The audit left the camp thinner in some places and denser in others, like a fabric pulled tight where it had been frayed. Men who had been comfortable in the fog of orders suddenly found their hands occupied with evidence logs and subpoenas. Paper stacked in neat piles on the colonel's table and the tent hummed with the slow, patient sound of people trying to turn chaos into something they could file away.
I told myself I would sleep, that the night was only a long place between briefings. But grief, when it becomes a thing you live inside, does not allow neat intervals. It insinuates itself into the small hours, into the places where breathing is too loud and silence presses against the tent canvas. I sat up long after the lamps had been put out in the clinic and read his lines again—the ones that had been folded like a talisman into my pocket:
Forgive me.
Two words that had been at once comfort and accusation. Did he write them because he knew what he was about to do? Or because he foresaw the way men would funnel him into a headline? Both felt possible. Both felt inadequate.
The radio crackled at three. I should have been asleep; the ward needed rest. Instead the satphone scrolled Daiwik's name like a small electric pulse, and I pressed the receiver without thinking. His voice came thin with wakefulness.
"Kavya," he said. "They've found more—another cache at Sector Nine. Items. Shards. It's complicated."
"Are you there?" I asked.
"I am," he said. "Can you come out? To the grove? There's something else."
I felt the immediate animal spring of hope—hopes that have names and pulsing maps—then a second inside panic: the grove was our ritual, ours alone, a place where I had allowed myself to be both lover and civilian, therapist and dependent. If he wanted me there, it meant the world had tilted again.
I was out before I had time to weigh the wisdom of it. The frost had become a thin glass over everything; my boots made small cracking sounds as I crossed the yard. Lanterns dotted the camp like patient stars, and the clinic's flap was a soft square of light behind me.
Daiwik stood at the edge of the grove as if he had been waiting for that exact moment of my breath. He did not look like a man who had the luxury of theatrics; he looked like someone who had been carrying something too long and had decided to shoulder the consequence.
"Is he—?" The question lodged heavy and brittle.
"He's here," Daiwik said. The two words were a map and a trap at once. His jaw worked with tiredness. "He came back, Kavya. He slipped through a gap in the rotation. He's at the med bay, in a secured room. He asked for you."
I felt dizzy in the way you feel when a chair is pulled away and the floor answers late. Alive. The word recalibrated everything in my chest. Relief arrived as a hot, jagged stab; then fury rose in a colder, more measured tide. The anger was not at him—at least not only at him. It was at all the men who had stewarded this secret, at the leak that had made him an image before he could be a person to me; at Daiwik, who had held my grief like a fragile jar and decided he could manage it better than I could.
"You saw him?" I asked.
Daiwik's shoulders tightened. "I did. After he was brought in, before they labeled him. He was breathing; he cursed at the morphine in a way only he can, and he told me—he told me to keep my mouth shut, to trust the mission. I agreed. I thought I was protecting you by obeying orders. I thought I was protecting the men."
"You kept his living from me," I said. The frost in my breath changed the words into small, sharp things. "You kept his breath hidden so the world could call him a ghost."
His face collapsed in a way I had seen in night shifts when a soldier learns a friend has died and his hands have nothing to do but prepare a body. "I am sorry," he said. "I am sorry for keeping you in the dark. I thought I could bear the guilt if it saved him. I didn't imagine this would become a leak. I thought—"
"You thought," I echoed. We had been using that soft word lately to bridge impossible things. "You thought for me."
He flinched. He was a healer and he'd made a decision like a general. "He asked us to. Shash asked me to. He asked Nandini, too. He said if the operation required it, silence was a shield. We obeyed."
The grove felt smaller. Lanterns swung slightly in the wind, as if they, too, could not decide how to bear illumination.
"Where is he?" I demanded, my throat thick with the pressured air of a woman about to cross a border.
"He asked me to bring you," Daiwik said. "But Colonel wants proof of identity and control. This is why I came. I told Shash I would get you—covertly if I had to."
A hundred reasons rose—protocol, prudence, the danger of an ongoing operation—but in the end the truth was plain: if he lived and I would not be told, I would tear the world apart with questions. That very hunger, the need to know, had propelled me into darkness after the leak. I had to see him before the institution made his life into a clean and tragic file.
We moved through the camp like conspirators. Nandini found us at the med bay door, her white coat swallowed by the night. She gave me one of those looks that contained apology and practicality, the peculiar offerings you get from people who have kept you in mind even as they determined to protect you from what they thought might hurt.
