"Tomorrow," I'd said with such certainty, holding the fourth token like I was ready to dive into another lifetime of trauma. But when tomorrow came, I woke up feeling like I'd been hit by a truck carrying the emotional weight of three dead women.
My body ached in places that had no business aching. My throat felt raw though I hadn't spoken above a whisper. The crescent scar on my forearm throbbed with phantom pain from Meera's burns, and I found myself checking my reflection obsessively for marks that belonged to other lifetimes.
"I need a break," I told Aditya when he texted asking if I was ready for the fourth story. The admission felt like failure, but also like breathing.
"Good," he replied immediately. "Your nervous system needs time to integrate. How about we do something completely normal today?"
Normal. The word felt foreign and appealing in equal measure.
At the Farmer’s Market…
"Normal" turned out to be farmers market wandering, sipping OJ and the kind of lazy Sunday afternoon I hadn't allowed myself in months. Aditya showed up with reusable bags, I was very disorganized and never carried bags, how opposite are we, I thought with an easy smile and we spent hours moving between stalls like we were normal people with normal problems, debating heirloom tomatoes and whether the lavender honey was worth the extra cost. Tasting every little thing in the stalls, and by the end of it all we had munched on so much that we could be mistook as being pregnant.
"You're different when you're not processing supernatural trauma," he observed as we sat on a bench sharing our last and final snack….fruits with Tajin, so perfect it seemed criminal to eat it quickly.
"Different how?" I said, biting into a juicy pineapple slice. As the juice was dripping on my chin, I saw Aditya bring his finger to my face, rub it gently and bring his fingers to his mouth. I was blushing and turned red, acted like it was nothing with my head down now.
"Lighter. Like you're not carrying the weight of multiple lifetimes in your shoulders." He gestured at my posture, and I realized he was right. I wasn't hunched forward, protecting myself from invisible blows. "More... present."
I took another bite of the pineapple, savoring the way the juice ran down my chin without immediately reaching for a napkin to clean it up. "I'd forgotten what it felt like to just be Anaya. Not Kamala or Priya or Meera. Just me, in this life, choosing stone fruit at a farmers market."
"Do you like her? This version of Anaya?"
The question caught me off guard. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, when you're not comparing yourself to past versions or trying to fix patterns, do you actually like who you are right now?"
I considered this seriously. Did I? For so long, self-improvement had been about becoming someone else, someone more confident, more decisive, more worthy of love. But right now, sitting in afternoon sunshine with pineapple juice on my fingers and a man who asked me questions that mattered, I felt something I'd never experienced before: contentment with my own company.
"Yeah," I said, surprising myself. "I think I do."
The break stretched into a week, then two. Not because I was avoiding the fourth story, but because I was discovering what it felt like to build a life based on what brought me joy rather than what needed healing.
I signed up for pottery classes on Tuesday evenings and rock climbing lessons on Thursday mornings. Both terrified me, which felt like exactly the point. In pottery, I learned that clay responds better to gentle pressure than force….a metaphor so obvious it made me laugh. In climbing, I discovered that fear and excitement really did feel identical in the body; the only difference was the story I told myself about the sensation.
"You're getting stronger," Marcus, my climbing instructor, said after I completed a route that had defeated me for weeks. "But more importantly, you're trusting yourself more. You see a hold and go for it instead of second-guessing."
Trusting myself. What a revolutionary concept.
I started saying no to things without elaborate explanations. When my manager asked me to work late on a project that wasn't urgent, I said simply, "I can't stay late today, but I'll prioritize it tomorrow morning." When Prathima invited me to a party where I knew I'd spend the evening managing other people's emotions, I said, "I'm not up for a crowd tonight, but let's plan a one-on-one dinner soon."
Each small act of self-advocacy felt like flexing a muscle I'd never used before.
And then there was Aditya.
The shift between us was subtle but unmistakable. Where there had once been careful distance and unspoken tension, now there was easy intimacy and the kind of comfortable silence that comes when two people stop performing for each other.
It started with small things. His hand finding mine during a movie. Me curling against his shoulder when we read in the same space. The way he'd brush my hair back from my face when I was concentrating on something, absent-minded and natural as breathing.
One evening, three weeks after Meera's story, we were cooking dinner together…his hands chopping vegetables while I stirred the rice, moving around each other in my small kitchen with the unconscious choreography of people who fit.
"Can I ask you something?" I said, not looking up from the pan.
"Always."
"Do you want me?" The question came out more directly than I'd intended. "I mean, really want me? Because sometimes I can't tell the difference between someone who wants me and someone who's being kind to me, and I need to know which this is."
He stopped chopping and turned to face me fully, something shifting in his expression.
"Anaya." His voice was quieter now, more serious.
"I'm serious. I've spent so long not knowing what I want that I can't tell when someone else wants me either."
He moved behind me, his hands settling on my hips, his mouth close to my ear. "I have wanted you since the day you opened your door looking like you'd been crying, wearing an oversized sweater and the most beautiful frown I'd ever seen."
My breath caught. "That was months ago."
"Three months, two weeks, and three days ago." His lips brushed my neck. "But who's counting?"
I turned in his arms, rice forgotten, and saw something in his face that made my knees weak. Not the careful tenderness he usually showed me, but raw desire mixed with something deeper.
"I want you too," I whispered, the admission feeling both terrifying and inevitable. "I've wanted you for so long I forgot what it felt like to want something for myself instead of waiting to be wanted."
When he kissed me this time, it wasn't careful or tentative. It was hungry and certain and full of months of restrained longing. I kissed him back with equal intensity, my hands tangling in his hair, my body pressing against his like I was trying to erase every inch of space between us.
"Bedroom?" he murmured against my mouth.
