He leans into me. His forehead comes to rest against my collarbone, the way it does in sleep, except this time his eyes are open and the choice is conscious and he is, for the first time in his life, letting someone hold him in public. His hand slides from my shoulder to the back of my neck, his fingers curling into the hair at my nape, and the touch is light and intimate and sends a shiver down my spine that has nothing to do with the evening air.
I tighten my arm around his waist, and press my cheek against his hair. He smells like the warm, specific, irreplaceable scent that is just Arjun, and I breathe him in, and we sway, barely moving, just two bodies occupying the same space in the amber light.
Then he lifts his head. He looks up at me, his eyes luminous in the lantern light, and his fingers tighten at the back of my neck, and he pulls me down, gently, and kisses me.
In front of everyone. In the middle of a festival, surrounded by lanterns and music and his entire family, Arjun Kapoor kisses me. It is soft and slow and tastes like lime and the particular, specific courage of a man who has been terrified of being seen for his entire life and is choosing, right now, in this moment, to be seen completely.
We sway. We don’t spin or step or do anything that could technically be called dancing. We just hold each other and move, gently, and the music wraps around us.
Somewhere in the crowd, Priya is likely watching holding back the tears in her eyes. Karan is probably grinning like his favourite team just won the cup.
I’m sure Yash is leaning against a pillar with his arms crossed and a quiet, proud, deeply satisfied smile on his face. The smile of a younger brother who sent an oversized Canadianto find his older brother and is watching the results with the certainty that he knew what would happen.
Daadi taps her cane once on the stone path. The sound carries, small and sharp and final, through the warm Rajasthani night.
One tap. Approval.
For Arjun. For me. For this.
I hold him tighter. He lets me.
The festival glows around us like a living thing, and the music plays, and the stars come out, enormous and close and bright, and I am dancing badly with the man I love under the biggest sky I have ever seen. It is, without question, without reservation, without a single clinical term or strategic assessment or leather notebook to contain it, the happiest moment of my life.
Chapter 25
The Child
Arjun
The sudden scream cuts through the festival like a scalpel through tissue.
One moment, I am standing in the dim flickering light with Casey's hand in mine, the taste of lime still on my lips, the echo of a cane tap still resonating in my chest. The next, a sound tears through the music and the laughter and the murmur of the crowd, a sound I recognize instantly, a sound that my body has been trained to respond to the way a soldier responds to gunfire.
A mother is screaming for her child.
Not the playful, excited screaming of festival children with sparklers. Not the overwhelmed, overtired cry of a child past their bedtime. This is a mother's scream, high and terrified and primal, and it is coming from near the food stalls, and it rearranges every cell in my body in under a second.
Casey's hand drops mine. Not because he wants to let go. Because we are both moving. Simultaneously. Without discussion, without coordination, without a single word exchanged. Two doctors, hearing a mother and her child in distress, and everyother thing we are to each other, lovers, fiancés, fake or real, all of it falls away, and there is only this.
The crowd parts. People are stumbling back from a clearing near the samosa stall, their faces white in the lantern light, and I can see it before I reach it: a small body on the ground, convulsing. A boy. Six, maybe seven. His body is arching and jerking with the rhythmic, uncontrolled violence of a tonic-clonic seizure, his eyes rolled back, his small hands clenched into fists, a thin line of foam at the corner of his mouth. His mother is on her knees beside him, gripping his shoulders, trying to hold him still, which is wrong, and could hurt him.
Casey gets there first. He is faster than me in a crowd because he is bigger and people move for him the way they move for an oncoming vehicle, instinctively and without argument.
“Ma'am.” His voice has changed. It is not the golden retriever voice, not the warm, teasing, endlessly patient voice that I have been falling in love with for two years. It is the ER voice. Calm. Commanding. Absolute. “Ma'am, I need you to let go of him. I'm a doctor. Let me help.”
The mother looks up at him, her face a mask of terror, and something in Casey's expression, something steady and sure and irrefutably competent, breaks through the panic. She releases her son. Casey drops to his knees beside the boy with a fluidity that belies his size, and his hands, those enormous, calloused, gentle hands, begin their assessment.
I am beside him in the next breath. I do not announce myself. I do not need to. Casey registers my presence the way a surgeon registers the placement of an instrument: by feel, by instinct, by the particular calibration of a partnership that exists below the level of conscious thought.
“Tonic-clonic,” I say, my fingers finding the boy's pulse at his neck. Rapid. Thready. The seizure has been going for at least thirty seconds based on the clonic phase pattern. “Exact duration unknown. No visible head trauma. No medical alert bracelet.”
“Airways are clear,” Casey reports, tilting the boy's head to theside with one hand to prevent aspiration. His other hand is on the boy's chest, monitoring the heaving, arrhythmic breathing. “Pulse is one-forty. He's burning up. Feel his forehead.”
I press the back of my hand against the child's forehead. He is incandescent. Febrile seizure. The fever is so high I can feel the heat radiating off him before I make contact.
“Febrile,” I confirm. “Thirty-nine, maybe forty degrees. We need to cool him down. Ice, cold water, wet cloths, anything.”
Behind us, Karan's voice cuts through the crowd as Dev assists him. “Move! Move, everyone, give them space! Someone get water from the kitchen, cold water, now!” The crowd obeys. Karan is a Kapoor and the name carries weight even in a medical emergency, and within thirty seconds, someone is pressing cold bottles of water and a damp cloth into my hands.