"He's awake," she said. "He asked for you by name. He seemed... different."
Different is a small word for the way a man looks after he has split himself into roles. A soldier learns to wrap himself in secrecy for missions; a man who returns from the brink keeps some of the secrecy as an amulet.
The med bay smelled of iodine and old coffee; lights were low because confidentiality was a form of courtesy. They led me to a small curtained cubicle that had been made private—an arrangement the colonel had tolerated because Daiwik had persuaded him this was necessary, for now, to avoid media and to protect the mission.
When the curtain drew, time collapsed. There he was—smaller, perhaps, or maybe the vantage of grief had made him so. He sat on the edge of a cot. Bandages still gathered like snow at his side; a small shave of stubble crossed his jaw. He looked at me as if the world were a single problem and I was the only answer. For a second there was no sound but the soft rustle of canvas.
I wanted, in the raw place that is not yet grief but is almost peril, to throw myself at him. The living body in front of me made my eyes fill with a pressure I could not name: relief, yes; fury, yes; a grief so complicated it felt like a new organ forming in my chest.
"Shash," I said, and the name landed like a prayer.
He straightened, and the curve of his mouth that had been reserved for jokes when we were foolish and were lazy with our love, flickered. "Kavya." The voice was hoarse, as if evacuated of sleep. "You came."
I crossed to him without thinking. His hands were cool and rough; he reached for my face, and I braced against the tenderness like a woman who knows tenderness is a dangerous thing in the field. He cupped my jaw and his thumb brushed the scar on my temple where years had left their map. "You look—" he faltered. "You look like the world made sense even when it did not."
"You told me to live," I said. The memory of his letter—Do not make me a monument, live—cut into me then like a mandate. "You told me to live. I was trying."
He breathed in, eyes closing as if to steady a memory. "I am sorry," he said. "I am sorry for everything. For the silence. For the hole I left."
The first thing I did felt stupid and very human: I searched his face for signs of what I had missed. A new scar, a fresh white line at the corner of his eyebrow; his left hand trembled when he pressed it to the bandage at his side. He looked like a man who had been carved in the wind and then stitched back with hands that had hurry.
"You could have told me you were alive," I said. The words were simple. "You could have sent one line—one stupid, meaningless line—'I'm alive.' You could have trusted me to not follow you into danger."
He closed his eyes. "I wanted to tell you. I tried, in ways you do not know. I left notes where only you might find them sometimes—little things. But the mission... it was set so deep. They said if any echo leaked, it would ruin months of work and the men we were trying to turn. I thought—foolishly—that if I kept myself a ghost, I could keep you safe."
The sentence echoed something I had been told by men at the front: to lie is sometimes to protect; to vanish is sometimes to save. It was an ethic that required you to sacrifice your beloved's right to the truth for a strategic gain. The math of it felt cold and wrong in my bones.
"You made me a ghost," I said. "They made me go to a place where I recited your name at a shrine because a paper said it was my duty to mourn. You asked them to let you be both a soldier and a phantom and expected me to accept both."
He flinched as if my words had physical teeth. For a while he said nothing but kept his hand in mine, tight enough to anchor us both. Then he pushed air out of his chest, the ragged, utterly honest sound of a man who has been very near and returned with pieces missing.
"I did what I thought would save more men," he said. "I cannot try to justify it. I chose the mission. I chose the risk. I thought I could make sense of the ends by choosing the means. And I thought—" He looked up, and for the first time his eyes had a hardness I'd rarely seen. "—I thought I could be the man who endured what needed to be endured."
There was a steel in him that was not all war. There was also a loneliness that had hardened like frost. Behind that loneliness I could sense the flicker of something else—regret, yes, but also a desperate belief that he had been doing the right thing.
"I did not come to ask forgiveness in any noble way," he continued. "I came because I could not stay away. I am alive; that is true. But I may have to leave again. There are parts of this job that require you to be not just brave but also unreadable. I wanted to keep you safe."
I tasted anger and loss layered together. "You kept your life from me because you thought it was armor," I said. "But armor is heavy. It crushes people inside."
He closed his eyes, and for a long while neither of us spoke. The med bay's fluorescent light hummed like the world's indifferent heart. Outside, someone was moving a vehicle, a dull, distant sound of trucks that reminded me we were still in the middle of living and dying.
"I asked Daiwik to keep you out of it," Shash said finally, voice low. "He promised. He did what he thought best. He is not a bad man, Kavya."
