She has never greeted Casey like that. She has been civil. She has been evaluative. She has, since the dinner confrontation, been carefully, strategically neutral. But she has never greeted him with that warmth, that ease, that reflexive, uncomplicated welcome that says: you are one of ours.
“She really likes him,” Casey says.
His voice is steady. Observational. As if he is making a medicalassessment, which is ironic because that is supposed to be my department. I glance at him. His face is calm. His blue eyes are watching the courtyard with the patient, focused attention he brings to everything, but there is something underneath the calm that I have not seen before. Something that looks, if I am honest, like the first hairline fracture in Casey’s unshakeable confidence. This is the same Casey who has spent every moment since his arrival being the warm, steady centre of every room he walks into.
“My mother likes the idea of him,” I say carefully. “She likes the compatibility matrix. The family connections. The astrological charts. Dev is a solution to a problem she has been trying to solve for years.”
“And what's the problem?”
“Me.”
Casey looks at me. I look back at the courtyard, where Dev is now being ushered inside by Mother, her hand on his arm, her voice carrying faint notes of animated conversation up to the terrace. They look right together. They look like they belong in the same frame, the same world, the same conversation. The Kapoor estate, with its sandstone and silk and centuries of carefully curated aristocratic beauty, is Dev's native environment. He moves through it the way I move through it, with the unconscious ease of inherited familiarity.
Casey moves through it the way a golden retriever moves through a cat show. With enthusiasm, and the cheerful refusal to acknowledge that he doesn't technically belong. And it is this, specifically this, that I find so desperately, terrifyingly attractive about him, because Casey's refusal to be intimidated by a world that was not built for him is the same quality that I left this world to find.
But standing on this terrace, watching my mother usher the man she chose for me into the house my family built centuries ago, I understand something that I have been trying not to understand.
This is not just about Casey and me. This is about whatchoosing Casey means. It means choosing the man who doesn't fit the frame over the one who does. It means choosing a lake cottage in Huntsville over a flat in Kensington. It means choosing Uncrustables over canapés, goldendoodles over polo horses, dinosaur scrubs over Savile Row. It means telling my mother, and my family, and the entire social architecture that raised me, that the life they built for me is not the life I want. And that is a detonation that will not be contained to a single dinner table.
“Hey.” Casey's hand finds mine on the terrace railing. His fingers thread through mine with the easy, tender certainty that has become as natural as breathing since the kiss, since the morning-after, since we crossed the line and did not cross back. “You're doing the thing where you calculate cataclysmic outcomes. I can hear it from here.”
“You cannot hear my thoughts.”
“I can hear your jaw clenching. It makes a very specific sound. Like someone over-tightening a bolt.” His thumb traces a slow circle on the back of my hand. “Dev arriving doesn't change anything.”
“Dev arriving changes the diplomatic landscape considerably.”
“Arjun.” He turns to face me, and his blue eyes are steady, and his hand is caressing mine, and he is doing the thing that Casey Welling does better than anyone I have ever met, which is standing very still in the middle of chaos and being exactly the thing that someone needs. “You kissed me this morning. In daylight. Without the moon. Remember?”
“I remember, vividly.”
“Then Dev arriving doesn't change anything. It just means there's another person at dinner.”
I want to believe him. I want to believe that it is that simple, that the arrival of a perfectly compatible, family-approved, astrologically sanctioned cardiac surgeon from London is just “another person at dinner.” But I know my mother, and I know this world,and I know that Dev Mehindra is not another person at dinner. Dev Mehindra is her version of checkmate.
We go downstairs to meet him. Together. Casey's hand in mine until we reach the main floor corridor, where I release it, and the release feels like pulling a bandage off a wound that hasn't finished healing.
Dev is in the drawing room with Mother. He stands when we enter, and up close, the effect is even more pronounced. He is tall, nearly as tall as Casey, but leaner, with a runner's build. His eyes are dark and intelligent. His handshake, when he offers it to Casey, is firm and direct, and his smile is genuine, and this is the problem. This is the entire problem.
Dev is not a villain. He is actually a good man; just not the man for me.
“Dr. Welling,” Dev says, taking Casey's hand. His accent is British, polished, the product of the same kind of schools that produced Rohan but without Rohan's deliberate provocation. “It's a pleasure. I've heard a great deal about you.”
“All from the WhatsApp group?” Casey asks, grinning.
“Predominantly, yes. Sunita's coverage has been remarkably thorough. I believe I already know your cholesterol levels.”
Casey laughs. It is a genuine, full-body laugh, and I watch Dev's expression shift in response, a fractional widening of the eyes, a slight tilt of the head, the involuntary recalibration of a man encountering something unexpected. Dev was expecting, I suspect, something closer to what the WhatsApp group promised: a large, chaotic Canadian who had somehow stumbled into Arjun Kapoor's orbit. What he is getting is a large, chaotic Canadian who fills a room with enthusiasm just by standing in it, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a footnote and a headline.
“And Arjun.” Dev turns to me, and his expression changes. Softens. There is something in his eyes when he looks at me that I recognized three years ago at that dinner in London and chose to ignore because acknowledging it would have required acknowledgingmy own loneliness, and I was not prepared for that. It is not love. It is not infatuation. It is a quiet, respectful, carefully maintained interest that has survived three years and an ocean, and it is, in its own way, as patient as Casey's. Just aimed differently. From a different world.
“Dev,” I say, and my voice is neutral and polished and gives absolutely nothing away. “Welcome.”
“You look well,” he says, and his eyes travel over me with a quick, clinical assessment that I recognize because I do it myself. “Better than London. Less...” He searches for the word. “Compressed.”
He is right. I am less compressed. I have been less compressed since a supply closet in Toronto, since a hand held across a kitchen table, since Casey reminded my body how to sleep. But I do not say this. I say, “The Rajasthani air agrees with me.”
“It suits you,” Dev agrees, and the way he says it, quiet and sincere, makes it clear he is not talking about the air.