Arjun’s quiet for a moment. His fingers move through Oliver's fur, slow and absent. “Theoretically, if we were having a wedding,” he says, and his voice is very careful, very measured, like someone stepping onto ice they aren’t sure will hold, “Gabriel would not be seated at the head table. Gabriel would be officiating. He would insist.”
“He would absolutely insist.”
“It would be the most theatrical ceremony in the history of Canadian matrimony.”
“He'd wear a cape.”
“Excuse me, he would not wear a cape.”
“He would absolutely wear a cape, Arjun. Gabriel Moretti at a wedding ceremony he is officiating? Cape. One hundred percent. Probably silk. Probably Italian. Very likely with a monogram.”
Arjun's mouth twitches. The not-quite-smile. The one that’s just for me.
“If,” he says again, and the word is a door opening, just a crack, just enough to let the light through. “If.”
I look at him across Oliver's sleeping body. His eyes are warm in the lamplight, and his hand is in the fur of my dog who chose him, and the apartment is messy and warm and smells of the chai he made, the chai he learned to make the way Kavita does, the chaithat took him seventeen attempts and a video call with Daadi, and somewhere in Huntsville my mother is probably asleep in her house on the lake, and somewhere in Rajasthan his grandmother is probably awake in her chair, and the world is big and complicated and full of people who love us, and the word ‘if’ is sitting between us on the couch like a promise that isn’t ready to be made but isn’t afraid to be imagined.
“If,” I agree.
Oliver sighs in his sleep. Our fingers touch across his back.
Real looks like this.
Chapter 34
The Proposal (For Real This Time)
Arjun
Ibuy the ring the following week.
Not from the Kapoor vaults. Not from the family jeweller in Jaipur who has been supplying the Kapoors with engagement rings for four generations and who my mother has almost certainly already briefed on Casey's ring size through some intelligence channel I cannot identify or prevent. Not from any source that carries the weight of family expectation or dynastic obligation or the strategic implications of a Kapoor engagement.
I buy it from a small jeweller on Queen Street West, in a shop between a vintage bookstore and a ramen place that Casey claims has the best tonkotsu in the city and that I have been reluctantly forced to agree is, in fact, excellent. The shop is tiny. The jeweller is a woman named Maria who has been making rings by hand for thirty years and who looks at me with calm, assessing patience, as though she has seen many nervous men stand in her shop and stare at trays of rings with the glazed, overwhelmed expression that comes with making a decision that will outlast their furniture.
She also looks at me with faint, knowing amusement, as though she has met me before. Not in person. In description.
“You're the doctor,” Maria says.
“I am a doctor.”
“Thedoctor. The neurosurgeon. The one who clasps his hands behind his back when he is uncomfortable, which is most of the time. The one who, several months ago, a very large, very blond, very flustered customer came in here to buy two rings for, in a great hurry, with a credit card he kept dropping.”
I stare at her.
“He bought them here.”
“He bought them here. He stood exactly where you are standing now. He was sweating. He explained to me, in a great deal of detail that I did not ask for, that you and he were undertaking a project of considerable complexity and would require, in his words,two rings.I sold him two rings. He did not return them. I assume he still has them, because he seemed the sort who would not, in the end, return such things.”
The rings are in the top drawer of his dresser, the one that became mine the day we returned home. They have been there since the night we landed back in Toronto and removed them by mutual unspoken agreement, both of us, at the front door, like coats. We have not discussed them since. Neither of us has thrown them away. Neither of us has worn them. They sit in a small velvet pouch among the other artefacts of a life I no longer recognise as mine, and I have known, since the moment I decided to come to this shop, that the question was never whether to keep them. It was whether to leave them in the drawer.
They are staying in the drawer.
Not because they are nothing. They are not nothing. They are evidence that on the morning before our flight to Delhi, in a panic neither of us was quite ready to name, the man I love walked into this shop and described me to a stranger before buying the rings he hoped would carry us through the lie. They are evidence that even in the middle of a performance, he was telling the truth.They are precious in the way that prop weapons from a real war are precious, which is to say that the metal is cheap but the history is not.
But they were chosen for a performance. They were chosen in haste, for a story we were telling other people. And what I am here to buy is not another piece of evidence. I am here to buy a ring that has no performance in it at all. A ring that is the first object I have ever selected for him that does not need to convince anyone of anything, including me.
“He still has them,” I say to Maria. “We both do. We are not getting rid of them. But we are also not going back to them.”