His Arranged Bride

Chapter 45

Pratham

"What the hell are you doing?" I snap at Sandhya, grabbing her shoulder and pushing her away from me. "I have told you countless times already. I don't love you and don't want to be with you."

"Please don't say that, Pratham," she pleads, her voice trembling. "I know you still have feelings for me. You can't just walk away from everything we had."

I shake my head, my jaw clenching as a mix of anger and frustration boils up inside me. "Everything we had was over long back, Sandhya. I kept myself shackled to my past for long, but now I have decided to move on. You need to accept it."

Her face twists with anger, and she steps closer to me, clutching my arms as she looks up at me with red-rimmed eyes. "You can't mean that. You can't just throw me away from your life."

Prying her hands off my arms, I move back from her. Then, sighing, I rub a hand over my face. "Look, I don't know what else to tell you. I have made a choice for my life, for my future. And that future is with my wife, not with you. You need to understand that."

For a moment, Sandhya just stares at me, her expression a mixture of hurt and disbelief. But then, the very next second, her face hardens, and she crosses her arms over her chest. "You think you are going to be happy with your wife? After what you did to me?"

A surge of guilt floods through me at her words, and I look away, my hands balling into fists at my sides.

I know she is talking about the accident, about her right leg that got crushed in such a way that she developed a permanent limp.

"How could you leave me to die there, Pratham? Just how?" She asks.

"They told me you were dead," I tell her, my voice strained. "You say there had been a mix-up but—"

"But what? Do you think I am lying?" She counters. "If you do, you can call up that hospital in London and ask them. They'll tell you I had been in coma for almost ten months. And when I woke up, doctors kept me there for few weeks before allowing me to travel. Once they did, I came running to you only to find out about you being married."

Her lips curve into a bitter smile and she shakes her head. "It was because of you that I got into that accident. It was because of you that I was in a coma. And it's because of you that I'll need to live with this limp my whole life.

"After ruining me in such a way, you now want to move on in your life with someone else? You said to me last time that your happiness lies with your wife. But after what you did to me, you think you deserve to be happy with anyone else except me?"

Her words cut deep, reopening old wounds that never fully healed. I feel the weight of my guilt pressing down on me, making it hard to breathe.

But suddenly, Nitya's smiling face flashes in my mind, and that makes it slightly easier to keep breathing.

I can't let my guilt control my life anymore. I can't let it dictate my future.

"I might not deserve it," I tell Sandhya. "But I need to try. For my Nitya. I want to start fresh with her and build a life with her."

As I say those words, I see a change in Sandhya's eyes. She squares her shoulders and stares unblinkingly at me.

"You are fooling yourself if you think Nitya will ever love you like I do," she says, her voice low and insistent. "No one can love you as much as I do, Pratham."

I feel my patience wearing thin, but I try to keep my voice steady. As it is, she seems already riled up and I don't want to make the situation worse by losing my calm.