“Now we go back to the estate. Together. And I tell my mother, in front of whoever is assembled, that I am not marrying Dev, the Bhatnagar boy, or any other man not named Casey Welling, and I am not accepting Pandit-ji's verdict, and I am choosing you and only you.”
He pulls back. He looks at me. His blue eyes are red-rimmed and wet and fierce.
“That was a speech,” he says.
“It formed involuntarily. I cannot help it. It is a neurological condition.”
He laughs. A real laugh. The first real laugh in four days, full and warm and slightly broken at the edges.
“You're an idiot,” he says.
“I am a comprehensive disaster.”
“You're my comprehensive disaster.”
“Is that a clinical assessment?”
“Even better, it’s a diagnosis. Terminal. No cure. You're stuck with me, Doc.”
I pull him down and kiss him again, because I can, because he is mine and I am his and we are two idiots who almost destroyed the best thing that ever happened to either of us because one of us processes love like a surgical procedure and the other one processes pain by leaving the building, and we are going to spend the rest of our lives learning to do both of those things differently,together.
“Let's go home,” I say.
And I mean the estate, and I mean Toronto, and I mean wherever he is, because that is what home has meant since a supply closet, since a dossier with a typo, since a hand held across a kitchen table and a pillow wall that never stood a chance.
Casey takes my hand. His fingers thread through mine. Steady. Warm. Present.
“Let's go home,” he says.
Chapter 32
Leaving Rajasthan
Arjun
We drive back to the estate in the late morning, and Casey holds my hand the entire way.
This is not a planned gesture. This is not a performance for the driver or a statement of intent for the family we are about to face. This is simply Casey Welling's hand wrapped around mine on the back seat of a car, his thumb tracing slow, absent circles on my knuckles. The contact is steady. Uncomplicated. Fundamentally Casey. I spend the first twenty minutes of the drive wondering how I survived four days without it.
Priya is not in the car. She texted an hour ago from the hotel lobby:
Vikram is giving me a tour of the old quarter. It turns out he is a third year engineering student, and knows everything about Mughal-era irrigation systems. This may take a while. Tell Casey I said welcome back. Also tell him that if he breaks my brother's heart again I will find him and I will use Daadi's cane liberally.
At the time, Casey read the text over my shoulder and laughed so hardthe bed shook, which was notable because we were still in the bed at the time, and the shaking dislodged a pillow that fell on my face, and I informed him with great dignity that physical comedy was not appropriate during serious emotional reconciliation. He kissed the indignation off my mouth and told me I was adorable when I was pompous, and I told him I was never pompous, and he raised one eyebrow so high it disappeared into his messy curls, and I conceded the point.
I sit up. I lean over the edge of the bed and locate my trousers, which are on the floor in a configuration I do not entirely recognize, and I retrieve from the pocket a small holographic object that has been with me since he left.
“Casey.”
“Mm.”
“Hold out your hand.”
He does, without opening his eyes, with the trusting gesture of someone who has decided that whatever I am about to put in his palm is going to be fine. I place the stegosaurus sticker on his palm. He opens his eyes. He looks at it.
The expression that moves across his face is one I will remember for the rest of my life. Recognition. Then disbelief. Then a kind of devastating tenderness that I am not sure I have earned but am going to accept anyway, because Casey hands these things out without strict adherence to the question of whether they have been earned.
“You kept it.”