“Meera, wait,” he said quickly, panic flooding his face. His hand reached for mine. “Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Fine. I’ll marry you. Just don’t walk away. Please.”
The words hit me like ice water.
Now he was saying yes. Not because he was ready, not because he was sure, but because he was afraid I was finally serious about leaving.
The yes felt worse than the no.
I pulled my hand back.
“No,” I said softly. “Not like this.”
And under the soft glow of the garden lights, with candles still burning and the fountain still singing its gentle song, I turned away from him and walked back down the path alone. The petals crunched under my shoes. Behind me, he didn’t follow.
After the second proposal—after the botanical garden, the candles, the echo of “not yet” lingering in the air—I knew something had shifted inside me, something that wouldn’t snap back into place this time.
I couldn’t pretend. Not again.
The night after the proposal, I went home with Adrien in silence. I didn’t cry. I didn’t yell. I didn’t even ask why he kept saying the same words that hurt me the same way every time. The silence between us filled the apartment like fog.
He slept in the guest room. We’d done that before during arguments—our unspoken rule of “We’ll cool off tonight and fix it tomorrow.”
But this time, the quiet was different. It didn’t feel like cooling off. It felt like distance. It felt like a door slowly closing between us.
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