The woman entered Aditya’s life without ceremony.

She worked in a different department, on a different floor. Their first interaction lasted less than five minutes, a brief exchange about a delayed report in the corridor outside a conference room. There was nothing remarkable about the conversation itself.

What lingered was the silence afterward.

Her name was Mira. She spoke carefully, as if weighing each word before allowing it to surface. When she listened, she did not interrupt. She did not rush to fill gaps. The pauses between her sentences felt deliberate, almost intimate.

Aditya found himself replaying the encounter later that evening, surprised by its persistence. He told himself it was nothing. A coincidence. Fatigue.

But the next time he saw her, he noticed how she seemed slightly apart from the office’s usual urgency. She did her work competently, without fuss. She asked questions that felt oddly personal, though they were not.

"You look like someone who thinks a lot," she said once, half-smiling.

The comment startled him. He laughed it off, but something inside him stirred.

With Mira, conversation unfolded without effort. She did not ask for explanations. She did not seek reassurance. She accepted ambiguity as if it were a shared language.

Aditya began to feel more himself around her. Or rather, more like the person he had once imagined he might become. Whole. Undivided.

He did not name this feeling as longing. He framed it as inspiration. Intellectual connection. Something harmless.

At home, Kavya sensed the shift before she saw it.

Aditya’s body was present, but his attention slipped away easily. He smiled at messages she could not see. He seemed lighter and heavier at the same time—buoyed by something, burdened by secrecy.

She asked him about his day. He answered politely, vaguely. The spaces between his words felt crowded.

One afternoon, while folding laundry, Kavya was struck by an irrational certainty.

There was someone else.

The thought arrived fully formed, without evidence. She dismissed it immediately, ashamed of her suspicion. Aditya was not that kind of man. They were not that kind of couple.

Still, the feeling persisted, quiet and relentless.

Aditya, for his part, felt both exhilarated and afraid. Mira seemed to embody a promise he could not articulate. Around her, he felt invited rather than demanded. Seen without being defined.

He did not touch her. He did not cross any visible line.

Yet something essential had already shifted.

Late one night, lying beside Kavya, he stared into the darkness, aware of the widening distance between his inner life and the marriage. The thought unsettled him, but it did not stop him.

He told himself this was a phase. A harmless illusion.

But the illusion was already shaping his reality.