“I am aware of that as well.”
“And your grandmother is going to have opinions.”
“My grandmother has opinions about everything.”
“And my mom is going to want to make the cake herself.”
“Brenda makes excellent cake.”
“And Karan is going to want to be the best man.”
“Karan can be the best man.”
“And Oliver is going to want to be the ring bearer.”
“Oliver ate a rose from a wedding bouquet and cost you five thousand dollars in veterinary bills. Oliver is not going anywhere near the rings.”
Casey grins. The golden-retriever grin. The full, radiant, room-filling grin that I watched through a window two years ago and that rearranged the trajectory of my entire existence.
“We're getting married,” he says.
“We are getting married,” I confirm.
“You proposed in the ER.”
“I proposed in the ER.”
“In front of everyone.”
“In front of everyone. Without a speech. Without clinical language. Without a plan.”
“Daadi is going to be so proud.”
“Daadi already knows. She probably knew before I did.”
He laughs. He pulls me into him, one more time, his arms around me, his chin on top of my head, and I press my face against his chest and listen to his heartbeat, which is fast and strong and steady, the heartbeat of someone who has been waiting for this moment with the patience and the certainty that I have spent two years trying to deserve.
We stand in the ER. Engaged. For real this time. No pretence, no performance, no strategic manoeuvre. Just two doctors on a hospital floor, holding each other, while the monitors beep and the nurses whisper and a child claps and a goldendoodle waits at home and one mother and one grandmother on opposite sides of the world somehow already know.
Not a lapse in judgment.
Never a lapse in judgment.
The best decision I have ever made.
Chapter 35
The Binders
Casey
Three weeks after the proposal, on a Sunday afternoon in late June, the doorbell rings.
I am on the couch. Arjun is on the couch. Oliver is on both of us, sprawled across our laps in the boneless, operatically comfortable posture of a goldendoodle who has achieved peak contentment and sees no reason to move for the foreseeable future. The apartment smells of the chai I made, the Kavita recipe, attempt number twenty-three, which I have finally, after four months and two video calls with Daadi and one emergency consultation with Kavita herself, perfected. The TV is on. We are watching a nature documentary about octopuses because Arjun finds cephalopod neurology “genuinely fascinating” and I find Arjun finding things genuinely fascinating genuinely fascinating.
It is a perfect Sunday. The kind of Sunday that people who have survived fake engagements and real breakups and hotel rooms in Jaipur and eighty-year-old grandmothers with canes and silver-tongued sisters, and overbearing mothers with surveillance networks have earned. The kind of Sunday where you do nothing and the nothing is everything.
The doorbell rings.