes were on mine with the particular quality of someone saying something they have already fully meant before they say it.
"I will wait for you to be ready." His thumbs moved across my cheeks, gentle and sure. "Until my last breath, if that's what it takes." A pause, and then — lighter, but no less sincere: "But don't go flirting with other people in the meantime. That is a non-negotiable condition."
A sound escaped me that was half laugh and half sob and entirely undignified.
"I don't flirt with anyone," I said, smacking his hand lightly — a gesture that accomplished nothing except making the corner of his mouth move. "And I never said I liked you."
Although I do.
I do and I cannot say it and I don't know what to do with that.
What if this is about Caleb? What if I'm just — convenient? A reaction, not a choice?
What if his sincerity is real and my fear is the only thing standing between us?
Should I take the risk?
The questions moved through me in overlapping circles, none of them arriving at a clean answer. He was still holding my face. His eyes were still on mine. And the terrifying thing — the truly, completely terrifying thing — was that being here, in this specific configuration of closeness and honesty, felt more like myself than anything else I had experienced since waking up to a life I only half-recognised.
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
"What exactly is happening here?"
Justin's voice cut across the evening air like something that had been sharpened specifically for this purpose.
I registered his presence — and his expression — simultaneously. This was not Justin as I knew him. The easy warmth, the gentle teasing, the comfortable older-brother energy — all of it was gone, replaced by something tight and controlled that sat strangely on his features, like a suit that didn't quite fit.
Adithya didn't move.
Not an inch. Not a fraction. He remained exactly where he was, hands still framing my face, the portrait of a man who had registered the interruption and made a conscious decision to be entirely unbothered by it.
The smile on his face, if anything, grew slightly.
"Nothing," I said, pushing Adithya's hands away and creating distance with considerably more urgency than grace. He caught me as I overbalanced — of course he did — and set me upright with the casual competence of someone who had been anticipating exactly this outcome.
The chuckle that followed was extremely irritating.
"Where is the guest bedroom?" I asked, addressing the middle distance between both of them.
"I'll take you, cupcake," Justin said, and his hand landed on my shoulder with a possessiveness that didn't match his tone — or any version of Justin I had previously encountered.
"The maid has already been asked," Adithya said pleasantly.
"That wasn't your decision to make." Justin's voice had an edge now. Clean and deliberate.
"It's fine," I said, stepping neatly out from under Justin's hand. "The maid is fine. I don't need either of you."
I moved toward the door.
From behind me — Justin's arms, sudden and enveloping, pulling me into a hug that arrived without invitation or warning.
Then the hug ended, equally suddenly, because Adithya had taken a measured step forward and removed Justin from the equation with a calm, unhurried efficiency that suggested this was a line he had decided not to negotiate around.
The look that passed between them was not a conversation.
It was a declaration.
Two maids appeared in the doorway with diplomatic timing. I went with them without looking back.
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
The guest room was quiet and cool and blessedly uncomplicated. I changed, skipped dinner — my appetite had been replaced entirely by the complicated knot of everything that had happened on that patio — and had just folded back the covers when the knock came.
I opened the door.
Justin.
Something was immediately, instinctively wrong. He stepped forward. I stepped back. The geometry of the moment had a direction I didn't like, and my body understood it before my brain fully assembled the words.
"It's late," I said carefully. "You should—"
"Didn't you hear her?"
The voice came from behind Justin — quiet, level, and carrying in it the particular quality of someone who has already decided what is going to happen next and is simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.
Adithya.
He stepped into the doorway. His hand came up — smooth, unhesitating — and created a firm, final barrier between Justin and the space Justin had been moving toward. A single motion. Absolute.
Justin went still.
Whatever had taken hold of him tonight — whatever strange, unsettling current had replaced the person I thought I knew — retreated. Not entirely. But enough.
Adithya walked him out. Calmly. The way you escort something out of a room where it doesn't belong.
At the door, he turned back.
"Lock it," he said. Not unkindly. But with a certainty that left no room for negotiation.
"Why did he do that?" I asked. Genuinely confused. Genuinely unsettled. The Justin I knew didn't — that wasn't—
"Lock the door, Shreya."
His voice had changed. The lightness — all of it — was gone. What remained was something older and more serious, and it looked at me with an intensity that made me feel simultaneously very seen and very small.
Then he was gone.
I locked the door.
I stood in the quiet of the room for a long moment, back against the wood, heart doing several things at once.
Why did Justin act like that?
Why did Adithya look at me like that?
Why does everything about this house feel like a story I'm already in the middle of?
I went to bed. Sleep took longer than it should have.
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
Morning arrived with the particular mercy of ordinariness. Sunlight. The smell of breakfast. The sounds of a house that had, apparently, decided to behave itself.
I dressed, went downstairs, and made the executive decision to direct my full attention toward food and away from both of the people I was currently sharing a house with.
It lasted approximately four minutes.
"Shreya."
Justin's voice. Different again — back to something closer to itself, but quieter, and carrying underneath it the specific weight of someone who has spent the night sitting with something they're not proud of.
"I'm sorry." He didn't look at the table when he said it. He looked at me. "Last night — I don't — I got completely carried away, and I'm sorry. That wasn't okay."
The sincerity was real. I could see it plainly on his face — the same face that had, last night, been wearing an expression I didn't recognise and didn't want to.
I looked at him for a moment.
Who are you, Justin?
And what aren't you telling me?
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
She was surrounded by people who knew her story.
Every single one of them had decided,
for their own reasons,
not to tell her.
But secrets,
like all things that are buried,
have a way of finding the surface.
Shreya was running out of time
to find her truth
before her truth found her.
To be continued...