Prologue

I stopped expecting people to choose me a long time ago.

Maybe it happened the day I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I could never be enough.

Not enough marks.

Not enough achievements.

Not enough reasons to be loved.

People often say that home is where your heart feels safe.

For me, home was a place where I learned how to smile and stay silent at the same time.

A place where I celebrated my victories quietly and cried over my failures alone.

The funny thing is, nobody ever noticed.

Or maybe they did.

They just never cared enough to ask.

There was a time when I used to believe that if I worked harder, studied better, and became everything they wanted me to be, things would change.

I thought one day my father would look at me and say he was proud.

I waited for that day for years.

It never came.

And somewhere between expectations and disappointments, I stopped waiting.

But life has a strange way of breaking people.

And an even stranger way of rebuilding them.

This is not a story about a perfect girl.

This is the story of a girl who spent years feeling unwanted.

A girl who lost the person she loved the most.

A girl who forgot how to hope.

And a girl who slowly learned that being broken was never the end of her story.

It was only the beginning.

My name is Sneha Sharma.

And this is my story.