“Arjun.” I turn to face him on the settee. His hands are still clenched in his lap, his knuckles white, his shoulders carrying enough tension to power a small turbine. “Your mom is tough. I get it. She's smart, she's strategic, and she loves you in a way that's gotten extremely tangled up in control. But she didn't throw me out. She asked me real questions, and she listened to genuine answers, and when I put my hand on your knee, she didn't look angry. She looked...”
“What?”
“Surprised. Like she wasn't expecting you to have someone who touches you like that.”
Arjun's mouth opens. Then closes. His eyes search my face, and I can see him trying to process what I've said, trying to run it through his internal filters and categorize it and file it away in a labelled drawer, and failing, because some things can’t be filtered. Some things are just true and warm and too big for a drawer.
“You're reading too much into a facial expression,” he says, but his voice has lost its edge.
“I'm excellent at reading facial expressions. It's literally my job.”
“Your job is emergency paediatric medicine.”
“Which involves reading the facial expressions of humans who can’t verbally articulate their symptoms. It's the same skill set, Doc. Your mom is a tough cookie, but she's not unreadable.”
From the divan by the window, Priya unfolds herself and stands with the languid grace of a cat who has been watching two mice negotiate a maze.
“He's not wrong,” she says, looking at Arjun with an expression that is equal parts affection and exasperation. “Mother was expecting to hate him, and instead she's recalibrating. That's the best possible outcome from a first engagement.” She turns to me, and her sharp eyes study my face with an intensity that’s pure Kapoor. “You're either very genuine or very good, Casey. I haven't decided which.”
“Can't I be both?” I ask.
She smiles. It’s a small, dangerous Kapoor smile, and it’s the first moment I understand, with clarity, that Priya isn’t exactly an ally. Not yet. She’s an independent intelligence agency with her own agenda, and that agenda is the protection of her brother. Until she’s satisfied that I’m not a threat to him, she’ll be watching me with exactly the same relentless attention that her mother brings to dinner parties.
“Both would be ideal,” she says. “Come now. I'll show you to the suite. You look like you need a shower and a very large drink. Dinner is in three hours, so you’ll have time for both before then.”
She leads us out of the drawing room and through a corridor that’s longer than my entire apartment building. The walls are lined with portraits: generations of Kapoors in formal dress, staring down at us with the collective disapproval of people who probably had opinions about everything.
I glance at Arjun. He’s walking beside me with his hands clasped behind his back, his face composed, his eyes fixed straight ahead. But as we pass a small alcove where an ornate antique vase sits on a carved table, his hand drops from behind his back, and for two steps, maybe three, the backs of his fingers brush against mine.
Deliberate yet brief. Gone before Priya, walking ahead of us, can see.
I don't look at him. I don't react. I just let my hand stay exactly where it is, open and oh so very available, in the space between us.
The jasmine smells sweet and heavy in the warm corridor air, and somewhere in this palace, Meera Kapoor is probably pouring herself another cup of tea and planning her next move. At the same time, I’m walking through the ancestral home of the man I love, and his fingers are brushing mine, and I’m not pretending.
Not even a little bit.
Chapter 9
The Bedroom Problem
Arjun
The guest suite has one bed.
I stand in the doorway and stare at it as if I were evaluating a malignant tumour on a scan, cataloguing its dimensions, its position in the room, and the exact degree to which it is going to ruin my life.
It is a king-size bed. A massive, ornate, canopied king-size bed with a carved mahogany frame, draped in silk in shades of deep crimson and gold, piled with approximately fourteen decorative pillows arranged in a cascading formation that someone on the household staff clearly spent a meaningful amount of their day perfecting. It sits in the centre of the guest suite like an altar, flanked by matching rosewood nightstands, each topped with a brass lamp, because my mother does not miss a single detail and she has furnished this room as a romantic stage set with the deliberate, calculated precision of a field general establishing a forward operating base.
One bed. One. Not two singles that have been pushed together and could be discreetly separated under cover of darkness. Not a bed and a sofa. Not a bed and a chaise lounge. Onesingular, silk-draped king-size bed, positioned in a room with a ceiling painted in delicate Mughal miniatures and a private balcony overlooking the moonlit gardens.
My mother orchestrated this with the subtlety of a battering ram.
“Nice room,” Casey says, shouldering past me through the doorway with his bag slung over one arm and his carry-on in the other. He drops both on the floor with a casualness that makes something in my left eye twitch, surveys the space with an appreciative whistle, and immediately gravitates toward the balcony doors. “Oh, wow. You can see the whole garden from here. Is that another fountain? That's definitely another fountain. Arjun, look there's a fountain.”
“Yes. There are seven fountains on the estate grounds.”
“Seven fountains.” He shakes his head, grinning out at the moonlit gardens. “My mom has a birdbath that she bought at Canadian Tire when I was a kid. It's shaped like a frog.”