The Library of Fates(73)

I couldn’t predict the future like Thala, but I knew what would happen, how things would unfold.

Thea would stop spending time with Chandradev. It would be a decision she made with her will, rather than with her heart, and she would pay a price for it. She would distance herself from him, even as it pained her. She would spend weeks and months and years wondering what that other life—the one she desired—might have looked like.

She would watch Chandradev return to Shalingar at the end of his four years at the Academy, and she would spend weeks lamenting his absence. She would marry a man she didn’t love, and she would harbor an intense pain and longing for the one she did.

“I suppose, no matter what, I’ll be fine,” she said to me after a long silence.

“You will?” I asked, surprised.

She smiled. “I don’t know.” There were tears in her eyes. “The thing is . . . I know we’ve only just met . . . but somehow, the idea of being with Chandradev is already rooted in me.”

I nodded, trying not to cry. “I know he feels the same way.”

In preventing one particular form of disaster, the absence of that other reality, the one we knew and expected, the one that we felt was our own, was slowly becoming a gaping hole in each of our lives, searing us with its edges.

“Will he be all right?” Thea asked. She was asking about my father.

In some part of me, I knew the answer to this too: Chandradev would suffer, wondering what he had done wrong. He would hold tightly to a secret, buried in the deepest recesses of his heart: That he loved Thea. That he couldn’t have her.

But perhaps that was always the case.

“In the version of time that I came from, that I experienced, he spends years away from you, missing you anyway. It seems that loss, or at least the experience of being torn from each other, is a part of your lives no matter what you choose.”

I remembered Thala’s words: Some things are fixed, some things are changeable. Maybe it was never Thea and Chandradev’s fate to spend a lifetime together, to raise a family together. Maybe fate is a puzzle that nobody truly understands, not even the vetalas.

She nodded. “I know what you’re asking me to do. But it’s still difficult to swallow. That I have a choice, but I really don’t. That my actions have unintended consequences.”

“I’m sorry that I’m the one to deliver the news to you. We’re altering the course of nature,” I explained to her. “And I don’t know all the consequences. I don’t think anyone ever does. And I know that in your heart, it doesn’t feel right. It probably won’t for a long time.”

“What about you?” she asked. “What happens to you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you just . . . disappear?” she asked carefully.

“I don’t know. But most likely, it all just . . . ends.”

As I said this, I realized that I felt broken too. I was close to exiting this world that I had been a part of, and it was difficult to let go. It was as though the pain that Sikander must have felt in that other version of this story had somehow been divided among us.

That was the moment that Thea began to cry, her shoulders trembling. It was actually hitting her now—she wasn’t just letting go of a moment or a person or an outcome that she wanted. She was closing the door on an entirely other life, and I could tell that she felt the loss of that future as though she had actually lived it.

And she had, in some other version of time. I understood this now.

“Thea?” I quietly asked, getting up and sitting down next to her. “Are you . . . all right?”

She turned to me, and her skin was blotched red, her eyes crimson. She was crying the kind of tears where the sadness threatens to choke and engulf you. I knew this kind of sadness well.

“One day, I’ll make peace with it, I suppose. But it’s a lie. And the saddest thing is . . . he doesn’t know.”

“Who, Sikander?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Chandradev. He’ll never know how I feel about him. It’s as though there’s a hollow in my life now that can never be filled. And I just know I’ll spend my years searching the world, looking for pieces of him in everyone I meet. Does that make sense to you?”

I realized then that she was looking to me for strength. My mother wanted me to comfort her. I swallowed hard as I thought about Arjun. I sat down beside her. “I loved someone like that once.”

“Arjun?”

I nodded. “There’s another version of this story where he and I run away together,” I said. “Where we actually succeed at running away.”

“And probably another where you marry.”

“And another where he loves someone else, and so do I.”

“How do you make peace with that?” she asked. “With all the possibilities? With everything that could have been?”

But for once, I couldn’t will myself to consider all the fates that were out of my control, all the lives I had lost or couldn’t have. I simply wanted to spend the last precious moments of my existence with my mother.

She was right: Sooner, rather than later, it would all end. It would end for all of us. I just didn’t know what that would look like for me. But perhaps that’s always the case anyway.

“Amrita?” she asked before she left my room that night. I turned to her, and she pulled me into her arms, holding me tightly.