Without You, Incomplete
It had been seven years since Reeva had last seen Ayaan. Seven years since he had vanished from her life without a trace. Now, he stood before her, in her cozy little bookstore café in Jaipur, holding a coffee cup like nothing had changed.
But everything had changed.
He looked older, leaner, with eyes that carried too many storms. Reeva’s heart pounded as she fumbled with the bill counter, pretending not to notice him. But he had already noticed her. Their eyes met, and time froze.
“Reeva?” His voice was cautious, like a man testing the depth of a long-forgotten river.
She blinked, half-afraid this was some dream spun by nostalgia. “Ayaan?” she whispered.
He smiled faintly, and the sound of his name on her lips seemed to awaken something in him. But Reeva was not the girl he had left behind in Delhi. She had built a life, or at least a version of one, over the ashes of the love they once shared.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, not with joy, but with restrained rage.
“I came to return something,” he said quietly, placing a worn envelope on the counter. It was addressed to her in his handwriting.
She didn’t touch it. “You vanished without a word. Seven years, Ayaan. Do you know what that does to a person?”
He sighed. “You deserve an explanation. But not here. Please… give me one hour.”
Reeva stared at him. The anger she had buried was rising like a tide. But curiosity was cruel, and her heart, despite everything, still wanted answers.
“Okay,” she said. “One hour. But if you lie—just once—I’ll walk away again. Forever.”
They sat on the rooftop café above her store, where the evening sun dipped behind the Aravalli hills. Ayaan seemed hesitant, almost fragile.
“I was diagnosed with cancer,” he began. “Stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was aggressive. The doctors gave me less than a year.”
Reeva froze.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want your life to be reduced to hospital visits and sorrow. I wanted you to fly. You had dreams, Reeva. I didn’t want to become your burden.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “So you just… disappeared? You thought breaking my heart would help me?”
“I was scared,” he admitted. “I thought you’d hate me, yes—but at least you’d move on. I didn’t want you watching me fade.”
Tears welled in her eyes, unbidden. “You didn’t just break my heart, Ayaan. You shattered it. And then I waited. Every day. No calls. No texts. Nothing. I thought I wasn’t enough for you.”
“I was enough for both of us,” he whispered. “And that was the problem.”
He handed her a medical report—old, yellowed, but real. Reeva stared at it, her fingers trembling. “You survived?”
“Yes,” he said. “After two years of chemo, I was declared cancer-free. But by then… you were gone. You’d moved to Jaipur. Your number had changed. I couldn’t find you.”
“And now?”
“I came to say goodbye. Properly this time. And maybe… to see if the story we began still has a final chapter.”
The days that followed were confusing for Reeva. She couldn’t get Ayaan out of her mind. The memories flooded back—late nights studying in Delhi University, stolen kisses in libraries, the poetry he wrote in the margins of her notebooks.
Her best friend Meher was skeptical. “He left once, Reeva. What if he does it again?”
“I don’t know,” Reeva confessed. “But I want to know the truth of everything—even the parts that hurt.”
Ayaan stayed in Jaipur for a week. They met every evening. They walked the narrow streets of the old city, laughed over chai, revisited the bookstore where they had once dreamed of writing a novel together.
And then… came the second twist.
One night, Ayaan didn’t show up.
Reeva waited two hours before going to his guest house. The receptionist handed her a note.
“Don’t look for me. I’m protecting you again.
—Ayaan”
Reeva’s heart sank.
But this time, she didn’t let him disappear.
She hacked into his email—she still remembered his old poetry-based password. What she found shocked her.
Ayaan was being blackmailed.
Attached were scanned photos—doctored images of him with criminal figures. There were threats. A hidden letter revealed that during his treatment, Ayaan had unknowingly participated in a drug trial under a false identity. The firm running it was under investigation now, and Ayaan had become collateral.
He hadn’t told her. Again.
This time, she didn’t cry.
She called her lawyer friend. She found the investigating officer. She connected the dots. It took two weeks of digging, but the truth came out: Ayaan was innocent, a pawn in a pharmaceutical scam. The culprits were arrested.
And Reeva?
She found him in a small village near Udaipur, hiding in an old caretaker’s quarters.
When she walked into that dusty room, he was stunned. “How did you—?”
“You still use the same password for everything,” she smirked. “You should work on that.”
He laughed, then broke down.
“I’m so tired, Reeva,” he whispered. “I thought disappearing would protect you again. But it’s me who’s incomplete without you.”
She knelt in front of him and held his face.
“We finish this story together. No more secrets. No more hiding.”
Months later, Reeva and Ayaan reopened her bookstore café under a new name: “Chapter Two”.
It became a place for second chances, for lost lovers, for broken people to find words that healed them.
And on the shelf near the counter was their co-written novel:
“Without You, Incomplete” — a story about love, betrayal, forgiveness… and beginning again.
