I left at the first opportunity. I went to Cambridge, then Edinburgh, then Toronto. I chose a career where precision and control could save lives instead of preserving legacies. I built a life in a freezing, grey, wonderful city where nobody knew or cared that I was a Kapoor. A life where surgical outcomes judged me, not my ancestry's sandstone walls.
And now I am driving back through those gates with a fake fiancé who is currently pressing his entire face against the car window, his breath fogging the glass, whispering “Holy shit” under his breath.
“Your house,” Casey says, very slowly, “has turrets.”
“They are jharokha balconies. Not turrets.”
“Arjun. Your house has balconies that look like turrets, on apalace, with actual bougainvillea and actual fountains and actual... wait is that a polo field?”
“Yes.”
“You grew up here.”
“Yes.”
“In a palace. With a polo field.”
“It is technically a haveli.”
He turns and looks at me, and his expression is not intimidated. It is not overwhelmed or resentful or any of the things I had braced for. It is something worse. It is something soft, and wondering, and achingly perceptive. Because Casey Welling is looking at this palace and seeing, with that devastating clarity he carries like a weapon he doesn't know he's holding, the boy who left.
“I grew up in a bungalow with a screened-in porch,” he breathes. “My dad rebuilt the porch twice because the raccoons kept getting in. It didn’t stop them.” He pauses. “This is incredible, Arjun.”
“It's a prison with beautiful landscaping,” I say, and I don't mean to say it, it comes out before I can clamp my jaw shut, raw and honest and completely unacceptable, and I immediately look away.
Casey says nothing. But his hand, resting on the seat between us, moves one inch closer to mine. And stays there.
The car pulls through the main courtyard and stops at the base of a wide stone staircase that leads to the central entrance. Staff are already emerging, a small, efficient choreography of people in crisp uniforms, ready to take bags, offer water, usher us inside. This is how arrival works at the Kapoor estate. It is a production.
I step out of the car and into the dry, fragrant heat, and before I can straighten my jacket, a voice hits me like a thrown object.
“Well. The prodigal prince returns.”
Priya is standing at the top of the stairs.
My sister is twenty-nine years old, and she is a precisioninstrument in human form. She is slim, middling height, with striking, long brown curls that cascade over one shoulder with a carelessness that I know takes her approximately forty-five minutes to achieve. She has our grandmother's sharp, intelligent green eyes, and she is wearing a casual salwar kameez in deep blue that manages to look simultaneously effortless and like it costs a small fortune, which it almost certainly does.
Her arms are crossed. Her head is tilted. One eyebrow is raised at an angle that communicates, with lethal efficiency, that she has questions, she has opinions, and she has had approximately twenty-four hours to prepare both since Mother called to announce my impending arrival with a mystery fiancé.
Her eyes flick to me. They perform a rapid, comprehensive assessment of my physical state, my expression, and my posture, and I watch her catalogue the data with the same cool efficiency that I bring to a pre-operative scan.
Then her eyes move to Casey.
She looks at him for a long time. She takes in the full six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound, blonde-curled, blue-eyed, wrinkled-henley-wearing, sweat-dampened reality of him, and her other eyebrow joins the first.
“Arjun,” she says, her voice carrying down the stone steps with crystalline, aristocratic clarity. “When Mother said you were bringing someone home, I expected... well, frankly, I expected a carbon copy of yourself. Some gaunt, terrified surgeon with immaculate cuticles and a pathological fear of carbohydrates.” Her eyes sweep Casey from boots to curls. “This is not that.”
“Priya,” I say, climbing the steps with my hands clasped behind my back. “This is Dr. Casey Welling. My fiancé.”
Casey climbs the stairs behind me. Each step makes the scale of him more apparent, and by the time he reaches the top and stands beside me, Priya has to tilt her head back to look at his face. She is not intimidated; nothing intimidates her. She merely adjusts her angle of assessment and continues.
“Dr. Welling,” she says, extending her hand. “I'm Priya,Arjun’s sister. Otherwise known as the reasonable one. I have many questions, but I'll start with the most pressing.” She pauses, her eyes bright with an intelligence that misses nothing. “How on earth did you get my brother to agree to bring someone home? We've been trying for years. Did you use anaesthesia?”
Casey laughs, that deep, booming, full-body laugh that echoes off the stone walls of the courtyard like a detonation, and I watch three members of the household staff physically startle.
“No anaesthesia,” he says, taking her hand and shaking it with the easy, enveloping warmth that he radiates like a space heater. “Just persistent charm and a superb magic trick.”
Priya's mouth twitches. It is the Kapoor mouth twitch, the one that means someone has surprised us and we are trying very hard not to show it. I know it because I do it. I do it constantly around Casey.