Chapter 1 Prescription for Disaster #2
My mother’s voice fills the quiet office, sharp, polished, and terrifyingly cheerful.
The screen is filled with blinding, golden sunlight.
She is sitting on the sprawling veranda of our family’s winter estate in Rajasthan, framed by vibrant, blooming pink bougainvillea.
She is wearing a seafoam green silk sari that probably costs more than my car, a massive diamond catching the light on her finger as she holds a delicate bone-china teacup.
The contrast between her sun-drenched, aristocratic paradise and my bleak, sleet-battered Toronto reality is staggering.
"Hello, Mother," I say, keeping my tone perfectly neutral. "I’m at the hospital, I really only have a minute—"
"Nonsense, I tracked your surgical schedule through the online portal. You’re done for the day," she cuts me off smoothly, taking a delicate sip of her tea.
In the background, I can hear the faint thwack of a croquet mallet and the polite applause of my British-Indian cousins.
"I’m calling with wonderful, wonderful news, darling.
Dev is flying in from London on Tuesday. "
My stomach drops out from under me. "Dev?"
"Dr. Dev, darling. The cardiac surgeon? The one with the spectacular cheekbones and the massive flat in Kensington?
Do try to keep up, Arjun." She smiles, a terrifying, brilliant expression that usually precedes a tactical family strike. "I’ve spoken to Daadi’s astrologer.
He ran the numbers, and your charts are magnificently compatible.
He says the stars are practically demanding a union.
I expect you here by Wednesday. We will have a small, informal engagement dinner on Friday.
Just seventy or eighty close family members to celebrate. "
"Mother, stop," I say, rubbing my temples where a massive headache is rapidly blooming. "I am not marrying Dev. I’ve told you this. We had a single dinner in London three years ago, and we spent the entire time arguing over the efficacy of beta-blockers versus surgical intervention."
"A shared passion for medicine! It’s deeply romantic," she counters seamlessly.
"Arjun," her voice loses its cheerful, lilting quality, dropping into the icy, aristocratic tone that makes even the toughest, most resilient aunties in our family tremble.
"You are thirty-three years old. You haven't brought a man home since your residency.
You spend one hundred hours a week at that freezing Canadian hospital. "
"I am saving children's brains, Mother. It requires focus."
"You are hiding," she corrects ruthlessly.
"If I leave it to you, you are going to marry your scalpels and die entirely alone in a sterile room.
Dev is perfect. He is handsome, he is from an impeccable family, he understands our world, and most importantly, he is entirely willing to relocate to Toronto for a year to sort out the visa paperwork after the ceremony. It is decided."
"It is not decided!" I snap, my renowned, heavily guarded composure finally cracking.
The walls of my office feel like they are actively shrinking, closing in on me.
Between Gabriel telling me I'm a repressed tragedy and my mother aggressively planning my arranged marriage across the globe, I feel like I am suffocating.
"Be reasonable, darling. Daadi has already approved the caterer," she says, as if picking out appetizers is the binding legal contract of matrimony.
I turn away from the phone, looking desperately through the glass of my interior window, down into the ER below.
Down there, amidst the bright primary colours and the absolute chaos of the afternoon shift, is Dr. Casey Welling.
Casey is a Paediatric Generalist, the frontline defence of the emergency room, and he is the undisputed, universally adored golden boy of the floor.
He is massive, standing six-foot-three with broad, sweeping shoulders and the thick, sturdy build of a lifelong Canadian hockey player.
His scrubs are stretched to their absolute limit across his chest and muscular thighs.
His thick, blonde curls are a chaotic, unruly mess spilling out from beneath his surgical cap.
Right now, he is squatting in the middle of a suturing bay next to a crying six-year-old boy with a split eyebrow.
He doesn't look clinical. He looks entirely present. He is effortlessly applying purple Derma-bond across the laceration with steady hands while delivering a booming, chest-deep laugh that echoes all the way up to my office window. He finishes the glue, pulls a brightly coloured sticker out from behind the child’s ear like a magician, and slaps a holographic T-Rex right onto the kid's hospital gown.
The child instantly stops crying. He giggles, his face lighting up. Casey stands up, his own face radiant, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners as he high-fives the profoundly relieved mother standing nearby.
He is exactly the kind of warmth Gabriel was just yelling at me about. He is walking, talking sunshine. And for the last two years, I have harboured a secret, fiercely guarded, utterly humiliating crush on him.
My chest tightens so painfully I can barely breathe.
It is a stupid, reckless, entirely uncharacteristic impulse.
I am a man of science, of logic, of meticulously planned surgical routes.
But right now, I am fuelled by pure exhaustion, my mentor's biting words, and the desperate, primal need to escape my mother's velvet trap.
I look at the phone screen. My mother is tapping her manicured fingernails against her teacup, waiting for my surrender.
"I can't marry Dev," I blurt out, my voice slightly breathless. My eyes are locked completely on the giant, sunny Canadian doctor two floors below, who is currently adjusting his ridiculous dinosaur-print scrubs.
"And why on earth not?" my mother demands, her perfectly drawn eyebrows pulling together in a sharp frown.
I swallow hard. My throat is sandpaper-dry, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. Once I say it, there is no taking it back. It will require a level of deception I am entirely unqualified for.
"Because," I say, my voice steadying with terrifying resolve, "I'm already engaged."
Coming Soon - May 2026