A weary sigh escapes my lips. “Gabe’s not given me much of a choice. He doesn’t know I’m here. I tricked him into telling me where he would be meeting Damien next. I’m just waiting for Gabe to arrive. He’ll have no choice but to back me up when I tell Damien about me...about us.” I lick my lips. “I can no longer stay away from him, Jas. It’s been two whole months since he screamed and lost consciousness when I stood in front of him. Our son turned one and his father wasn’t there.”

My gaze shifts back to Damien drinking him in once again. He’s fiddling with his phone, a finger rubbing up and down his right temple, that all too familiar gesture making my heart ache. Arriving in the café, I literally halted in my tracks on seeing him seated alone at that corner table. Forcing my legs to move and not run to him was a challenge—a true test of my resolve to wait for the right time to bring him to me. God! Love is hard; singers write songs about it, poets have written odes to it, but only now I truly know how hard it really is.

“You know,” Jasmine says, “I would’ve never recognized him had I seen him alone somewhere. He looks so different, like he’s shed a skin.”

She’s right. Damien looks different from the man I fell in love with and married. Gone are the glasses and the stylish beard that my husband always wore. Now he’s shaved clean, with only slight stubble and no glasses. My Damien laughed easily, looked relaxed and had a twinkle in his eye that made him so very approachable. This man, on the other hand, has a carved, severe expression on his face that says, ‘Don’t you dare come closer if you want to live’. Every time he raises his eyes to scan the door, the walls around him raise a notch higher. He looks like he owns the world and he knows it.

Those beautiful grey green eyes look striking against the sharp planes of his aristocratic face. His straight patrician nose, high cheekbones and chiseled jaw—everything about him—screams wealth and privilege. His honey blonde hair is cut short, cropped close to his head, perhaps because of the accident and the subsequent surgery he has gone through. His dark three-piece suit is a far cry from the casual and relaxed pants and shirts he wore while working back home in Mumbai. Of course, I’ve seen him in a suit before, but nothing as formal and perfectly fit as this. He carries this attire with so much elegance and grace, like he was born to dress like this. And he was, only I didn’t know it.