He drove away from her flat that night feeling, for the first time in years, something close to calm.
He had found her. He had sat in her home. He had spoken to her face to face, as he had every right to, as any man who had waited this long and felt this deeply had every right to. She had been afraid — he had seen that and it had bothered him, because he did not want her to be afraid of him, that had never been what he wanted — but fear was sometimes the shape that understanding took in its early stages. She would process this. She would come to see.
He had told himself this so many times it had become a kind of internal weather. Constant, unremarkable, the backdrop to everything.
What he did not tell himself — what he had become very skilled at not telling himself — was what he had seen in her face when she asked him to leave. Not just fear. Something else. Something that looked, if you looked at it honestly, like the complete and settled absence of any feeling for him that was not dread.
He did not look at it honestly.
He had a gift, Rohan Mehra, for selective vision. For seeing only the version of events that confirmed what he needed to believe. She was guarded. She had been hurt before. She simply needed time and consistency, proof of his commitment. He would provide it.
He drove home through the city thinking: patience.
He did not notice, not then and not for a long time, the way his patience had changed. How it had started as something he was proud of — evidence of his depth of feeling — and had slowly become something else entirely. Something that was not really patience at all. Something that was the stillness before a pressure was applied.
He would not notice this until it was too late to matter.