"God, yes."
Making love with Aditya was nothing like the past-life memories of duty and endurance. This was choosing and being chosen, wanting and being wanted, giving and receiving in equal measure. His hands on my skin felt like reverence rather than possession. When he asked, "Is this okay?" and "What do you need?" and "Tell me what feels good," it was the first time anyone had ever made my pleasure the point rather than a side effect.
Afterward, lying tangled in sheets with late afternoon light streaming through my bedroom windows, I felt something I'd never experienced before: completely present in my own body without apology or anxiety.
"That was..." I started, then stopped, not sure how to articulate the magnitude of the shift.
"Different?" he suggested, tracing lazy patterns on my bare shoulder.
"Revolutionary." I turned to look at him. "In every other life, sex was something that happened to me. Something I endured or performed or traded for safety. But this..."
"This?"
"This was something I chose. Something I participated in rather than survived." I pressed my face against his chest, breathing in the scent of his skin. "I didn't know it could be like this."
"Like what?"
"Like partnership instead of conquest. Like celebration instead of transaction." I lifted my head to meet his eyes. "Like love instead of ownership."
Something flickered across his face at the word "love," but before I could analyze it, my phone buzzed on the nightstand.
A text from an unknown number: The souls are restless. They need completion. Come when you're ready, but don't wait too long. - K
I showed Aditya the message, feeling the familiar pull of unfinished business settle over me like a familiar weight.
"The Keeper?" he asked.
"Has to be." I looked at the fourth token on my dresser, dark wood that seemed to absorb rather than reflect light. "I think it's time."
But when I picked up the token that evening, something felt different. Instead of the immediate pull into another life's memories, I felt... resistance. Like the token was holding back, waiting for something.
When the fourth token refused to open, I felt frustration first….then dread.
"It's not working," I whispered, staring at the dark wood in my palm. It pulsed faintly, but held back, like a heartbeat behind stone.
Aditya leaned closer. "Maybe it's not about you."
The words snagged in me like a hook. "What do you mean?"
He nodded toward the tokens scattered across the table, each one carved from different wood, each one holding a woman's pain. "Every time you relived their stories, it wasn't just memory. It was inheritance. Kamala's silence. Priya's terror. Meera's bargain. They're still here, Anaya. Still waiting."
The truth hit like cold water: the ache in my throat wasn't mine alone, nor the phantom burns or the phantom bruises. They weren't just echoes—I was carrying what they never got to finish.
The Keeper's text echoed in my mind: The souls are restless. They need completion.
My voice trembled as I said it aloud: "The key isn't just about remembering. It's about releasing."
Aditya's gaze held mine, steady and unflinching. "Until you set them free, you'll never be free either."
I looked at the tokens, and for the first time I didn't just see artifacts. I saw Kamala pressed against the temple door, Priya biting back words that would have saved her, Meera's hands trembling as she offered herself in place of love. Each woman frozen in the moment her story was stolen.
"They're not gone," I whispered. "They're trapped. And the key will only turn when all four of them are at peace."
As if summoned by my words, the apartment grew cold. The candles on my coffee table flickered, and I could swear I heard whispers…not threatening, but urgent. Pleading.
Help us.
Finish what we couldn't.
Set us free.
I closed my eyes, and suddenly I could see them. Not their deaths this time, but their lives. Kamala as a child, laughing before marriage stole her voice. Priya teaching younger girls to read in secret. Meera tending a garden before dowry demands turned love into currency.
And the fourth... she was clearer now. A woman in a simple cotton sari, standing at a bedroom door, her hand raised as if to knock. But she was afraid. So afraid of what lay beyond that door. The scent of jasmine oil and fear. The sound of footsteps that made her flinch.
"I can see her," I breathed. "The fourth woman. She's... she's terrified of her own bedroom."
"What do you mean?"
Images flashed through my mind: a woman lying awake in terror, knowing what was coming. A bedroom door that felt like a prison. A husband who believed "no" was not a word wives were allowed to use.
"Forced intimacy," I whispered, my blood running cold. "She was being hurt by her husband, night after night. But back then, there was no word for what we now call marital rape. No legal recognition. A wife's body was considered her husband's property, and she had no right to refuse."
The fourth token grew hot in my palm, and suddenly I could see more…the moment she finally tried to leave. The way he'd caught her at the door, his hands around her throat, squeezing until her desperate clawing grew weak.
"She tried to escape," I continued, my voice growing stronger even as tears streamed down my face. "She packed a bag, tried to run to her mother's house. But he found her. And he killed her rather than let her leave. Strangled her to preserve his 'rights' as a husband."
Aditya's face was pale with horror. "When?"
"Earlier," I said, the knowledge coming to me like scattered puzzle pieces. "1895. Almost thirty years before Meera. The soul... my soul... it keeps trying to learn the same lessons across different lifetimes."
"What was her name?"
The knowledge came to me like a whisper: "Sita. Her name was Sita. She was twenty-four years old, and she never got to live in her own body safely."
As I spoke her name, the apartment filled with presence. Not threatening….grateful. Like she'd been waiting over a century just to be acknowledged.
"The token still won't open," I said, staring at the dark wood. "Even knowing her story, it's still locked."
"Maybe," Aditya said carefully, "you need to go back to where it all started. Not the temples, but... the Keeper."
I looked at him. "You think the Keeper has answers about how to set them free?"
"I think the Keeper is the only one who understands how this magic works. And maybe..." He paused, considering. "Maybe the souls need to be released in a specific way. A ritual. Something more than just acknowledgment."
I felt a pull, not toward India, but toward that impossible shed in the hills. "You're right. The Keeper will know how to help them find peace."
"And then?"
"And then maybe the key will finally turn."
To be continued...