Chapter 27
The Overheard Truth
Arjun
Ihave not spoken to Gabriel Moretti since we left Toronto, and I need him the way a drowning man needs a shore.
I am in the library. The estate library is on the second floor of the east wing, a long, narrow room lined floor to ceiling with books that span three centuries and four languages, and it is the quietest room in the house. It was my father's room. His desk is still here, a heavy mahogany piece with brass fittings, and his reading glasses are still in the top drawer, and when I was a boy, this was the one place in the estate where I could sit in absolute silence and feel safe, because my father was a quiet man, and quiet men made quiet rooms, and quiet rooms were the only rooms where I could breathe. It is the only place in this building that makes me feel closer to my father, and reminds me of the man he was.
I close the door. I lock it. I pull out my phone.
It is early morning in Toronto. Gabriel will be at the hospital. Gabriel is always at the hospital. The man operates on a schedule that makes my hundred-hour weeks look recreational.
He picks up on the second ring.
“Arjun.” His voice is sharp, theatrical, and immediately, overwhelmingly familiar. “I was beginning to think you had been absorbed into your family's ancestral holdings and were never returning. How is the engagement? How is the fiancé? Have you thawed sufficiently, or are you still my favourite walking cryogenic experiment?”
“Gabriel.” My voice sounds wrong. Thin. The composure I reconstructed after walking out of the drawing room is holding, but only just, the way a surgical suture holds a wound that hasn't finished bleeding. “I need to talk to you.”
A pause. The theatrical warmth drops. “What happened?”
“Everything.” I press my back against the library wall. The wood panelling is cool through my shirt. “Everything happened, Gabriel, and I have made a catastrophic error, and I need you to listen without performing, because I do not have the mental or emotional capacity for your theatrics right now.”
“Arjun. Talk to me.”
So I talk.
I tell him. I tell him the thing I have not said to anyone except Priya, the thing that has been the structural foundation of this entire trip, the thing that I buried under engagement announcements and henna ceremonies and a festival dance and a night that rewrote the molecular composition of my existence.
“The engagement was fake,” I say, and the words land in the quiet library like stones dropped into still water. “From the start. I told my mother I was engaged to avoid the arrangement with Dev. I panicked, and I said Casey's name, and I asked him to play along, and the entire thing was a strategic maneuver that I initiated out of desperation and executed with a level of deception that I am not proud of.”
Gabriel is silent. The silence stretches across thousands of kilometres, from a library in Rajasthan to an office in Toronto, and I can picture him exactly: sitting at his desk, his espresso in his hand, his dark eyes sharp and still.
“Go on,” he says.
“I brought him into my family's world as a prop. A convincing cover story. And he agreed, because he is the kind of person who agrees to things, who says yes in supply closets because someone he cares about asks him to, and I exploited that. I exploited his generosity and his warmth and his pathological inability to say no to a person in distress.”
“Arjun.”
“And then I let it go too far.” My voice is thinning. The suture is stretching. “I let the lines blur. I let the performance become...” I search for the word, the precise, clinical, controllable word that will contain what I am trying to describe. “Compromised. The operation became compromised by variables I failed to anticipate, and I have made an error in judgment that I cannot correct without causing significant collateral damage.”
“She had a name ready, Gabriel. A replacement. She spoke to Anjali Mehra the day after we arrived, which means the entire production this morning, the astrologer, the recommendation, the public verdict, was theatre staged around a decision she had already made. She is withdrawing the engagement announcement. There is a Bhatnagar boy in Bombay who has, I am informed, expressed interest in meeting me before the end of the calendar year.” A breath that does not quite hold. “She did not propose this. She announced it. In front of the household. While I was holding Casey's hand.”
I am standing in my father's library, using surgical language to describe the fact that I fell more in love with the man I was pretending to love, and the inadequacy of the terminology is staggering.
“When you say compromised,” Gabriel says carefully, “what exactly do you mean?”
“I mean that the arrangement is no longer contained. The mission parameters have been exceeded. The... the emotional component has deviated from the original operational scope in ways that are not recoverable.”
“Arjun. In plain language.”
“I'm in love with him.” The words come out cracked and raw and nothing like clinical language. “I have been in love with him for two years, and I brought him here pretending it was a strategy, and it was never a strategy, Gabriel. Not really. I said his name because he is the only person who makes the noise stop, and I have spent sixteen days pretending that I was pretending, and I cannot do it anymore, because last night I told him I loved him, and he said it back, and my mother just had an astrologer declare us cosmically incompatible in front of the entire family, and I walked out of the room and left him there because I am a coward who would rather retreat into clinical detachment than stand in a room and fight for the person I...”
My voice breaks. It just breaks, mid-sentence, like a bone under too much pressure, and the sound that comes out of me is not words. It is something older and more primal, a sound that belongs in a stairwell at two in the morning after a lost patient, not in a library at noon after a lost battle with an astrologer.
“I have made a grave error in judgment,” I whisper, and the phrase tastes like ash, because I have used it before, in a moonlit bedroom, to describe the best kiss of my life, and Casey's face when I said it was the worst thing I have ever caused. “I have made so many errors in judgment that I cannot determine which one is the original error and which are the cascading consequences of my ineptitude.”
“Arjun,” Gabriel says, and his voice has dropped every layer of performance, every theatrical flourish, every dramatic affectation. It is just Gabriel. My mentor. The man who sat beside me in a stairwell and told me that grief is the tax you pay for caring. “I need you to listen to me very carefully.”