The untold story ch 4

My heart hammered against my ribs, sick with the realization of what she was destroying down in the courtyard. But what she didn't know—what she could never know—was that before she had ripped the book from my hands in the bedroom earlier that day, my trembling fingers had already slipped between the pages and pulled something else free.
Tucked safely inside my pocket, hidden from the smoke and the fire, were two photographs.
The first was just the two of them—my mother standing close to a man, both of them smiling softly at the camera. I couldn't clearly make out his face, blurred by time and poor lighting, but a strange, phantom shiver ran down my spine. There was a nagging familiarity to his posture, as if I had seen him in the deep, forgotten corners of my own mind.
The second photograph made my breath catch entirely. It was a family portrait.
And there, standing right between them, was me as a toddler.
My mother had spent a decade telling me my father was a ghost, a bad man who disappeared, a monster best forgotten. But looking down at the glossy, faded paper in the dark of my room, the truth stared right back at me.
I flipped the family photo over. Scrawled across the back in neat, faded cursive were three words that changed everything:
Mohan and family.
I cried the whole night, the silent tears burning hot against my face as the smoke from the backyard faded into the cold pre-dawn air. By morning, the exhaustion had settled deep into my bones. When I walked into the studio, my eyes were hollow and my mind was entirely blank. I couldn't focus on the scripts, couldn't summon the detached, analytical voice my true-crime audience relied on.
Managing the channel's community tab felt impossible. I turned to Arun, my voice flat. "Can you post a note? Tell them... tell them the next episode is delayed by a week."
Arun stopped typing, turning his chair around with a frown. He looked at my pale face, the dark circles under my eyes. "Are we taking a break for a week? Is everything okay, Anu?"
"I'm just in a bad mood," I muttered, shaking my head. "I'm stuck behind something. We really need to search for something."
Before he could push me for answers, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the two photographs. I laid them out on the editing desk.
Arun’s eyes widened as he stared down at them. He looked at the family portrait—at my mother, the strange man, and me as a toddler standing between them. He listened in absolute silence as I spilled everything: the name Chandini, the address Kizhakkan Kav, the diary, and the fire in the courtyard.
When I finally finished, Arun let out a slow breath, leaning back in his chair. "If aunty is hiding this much from you, Anu... she must be doing it for a reason. Maybe she's trying to protect you from something dangerous."
"Protect me?" I snapped back, my voice rising, the grief and frustration boiling over. "He is my father! Why would she hate him so much? Don't I have the right to know who he is? Don't I have the right to see him?"
Arun didn't argue back. He saw the fire in my eyes and simply nodded, looking down at the back of the faded photograph where the words Mohan and family were scrawled.
He leaned closer, squinting at the bottom corner of the image where a faint, embossed logo was pressed into the paper stock. "Wait," Arun whispered, grabbing his phone. "Look right here. There's a faint studio stamp."
His fingers flew across his keyboard, running a reverse search on the faded lettering and the style of the stamp. A few minutes later, the screen lit up with a registry result.
Arun looked up at me, his expression stunned. "It's a photography studio, Anu. And it’s not here in Chennai. It’s in Kerala."