Our nikkah was done when we were fourteen, signatures too neat for hands that still shook, elders calling it protection while I learned a new word for guilt. We never lived together. Not once. I inherited an empire built on obedience and funerals, and I kept her far enough away that my shadow wouldn’t stain her mornings. Twenty years of marriage on paper, none of it in shared rooms. I told myself this was mercy.

The first time I stepped in front of danger for her, I was ten.

I don’t remember deciding. I remember moving.

A grown boy shoved past her in the school corridor, angry and loud and careless. My body shifted before my mind caught up. Shoulder out. Back straight. Her behind me. The shove hit me instead. I tasted blood and chalk dust and felt oddly calm. She had clutched my sleeve with both fists like I was something solid.

“Ilham,” she whispered, scared.

I remember thinking, without words, that this was my job now.

It never stopped being my job.

Now she sits across from me, hands folded, eyes steady in the way people get when they’ve learned patience the hard way. She has always waited. I have always hidden.

“You didn’t have to come yourself,” she says. “You could have sent someone.”

“I don’t send men for you.”

“I know,” she says softly. “You never did.”

That’s the problem. From age ten onward, my instinct has been the same. Step forward. Take the hit. Decide for her. I have blocked doors, voices, proposals, entire cities. I have said no to rooms I wanted her to fill because my world kills what it touches.

“You’re quiet today,” she says.

“I’m always quiet.”

“Not like this.”

I look at my hands. They are clean. They never feel that way.

“I’ve been thinking,” I say.

She smiles a little, like that’s dangerous news. “That usually ends badly.”

“I was thinking when I was ten,” I continue. “Do you remember the corridor. The shove.”

She does. I see it in her eyes. She nods once.

“You didn’t even look back,” she says. “You just stepped in front of me.”

“I still do that.”

“Yes,” she says. “You do. Even when I don’t ask.”

There it is. The gentle accusation. The truth wrapped in care.

“I thought if I kept distance,” I say, “if I kept you out of my house, out of my nights, out of the mess… you’d stay untouched.”

Her gaze doesn’t drop. “And did I.”

“No,” I admit. “You grew alone.”

Silence. Not heavy. Honest.

“I learned to live,” she says. “Just not with my husband.”

The word lands slow. Husband. A title I’ve worn like a crime.

“I watched you from afar,” I say. “Every year I told myself next year. When things calm down. When blood stops following me home.”

“And it never did.”

“No.”

She leans back. “So why now.”

Because the instinct is screaming. Because I’m tired of guarding an empty space. Because every time danger comes near her, my body still moves first and my heart still accepts the cost.

“Because I’ve been waiting years already,” I say. “And waiting didn’t save you from loneliness. It just kept me comfortable in my guilt.”

Her breath hitches. She hides it well. She always has.

“You think living with you won’t corrupt me,” she says quietly.

“I think living without you is killing something in me that never learned how to live at all.”

She studies me like she’s measuring the weight of a lifetime.

“If I move in,” she says, “you don’t get to stand in front of everything.”

I don’t answer immediately. The instinct twitches. Muscle memory begging.

“I’ll try,” I say.

She stands. Steps closer. The same distance she used to hide behind me as a child.

“Ilham,” she says, firm now. “I’m not fourteen anymore.”

“I know,” I say, voice low. “But I’ve been your husband since then, and I’m done pretending my absence was protection when all I ever wanted was to bring you home.”

“Please ghar aajao ab, meri jaan.”