“Further tests required…”
The words floated in the air like fragments of a sentence I couldn’t piece together.
“What are you saying?” I asked, my voice barely steady.
The doctor looked directly at me.
“We suspect there may be a growth in her brain.”
Silence.
Complete.
Absolute.
The world stopped.
“No…” I said immediately.
It came out instinctively.
Like rejecting the words would make them untrue.
“That’s not possible.”
Anushka didn’t speak.
She didn’t cry.
She just sat there.
Still.
Too still.
“We need an MRI to confirm,” the doctor continued. “It could be benign. But we cannot ignore the symptoms anymore.”
My ears rang.
My chest felt tight.
And suddenly, everything made sense.
The dizziness.
The fainting.
The exhaustion.
The quiet suffering.
I turned to look at Anushka.
Her face was calm.
Too calm.
“Did you… know?” I asked slowly.
She didn’t answer right away.
Then finally…
She nodded.
Just slightly.
And that single movement shattered something inside me.
“You knew?” my voice cracked. “And you didn’t tell me?”
Her eyes filled with tears—but they didn’t fall.
“I wasn’t sure,” she whispered. “I didn’t want to scare you… until I had to.”
“Until you had to?” I repeated, disbelief and pain mixing in my chest.
“I thought it was stress… or weakness… or something temporary,” she said. “And then… I got scared.”
Her voice broke.
“But not for myself.”
She looked at me.
And this time, the tears fell.
“For you.”
I turned away.
Not out of anger.
But because I couldn’t hold everything inside anymore.
All the emotions came crashing in at once.
The doubt.
The guilt.
The fear.
And one unbearable truth:
While I was busy suspecting her…
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