Aditya discovered that silence could be louder than argument.

With Kavya withdrawn, the house felt unfamiliar. There was no one to track his moods, no one to soften the edges of his days. The freedom he had longed for arrived stripped of pleasure.

He stopped seeing Mira.

The decision was not noble. It was inevitable. Without the pressure of secrecy, the connection lost its charge. The conversations that had once felt luminous now seemed tentative, incomplete. She had never been the answer. She had only illuminated a question.

Aditya began taking long walks in the early mornings, before the city fully woke. The repetition of his footsteps gave him something to hold onto. Thoughts surfaced that he had kept buried for decades.

His father’s face returned to him with unexpected clarity. The charm. The excuses. The ease with which he had retreated from responsibility when things grew difficult.

Aditya felt a surge of shame, followed by an equally strong resistance. He was not that man.

And yet.

He saw how his relentless ambition had been shaped by fear rather than desire. How success had become a defense against collapse. How his longing for unity had driven him outward, searching for completion in another person rather than risking fragmentation within himself.

The realization was painful.

For the first time, he allowed himself to sit with contradiction. To admit exhaustion. To acknowledge parts of himself that did not fit neatly into roles of competence and control.

One evening, alone in the living room, he felt something shift. Not relief. Not clarity. A quiet acceptance of incompleteness.

Unity, he understood, was not the absence of division, but the capacity to hold it.

This insight did not repair the marriage. It did not absolve him. But it grounded him in a way he had never known.

For the first time, he stopped searching outside himself.