The next three days are a blur of preparation.
The estate transforms. Staff move through the grounds with the focused, military efficiency of an invading force, hanging lanterns from the garden trees, constructing a raised platform in the central courtyard, draping silk in emerald and gold from every archway and pillar. My mother’s event planning is not planning. It is engineering. She has a master timeline, astaff deployment schedule, a seating chart that accounts for family feuds going back three generations, and a catering team that arrives in a convoy of white vans and immediately takes over the kitchen wing with the calm, practiced dominance of a well-funded occupation.
I avoid all of it. I see patients’ families on video calls, reviewing post-operative progress from seven thousand kilometres away, because the hospital doesn’t stop because Arjun Kapoor’s personal life has become a theatrical production. I review scans and annotate charts. I sit in the guest suite with my laptop and my medical journals and I try, with decreasing success, to pretend that the enormous, golden-haired man sleeping on the other side of a nightly rebuilt pillow wall is not slowly, regularly dismantling every wall I have ever built inside myself.
Because the pillow wall keeps falling. Every night, without fail. I rebuild it with increasing structural ambition, incorporating cushions from the window seat, folded blankets, once a bolster wedged vertically between the mattress and headboard that I was particularly proud of. And every morning, I wake up with Casey’s arm around me and his chest against my back and his breathing slow and deep against my hair, and the ruins of my engineering scattered across the silk bedding like evidence at a crime scene.
I have stopped pretending that this is a structural problem. The structure is fine. The structure would withstand a minor earthquake. The problem is that my body, in the undefended landscape of sleep, has decided where it wants to be, and it wants to be pressed against Casey Welling’s chest, and no amount of bolsters and engineering and clinical detachment is going to override that particular biological imperative.
I do not discuss this with Casey. Casey does not discuss it with me. We especially do not discuss the other thing, the thing that is an entirely predictable physiological response to waking up pressed against another warm body at six in the morning, the thing that I have to angle my hips carefully away from as I extract myself, the thing that I am certain Casey is also experiencing given the very specific, very deliberate way he rolls onto his stomachevery morning the instant I vacate the bed. We do not discuss it. We will never discuss it. If I am forced to discuss it, I will simply walk into the Rajasthani desert and keep walking until I reach a location sufficiently remote to die of embarrassment in peace. We have developed an unspoken protocol: I wake first, extract myself with strategic hip placement, shower at a temperature designed to restore composure, rebuild the walls inside, and am fully dressed and physiologically neutralized by the time he opens his eyes and surveys the wreckage with that slow, sleepy, devastating smile. Neither of us acknowledges what happened. But then neither of us stops it from happening again the following morning.
The morning of the engagement party, I wake up in the usual position: face against his collarbone, hand tangled in his shirt, his arm heavy around my waist, and my body performing its now-customary dawn rebellion with the same reliable, mortifying enthusiasm as every other morning this week. I extract myself with the careful, practised efficiency I’ve developed, angling my hips away from his strategically to reduce friction and contact between us, and I shower at a temperature that would be clinically inadvisable for most (note: all) human beings, and I stand in the bathroom in my towel and I look at myself in the mirror.
Today I have to walk into a room full of my family, wearing a suit designed specifically for this occasion, standing beside Casey who is not actually my fiancé, and convince every single person present we are in love.
The irony is so sharp it could cut surgical steel.
The day disappears in fragments. Breakfast on the terrace, where my mother announces the seating chart for the engagement dinner with the gravity of a general redrawing borders. A morning of last-minute consultations: the florist, the catering manager, my Auntie Sunita conducting what she describes as a “preliminary review” of the music selection and what I would describe as a hostile takeover. Casey is dispatched somewhere with Priya, who claims she needs his help and whom I suspectsimply wants to remove him from my mother’s orbit for tactical reasons. I do not see him for six hours. I notice every one of them.
Lunch, which I do not eat. A meeting with Tarun in his temporary atelier, during which he holds my face in both his hands and tells me that I am going to be magnificent and that if I cry on the lapels he will personally hunt me down. An hour alone in the suite, which I spend re-reading the same paragraph of a journal article eleven times without absorbing a single word.
By the time the late afternoon light begins to thicken to gold, the entire estate has shifted into pre-event tension. Servants moving with quiet urgency. The smell of cooking expanding from the kitchens through every corridor. Music drifting up from the lower courtyard, where the musicians are tuning. Casey and I have returned to the suite with the synchronicity of two people who do not need to discuss the schedule because the schedule has been imposed on us by my mother.
“I’ll change in the bathroom,” he says, picking up his garment bag as the tag from Tarun falls off.
“You don’t have to.”
“Yeah, I do.” He gives me a small, complicated smile. “Trust me on this one, Doc.”
The bathroom door closes.
Tarun has left the suits hanging in the dressing alcove of the guest suite, sealed in black garment bags with handwritten tags. Mine reads:
THE PRINCE. Do not wrinkle. Do not breathe near the lapels. Wear with the authorityyou were born with.
I pick up Casey’s tag:
THE GOLDEN ONE. I have made you into a monument. You’re welcome.
I unzip my garment bag.
The suit is emerald, as promised. Deep, rich, jewel-toned emerald green, the colour of old forests and polished malachite and, I realize, my own eyes. The fabric is a silk-wool blend, impossibly soft, with a weight and drape that suggests every thread was personally terrorized into submission by Tarun’s will. The cut is sharp, slim, precisely tailored to my proportions: narrow shoulders, tapered waist, trousers that break exactly at the ankle. The jacket has a nehru collar, a subtle nod to Indian formalwear that Tarun has integrated so seamlessly into the Western silhouette that it feels like an engaging conversation between two traditions rather than a compromise.
There are tiny gold details: thread at the buttonholes, a subtle brocade pattern at the cuff, a pocket square in raw gold silk. Emerald and gold. The Kapoor colours, reinterpreted through Tarun’s lens, and the effect is stunning.
I put it on.
The fabric settles against my body like armour. Like skin. I button the jacket with fingers that are, I note with detachment, trembling. Not the post-surgical tremor. Not the exhaustion tremor. A different kind entirely. The kind that comes from standing in front of a mirror in your family’s ancestral home, dressed in a suit that was made specifically for you to wear while lying to everyone you love.
I look at myself. Green eyes, dark curls, sharp cheekbones, the emerald fabric turning my skin to warm bronze. The suit fits like it was grown rather than sewn. Tarun is, infuriatingly, agenius.
Behind the bathroom door, I can hear the soft sounds of Casey moving: the rustle of fabric, the click of a buckle, a quiet, frustrated muttering that suggests he is having difficulty with something. I do not allow myself to imagine what.
There is a knock at the bathroom door.
“Arjun? I’m done. You can, uh...” Casey’s voice trails off. There is a pause. “You should probably come in here.”
I straighten my cuffs. I check my collar. I clasp my hands behind my back, then force them down to my sides, because tonight I am supposed to be a man in love, and men in love do not clasp their hands behind their backs like they are bracing for surgery.