Maya sat wrapped in her shawl at the tiny dining table, watching me with tired amusement.

“You still cook like someone trying to solve a legal case,” she said.

“I measure nothing in court either.”

“That explains a lot.”

I looked back at her.

For a second, we were not divorced. She was not sick. We were just us, in a kitchen too small for grief.

Then she coughed into her handkerchief, and reality returned.

After dinner, she insisted she could clean the dishes. I refused. She argued. I argued back. Finally, she gave up and went to sit on the sofa.

While washing plates, I saw something taped to the fridge.

A hospital calendar.

Monday was circled in red.

Under it, in Maya’s careful handwriting, were the words:

Cycle 2. Be brave.

I gripped the sink so hard my knuckles hurt.

That night, before leaving, I stood at her door with her spare prescription list in my pocket and a hundred apologies in my throat.

“I’ll come tomorrow,” I said.

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

I looked at her then. Pale face. Tired eyes. Brave mouth.

“I’m not trying to prove anything,” I said. “I’m trying to show up.”

For a moment, neither of us moved.

Then she nodded once.

“Goodnight, Arjun.”

“Goodnight, Maya.”

I sat in my car outside her building for nearly twenty minutes, staring at the dim light in her third-floor window.

Only when it switched off did I drive home.

But home was no longer home.

My apartment felt obscene in its comfort. Wide bed. Full refrigerator. Clean bathroom. Silence that I had once mistaken for peace.

I opened the drawer where our divorce papers were still kept in a brown envelope.

Finalized two months ago.

Irreversible, according to law.

But nothing about love obeyed paperwork.

The next morning, I called my office and took indefinite leave.

My senior partner was furious.

“You just won the Malhotra contract, Arjun. This is not the time.”

“My wife is ill,” I said.

There was a pause.

“I thought you were divorced.”

“So did I.”

I hung up before he could answer.

Then I called my mother.

She cried when I told her.

Not softly. Not politely. She broke.

“She never told us,” Ma kept saying. “That poor girl. That poor child.”

“She didn’t want anyone to know.”

“She carried too much,” Ma whispered. “Even when she lost the babies, she carried your pain too.”

I closed my eyes.

The miscarriages.

The word still opened a locked room inside me.

The first time, we had been devastated but hopeful. The second time, afraid. The third time, something in us changed. Maya had apologized to me in a hospital bed while I stood there numb, not knowing how to tell her that I was not angry, only broken.

But my silence had looked like blame.

And she had believed it.

By noon, I was back at her apartment with groceries, masks, sanitizer, clean bedsheets, and a notebook for her medication schedule.

Maya opened the door and stared at the bags.

“Did you buy the entire pharmacy?”

“Only half.”

“You cannot move in through groceries.”

“Watch me.”

She tried to scold me, but she was too tired, and I was too determined.

Over the next two days, I learned her life.

I learned which medicine made her nauseous.

Which tea she could tolerate.

Which neighbor sometimes brought her mail.

Which pillow helped when her back hurt.

Which smile meant she was actually in pain.

On Monday morning, I drove her to the hospital for admission.

The city was waking up around us. Street vendors lifting shutters. Buses coughing smoke into pale sunlight. People rushing toward ordinary days, unaware that inside my car, time had become precious and terrifying.

Maya looked out the window.

“I’m scared,” she said suddenly.

The honesty struck me.

I reached across the gear shift and opened my palm.

After a moment, she placed her hand in mine.

“I am too,” I said.

She nodded.

“Don’t disappear,” she whispered.

My throat tightened.

“I won’t.”

The hospital room was small, with cream walls and a window facing another building. A nurse inserted an IV line. Maya barely flinched. I flinched enough for both of us.

She noticed.

“You look worse than I do.”

“I hate needles.”

“You’re not the one getting them.”

“Emotionally, I am.”

She rolled her eyes.

I almost smiled.

The chemotherapy began that afternoon.

Drip by drip, clear liquid entered her body like a quiet war.

The first day, she joked.

The second day, she slept.

The third day, she stopped pretending.

I stayed beside her through the nausea, the fever checks, the blood tests, the nights when machines beeped and nurses moved like shadows in blue uniforms.

Sometimes she woke and found me reading beside her bed.

Sometimes she woke crying.

Once, near dawn, she whispered, “Do you think God punished me?”

I closed the book slowly.

“For what?”

“For not being able to keep our babies.”

Pain moved through me so sharply that I could not breathe for a moment.

I sat on the edge of her bed and took her hand.

“No,” I said. “No, Maya. Never.”

Her eyes were unfocused with fever and exhaustion.

“You became so quiet after the last one,” she whispered. “I thought you hated looking at me.”

“I hated looking at myself,” I said. “Because I couldn’t fix it. Because you were suffering and I had no language for it. Because every time I opened my mouth, I was afraid I’d make it worse.”

“You did make it worse,” she said.

The words were not cruel.

They were true.

A tear slipped into her hairline.

“I needed you to hold me.”

“I needed you to say her name.”

Her.

Our last baby.

The one Maya had secretly named Anaya.