“No.”
“Want to go hit a polo ball really hard until you feel better?”
“No.”
“Want me to track down Casey's hotel in Jaipur and deliver amessage? Because I know a guy who drives a very fast car and owes me a favour from the spice deal and...”
“Karan.”
“Yeah?”
“Please leave me alone.”
He goes. He leaves the chai and the parathas. I drink the chai. I do not touch the parathas. The chai is excellent, because Kavita's chai is always excellent, and the warmth of it moving down my throat is the first physical sensation I have registered in eighteen hours that is not pain.
Yash tries next. He is more strategic than Karan, which makes sense because Yash has been navigating the Kapoor family dynamics since birth with the fluid, diplomatic ease of a man who learned early that survival requires intelligence, not force.
He does not come to my room. He intercepts me in the corridor on the way to the second evening's dinner, falling into step beside me with a naturalness that does not feel planned even though it obviously is.
“You look terrible,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“I mean it. You look like you haven't slept in two days, and your shirt is buttoned wrong, and there is a triceratops sticker in your breast pocket.”
I look down. There is, in fact, a triceratops sticker in my breast pocket. I do not remember putting it there. My hand must have done it on autopilot, the way my hands clasp behind my back when I am anxious or find the pulse point on a patient's wrist or reach for Casey in sleep.
“Have you spoken to him?” Yash asks.
“I have sent messages. He has not responded.”
“How many messages?”
“Fourteen.”
Yash is quiet for a step. Two steps. Three. “What did they say?”
“The first seven were attempts to explain the fullcontext of the conversation he overheard. The next four were increasingly direct statements of emotional accountability. The most recent three were...” I pause. “Increasingly abbreviated.”
“Define increasingly abbreviated.”
“The last one said 'please.'“
Yash stops walking. I stop walking. We stand in the corridor, the same corridor where Casey walked away from me, and Yash looks at me with dark eyes that hold the same complicated love that all Kapoor siblings carry for each other, the love that is tangled with obligation and weighted with expectation but fierce despite all of it.
“Arjun,” he says. “You need to go to him.”
“He does not want me to go to him.”
“You don't know that. You know that he hasn't responded to your texts. That is not the same thing.”
“The silence is a response, Yash.”
“The silence is a man who is hurt and doesn't know what to do with it. That is different from a man who wants you to stop.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Go to Jaipur. Don't text. Show up. Be the person he fell in love with, not the person who talks about feelings like they're surgical complications.”
“I don't know how to be that person without him.”
Yash squeezes my shoulder. “Yes, you do. You just haven't practised.”