Page 29 of Scars and Crowns

A long silence follows.

"Daisy." The nickname breaks something inside me.

I can almost smell fresh flowers. Hear children's laughter. See tiny hands stuffing daisies into everyone's pockets because I couldn't bear the thought of anyone feeling left out.

Only he had ever looked at those flowers . . . and looked at me differently because of them. "For old times' sake." His voice is quiet now. "Help me." His eyebrows furrow, only a bit, "I promise you . . . " His eyes don't leave mine. "I'll take care of Sara. No matter what." He tilts his head slightly, the determination making his eyes shine, "You know I will."

And that's the problem.

I do know.

I know exactly the kind of man standing in front of me. If he gives his word . . . He'll keep it. Not for weeks. Not for months.

For life.

The certainty terrifies me more than uncertainty ever could. I feel my resistance begin to crack. Just around the edges. The man I've loved for longer than I can remember is asking me to marry him. Every forgotten dream I buried years ago suddenly stirs beneath the surface.

For one dangerous moment . . . I want to say yes. So badly that it frightens me. But that girl boarded a train years ago. The woman standing here carries responsibilities instead of dreams. She carries grief. Fear. Secrets. A daughter whose future will always matter more than her own heart.

I take a slow breath. "I can't say yes." My voice surprises me with how steady it sounds. "Not unless my daughter says yes first."

I meet his eyes. "She comes before everything." His eyes are still so stunning, I always felt like I was looking into a bottomless cup of dark roasted coffee, they possess a gravitational pull that feels both safe and endlessly captivating, "Whatever this is . . . It has to begin with her."

MEET UP

ANAMIKA

A week has passed since Yuvaan asked me to marry him.

Seven days.

It still doesn't feel real.

Some mornings I wake up convinced I imagined the entire conversation. That I'd been so exhausted my mind stitched together a fantasy from memories I should've buried years ago. Then reality catches up with me, slow and unrelenting, and I remember standing in his study while he looked at me with impossible certainty and calmly asked me to become his wife.

And then I remember my answer. Or rather . . . the lack of one.

Because it isn't really my answer anymore.

It's Sara's.

The future of my life has somehow come to rest in the tiny hands of a five-year-old who still thinks eating chocolate before dinner is a perfectly reasonable life choice.

If someone had told the nineteen-year-old version of me that one day I'd be standing here, weighing a marriage proposal from the Maharaja of Devgarh against the opinion of my daughter, I would've laughed in their face.

Life has a strange sense of humour. What I never saw coming, though, wasn't the proposal. It was everything that followed. Every single day since then, he's found a reason to ask me about Sara.

Small questions. Ordinary questions. Questions that would've sounded meaningless coming from anyone else.

"Does she like ripe mangoes, or only the raw ones with salt?"

"What's her favourite bedtime story?"

"Does she sleep with the lights on?"

"What makes her laugh the hardest?"

"What scares her?"