“I know.”
“Well.” She takes a breath. I can hear the tea. “That's a new one.”
“I was hurt.”
“I know you were hurt, sweetheart. You don't call me from another continent sounding like this because you're having a good day. But being hurt doesn't mean being right, and I know I raised you to know the difference.”
The ceiling fan clicks. The room’s dim. I press theheel of my hand against my eyes, which are doing the inconvenient thing again.
“He said terrible things about what you two have?” she asks.
“He said clinical things. Medical terminology. He described our relationship like it was a surgery that went sideways.”
“And that hurt you because it sounded like you didn't matter.”
“Yes.”
“And did you give him a chance to tell you that you did matter?”
The silence stretches. It stretches across seven thousand kilometres, from a hotel room in Jaipur to a kitchen in Huntsville, and it’s filled with the specific, devastating quality of a mother's question that you already know the answer to but aren’t ready to say out loud.
“No,” I say.
“Casey.” Her voice softens. Not the scolding voice. The other one. The voice she used when I was twelve and cried after my first hockey loss and she sat on the end of my bed and told me that losing was the price of playing. “Listen to me. I know what losing your dad did to you, because it did the same thing to me. I know that when someone you love disappears without warning, it rewires something inside you. It makes us brace for the next disappearance. It makes us leave rooms before they can empty.”
My chest constricts. “Ma...”
“Your dad didn't choose to leave us. His heart gave out and he was gone, and neither of us got to say goodbye, and that is a wound that doesn't close all the way. But sweetheart, you can't treat every person you love like they're about to disappear. That boy in the palace is not going anywhere. He tried to explain and you didn't let him. He and his family have sent you several messages. Those are not the actions of a man who is disappearing. Those are the actions of a man who is terrified and bad at words but trying anyway becausehe loves you.”
The ceiling fan clicks again. Three rotations. The room’s almost dark now.
“You're allowed to be hurt,” she says. “You're allowed to need space. But if you let your hurt make the decision for you, if you walk away from someone who is reaching for you because you're afraid of losing them, then you're not protecting yourself, sweetheart. You're just making the loss happen on your schedule instead of the world's.”
I take a breath. It comes in shaky and goes out shakier.
“He described me as a variable, Ma. He said the emotional component deviated from the operational scope. Who talks like that?”
“A scared Arjun, Casey. An Arjun who has been trained to process everything through medical language because that's the only place he feels safe, and the way he interprets the world around him. You've told me this. You told me about his bedside manner and his clinical this and his surgical that. It's how he's built. It doesn't mean he doesn't feel it. It means he doesn't know how to say it any other way.”
“He said 'I love you' last night. He said it perfectly. No clinical language. No hiding.”
“And this morning, when the pressure came back, and you weren’t alone and in bed together, he defaulted to the only coping mechanism he's got. That doesn't erase last night. That just means the work isn't finished.” She pauses. “Casey, does he love you?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. Not a fraction of a second. Because I know. I’ve known since a terrace under the stars, since a man who doesn’t dance asked me to hold him in front of his entire family, since a pair of steady surgeon's hands shook against my skin. “Yes, he loves me.”
“Then go back.”
“It's not that simple.”
“It is exactly that simple. It is the simplest thing in the world. A man who loves you is sitting in a palace trying to reach you on the phone, and you are lying on a hotel bed with your shoes onfeeling sorry for yourself. Go back. Let him explain. And if his explanation isn't enough, then you leave with the full picture. But you don't leave with half a conversation and call it a decision. That's not strength. That's fear, and I didn’t raise you to be afraid of anything.”
Brenda Welling. Fifty-four years old. Gift shop owner on Main Street, Huntsville, Ontario. Organizer of the annual regatta. Single mother who raised a six-foot-three golden retriever of a son on a small business owner’s variable income and the stubborn, unshakeable conviction that love is a verb, not a feeling, and that the verb requires showing up even when showing up is the hardest thing in the world.
She’s the most formidable woman I’ve ever known, and I include Meera Kapoor in that assessment. The difference between them is that Brenda Welling's strength has never required anyone else to be small.
“I love you, Ma.”
“I love you too. Now take your shoes off the bed immediately, get some sleep, and go talk to your man tomorrow morning. And Casey?”