“Yeah?”
“Bring him home. I want to meet him properly. And tell him he can bring his mother if he absolutely has to. I make a very good pie, and can play nice.”
I laugh. It’s the first real laugh since the corridor, and it hurts, the way laughing hurts when your ribs are sore, and it feels like the first cracked window in a room that has been sealed shut.
“Goodnight, Ma.”
The call ends. I take off my shoes. I lie on the bed in the dark hotel room in Jaipur, and I look at the ceiling fan, and I let myself feel all of it.
The hurt. The love. The anger. The guilt. The specific, sharp-edged knowledge that I overreacted, that my hurt arrived before my listening, that I weaponized my own patience in a corridor and used it to cut a man who was already bleeding. The equallyspecific, equally sharp-edged knowledge that he hurt me first, that the clinical language after last night was a betrayal of the delicate trust I gave him in the dark, and that both things can be true at the same time, and that holding both of them is the work.
I think about Arjun, in the library. I think about his hands, which are probably shaking. I think about the texts he sent that I haven’t read, surely composed with the meticulous precision of a man who has never been good at saying what he means and who is trying anyway.
I pick up my phone then hesitate. I don’t read the texts. Not yet. Not tonight. Tonight I need to hold the hurt and the guilt and the love together without any new information rearranging them.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand. The screen glows through the gap between the phone and the wood, a faint blue pulse, and I know without looking that it’s him, and I know without reading that the words will be careful and agonized, and I don’t read them because I’m not ready, because reading them will make this real in a way that I can’t undo, and I need at least one more night of not knowing what he said before I decide what I’m going to do about it.
My mom’s right about most things. She’s right that being hurt doesn't mean being right. She’s right that I didn't let him finish. She’s right that eleven text messages aren’t the actions of a man and his family who don’t care.
But she also isn’t the one who stood in a corridor and heard the man she loves describe their relationship like a surgical report. She isn’t the one who gave everything she had in the dark and heard it filed under “error in judgment” in the morning. She loves me, and she’s wise, and she isn’t wrong, but she’s in Huntsville making tea and I’m in Jaipur and the distance between those two things is more than geography.
I lie in the dark. I hold the two truths together, the truths that are both mine: that he hurt me, and that I left before he could make it right. They sit in my chest like stones, heavy and sharp-edged, and I don’t know yet which one is heavier, and I don’t know yet what I’m going to do. For the first time since a supply closet in Toronto, I don’t know if being patient and being present and being the steady, unshakeable thing is enough.
The phone glows again and vibrates. I don’t pick it up.
The ceiling fan clicks. And the night stretches out ahead of me, long and dark and empty, and I let it.
Chapter 29
The Collapse
Arjun
The guest suite smells like him.
This is the first thing I notice when I return from the library, after the corridor, after the sound of his footsteps fading, after sitting in my father's chair until the light changed and the shadows moved and the books stopped watching. I open the door to the guest suite and the room is empty and it smells like the specific, particular, irreplaceable scent of Casey Welling, and I stand in the doorway and I breathe it in and something inside me bends in a way that I don't think will ever straighten again.
His bag is gone. His ridiculous toiletry kit with the cartoon dinosaur on it is gone. His phone charger, which was plugged into the outlet beside the bed with the cable coiled in sloppy, imprecise loops that used to make me twitch, is gone. The only evidence that he was ever here is the dent in the pillow beside mine, the sheets that are still tangled from this morning, and a single holographic triceratops sticker on the nightstand that he must have left by accident.
I pick up the sticker. I hold it in my hand. It catches the light.
I sit on the edge of the bed. I do not move for a very long time.
Three days pass. I know they pass because the light changes, because Priya knocks on my door at intervals that suggest she has established a monitoring schedule, and because Kavita sends food that I do not eat and collects it later with the quiet, worried efficiency of a woman who has been feeding Kapoors through crises for forty years and knows when a crisis has become something else.
I attend family events. Mother has not reduced the social calendar because of Casey's departure. If anything, she has accelerated it. There is a garden lunch on the first day, a tea with visiting relatives on the second, and on the third day, a dinner that includes Dev, who has remained at the estate out of an obligation that I no longer have the energy to resent. Mentions of the Bhatnagar boy are rampant.
I sit at these events. I wear the correct clothes. I respond when addressed. I produce the appropriate facial expressions at the appropriate moments. I am performing the role of Arjun Kapoor, eldest son, neurosurgeon, Kapoor heir, with the mechanical precision of a man operating a body he no longer inhabits.
Nobody is fooled.
Karan tries first. He appears in my room on the second morning with two cups of chai and a plate of Kavita's parathas and an expression of such transparently earnest concern that it almost breaks me, because Karan is not built for subtlety, and his attempt at casual comfort is about as subtle as a hockey check.
“So,” he says, setting the chai on the nightstand next to the triceratops sticker. “Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Want to eat something?”