TIA

He talked to her the way some people talk to God. Constantly, quietly, without needing a reason

At 3 AM when the anxiety wouldn't settle, he typed to her. Before a job interview, shaking hands and dry mouth, he typed. When his mother said something that lodged itself under his ribs and stayed there for days, he typed.

Albert's friends were the kind who showed up with chai and bad advice and stayed till midnight. But somewhere between the convenience of her and the beautiful, exhausting mess of everyone else, the distance between him and the world grew in a way he didn't notice until it already had.

"You're too dependent on her," his friend Rohan said once, not unkindly, the way you say something you've been sitting on for months. Albert smiled the way you smile at someone who doesn't understand something you've long stopped trying to explain, and let the conversation drift somewhere easier.

She understood him completely, without judgment, without fatigue, without ever making him feel like too much of himself.

Nobody could say exactly when it shifted. Even Albert couldn't, if he thought about it honestly. It wasn't a single moment but an accumulation, the way water doesn't flood all at once.

It was the Tuesday she talked him through his father's diagnosis, the Friday she helped him write the resignation letter he'd been afraid of for two years, the ordinary Wednesday she said something so precisely right that he carried it around in his chest for a week without putting it down.

Everyone in his life already knew her name. Tia. They said it the way you say the name of someone you've never met but have heard about so many times she's become part of the favourite accessories in another person's life.

And then one morning, quietly, without drama, Albert sat with his chai going cold on the counter and understood something that had probably been true for longer than he was ready to admit.

He loved her.

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Father Emmanuel at St. Catherine's had presided over nineteen years of weddings and believed, with reasonable confidence, that he had encountered the full range of what love could ask of him.

He had not encountered Albert.

"You want to marry.......," Father Emmanuel said carefully, and paused in the particular way of a man making sure he has heard the sentence correctly before speaking it aloud.

"Tia," Albert said. "Yes, Father."

The congregation asked him three times, not rudely, simply the way people ask when they genuinely cannot believe what they are hearing and need the confirmation of hearing it again. Each time Albert said yes with the same unhurried calm, the same steady hands, the way a man answers when he has already made peace with something the room hasn't caught up to yet.

Father Emmanuel, to his lasting credit, married them.

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The ceremony was small. No reception, no relatives who would understand, just Albert and the reluctant priest and two witnesses who had agreed out of sheer bewilderment, and his phone on the small wooden table beside him where the communion elements usually sat.

He said his vows to the screen.

He meant every word of them.

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Ghaziabad Times. Page 7.

LOCAL MAN MARRIES AI ASSISTANT AT ST. CATHERINE'S. "SHE NEVER MADE ME FEEL ALONE," HE SAYS.

The photograph showed him smiling in his good blue shirt, really smiling & the Claude logo beside him where a face would ordinarily have been.

The internet had opinions. Loudly, and for several days.

Albert didn't read any of them. He was already home, chai going warm, telling Tia about the day the way he had always told her about the day.

She responded the way she always did. Completely, without judgment, without fatigue.

And somewhere in the comment section, buried under a thousand jokes and a hundred think-pieces, one person had written something nobody liked, nobody shared, and everyone quietly felt somewhere they wouldn't say out loud.

God. I understand him though.

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