"No," I said. "He isn't a bad man. He is a man who thought his choices would shield me and instead took my agency." The thought struck me as cold: the men around me, the ones who loved and had the authority to make decisions, had decided what I could carry. They had decided my grief for me.
Shash lowered his head. "I know. I am sorry. I wish—" He stopped. He could not wish the mistakes undone. "Come with me," he said suddenly, as if the solution were as simple as a command in the field. "Leave this place. Go home with me."
The words caught in a place inside me. They were an ultimatum offered like a benediction. The life I had was not only the grove and his letters; it included my mother's chemotherapy, a clinic of soldiers who needed me, and men who relied on the steady clinical decision I made when their hearts stuttered. To leave was to fold into a smaller, private map. To stay was to keep being visible in a world I had chosen—but one that had just hurt me deeply.
"Go with you where?" I asked. "Into another mission? Into another shadow?"
He lifted his face, eyes flooded with an honest kind of need. "Go away from the press. Go somewhere nothing can reach. Marry me somewhere I can find you every morning. Let me be simple with you."
There was a fever in the simplicity he offered; it was intoxicating because simplicity was a rare commodity. But life had taught me that simplicity offered by a man who lives on ridges and in missions is rarely what it seems. It is often a trap where hope is buried under duties and then exhumed as a funeral.
"I can't walk away from my work," I said. "Nor from my mother. Nor from these men. I can't be hidden because the world likes a clean story. You made me a chapter in your plot and expected me to accept the footnote."
His jaw set. "Then don't marry anyone for safety, Kavya. If you choose someone because he comes home, I will know you chose fear."
The accusation sliced like a scalpel. I felt it as a challenge wrapped in love. In the cold light, his vulnerability was a weapon and a balm.
For a long time we simply held each other. The heat from his hand was a small proof of life, a domestic miracle in a place where the ordinary was rationed. I wanted to forgive him then and find in his arms the map back to peace. I wanted to say yes to leaving and to drowning in the small, private world he offered.
But the world we inhabited was not kind to simple choices. Daiwik's confession had already opened a fissure in our trio; Nandini's reveal had shown the past had its own secret cartography; Aditya's leak had made our private life public property. The tent around us felt ready to close again, to collect the truth in its neat, unforgiving stacks.
"I can't decide tonight," I said finally. "I need time. I need the papers they promised, the full audit, the names who used the node. And I need to know why you thought the only way to save people was to make me an orphan in ink."
He nodded slowly, as if each small condition I listed was a weight he could lift. "I will wait," he said. "For your time. For your answer. But know this: I didn't choose silence because I wanted to hurt you. I chose it because the world we fight in told me to. I am not saying it's right."
We sat there until the light outside began to thin and the medic on night watch peeked through the curtain with a look that mixed concern and the permission she gave many lovers: an acknowledgment that human life sometimes made exceptions.
When I left the med bay, Daiwik followed me to the grove. He did not speak for several minutes; his hands were folded as if in prayer.
"You did right to come," he said finally. "I did wrong. But I'll stand with whatever you decide. I won't hide anything from you again."
His words were a small, shaky redemption. I did not answer with absolution; there were things that must be earned, not granted.
The grove was the same as always—the stump, the lanterns, the cold lace of skeletal branches. But that night it felt like a border crossing: the place where my life could tilt one way or another. The men I loved stood on either side of the path: one alive and raw with apologies and the other knotted with guilt and an eagerness to repair.
I kept my hands in my pockets, feeling the paper of the pendant photograph and the Forgive me note arranged like an accusation and a benediction. I did not know whether forgiveness was premature or necessary. I had been given a choice I did not want: to accept a man who had been both brave and cruel, to weigh love against agency, to decide whether to be loved in the way of soldiers—sacrificial, secretive—or to ask for love that came with transparency.
When the moon climbed high and the camp's watch shifted into sleep, I pressed my palm to the stump and whispered the only prayer cruelty had not yet taken from me: If you love me, show me how to live again with you in the light.
Shash's footsteps were receding as he left the med bay. For a moment I thought he would come back and stand under the lanterns beside me, and maybe he did, but maybe he didn't. Men like him are made of returns and departures. I feared the next departure would be final.
I went to sleep with the taste of his apology on my tongue and the knowledge that the next day would demand more than interviews and logs. It would demand decisions: of who to trust, whom to hold, and whether I could live with a love that required me to be kept in the dark for the apparent safety of strangers.
Outside, the wind moved through the cherry branches like a voice, patient and indifferent. Inside, the grove kept its vigil, and I tried to imagine the shape of forgiveness that would not ask me to erase my wounds.