CHAPTER 22
Three Weeks After the Balcony
The house had changed.
Not structurally. The marble floors were the same, the chandelier in the entrance hall still threw the same patterns of light across the same walls. The gardens were maintained by the same staff, the kitchen produced the same meals at the same hours.
But the air was different.
Nimisha noticed it in small increments, the way you notice a season changing—not in one dramatic moment but in accumulation, day after day, until you realized that what had been cold had become warm and you couldn't pinpoint exactly when the shift had happened.
Samarth touched her in public now.
Not the claiming, territorial gestures of a man marking possession—though that was still there, woven underneath—but the easy, unconscious touches of a man who simply wanted to be near his wife.
His hand at her back when they entered a room.
His fingers brushing hers across the breakfast table.
The way he paused in passing to press his lips to the top of her head when she was writing, like the gesture was too natural to require forethought.
"My love." He'd started saying it without preamble, without occasion, the way you said the name of something you were glad exists. She'd looked up the first time, startled, and he'd looked back with complete equanimity. What? As though endearments were something he'd always offered freely.
"You called me your love," she'd said.
"Yes," he'd agreed. "I'll probably keep doing it."
She'd looked back at her laptop and smiled until her face hurt.
The family was adjusting.
Shaurya was insufferable about it—gleeful in the particular way of younger siblings who have been proven right about something important and intend to collect on this indefinitely.
"I'm just saying," he told them both at breakfast one morning, "that I knew. From very early on. I told Abhay, I told Armaan—"
"You told your friends about my marriage?" Samarth said.
"I told them it was going to work out." Shaurya was undeterred. "I have excellent instincts."
"You once bet fifty thousand rupees that a building could not be on fire and have a fully functioning sprinkler system simultaneously."
"That was one time."
"You lost."
"Dramatically," Abhay confirmed from the doorway, not looking up from his phone.
"The point," Shaurya continued with dignity, "is that I knew. About you two. I knew from the moment bhabhi threw that spoon and Bruno didn't even blink."
Nimisha laughed, and Samarth looked at her laughing, and the expression on his face made Shaurya go briefly quiet with something that was almost reverence.
Raghbir's Study - 11:34 AM
The conversation with his father happened without being arranged. Samarth came to return some documents and found Raghbir standing at the window with the look of a man who'd been waiting for an opportunity.
"You're happy," Raghbir said, without preamble.
Samarth set the documents on the desk. "Yes."
"You look different."
"I feel different."
Raghbir was quiet for a moment. "I owe her an apology. Nimisha. I allowed your mother's behavior to go unchecked for too long. I should have—" He stopped. "I was watching what was happening and telling myself it wasn't my business, which was a failure of character."
"Yes," Samarth said. "It was."
Raghbir looked at his son. "You chose well."
"I was chosen," Samarth said. "I just finally accepted it."
His father studied him with the expression of a man who had spent thirty years making difficult decisions and recognized the particular quality of peace that came from finally making the right one.
"She's good," Raghbir said. "Not just for you. She's good. A genuinely good person. In this world, that's rare."
"I know."
"Take care of it."
"I intend to." Samarth picked up the documents. "Also, regarding the boundaries around our marriage—the comparisons, the snubs, the access others have been given to decisions that belong to us—that ends."
Raghbir raised an eyebrow.
"I should have said it the day we married," Samarth continued. "I didn't. I'm saying it now. Nimisha is my wife. Her position in this family is primary. Any behavior that undermines that—from anyone—ends."
His father looked at him for a long moment.
"I'll speak to your mother," he said.
"I'll speak to my mother," Samarth replied. "She needs to hear it from me."
Saroj's Sitting Room - That Afternoon
He found his mother with her tea and her embroidery, the image of domestic composure, and sat across from her without being invited.
She looked up, reading his face with the accuracy of someone who had known him his entire life.
"I owe Nimisha an apology," she said, before he could speak.
He waited.
"I know I do," Saroj continued, setting down her embroidery. "I've known it for some time. I told myself I was protecting you—that I was keeping space for the possibility that things could be different, that Kritika—" She stopped. "I was wrong. And I was unkind to a girl who deserved neither."
"You were," he said. Not cruelly. Just honestly.
"I'll fix it."
"You will," he agreed. "And Maa—" He leaned forward, his voice gentle but absolute. "The comparisons stop. The suggestions about who I should have married stop. The snubs, the exclusion, the subtle ways you've made her feel like a guest in her own home—all of it stops."
Saroj pressed her lips together.
"She's your daughter-in-law," Samarth said.
"She's been your daughter-in-law for over a year.
She's going to be your daughter-in-law for the rest of your life.
And she's—" He paused. "She's the person I love.
That should be sufficient. But if it's not, know this: I will always choose her.
Without hesitation. I should have made that clear from the beginning. "
His mother looked at him for a long moment.
Then she exhaled. "Bring her for tea tomorrow," she said quietly. "Just us."
"I'll tell her."
"I'll make her favorite," Saroj added. "Whatever that is."
"Anything with chocolate," Samarth said, standing. "And the butter biscuits from Bhika Ram's."
He left his mother sitting with her embroidery and the expression of a woman quietly rearranging her understanding of things.
Two Days Later - Morning
Nimisha was at her desk when Samarth appeared in the doorway with an expression she'd learned to identify as him trying not to show excitement, which he was very bad at concealing from her now that she knew what to look for.
"Pack a bag," he said.
She looked up. "For what?"
"Two weeks."
"Two weeks where?"
"Somewhere without your family or mine." He pushed off the doorframe and came into the room, stopping in front of her desk. "Somewhere with no family dinners and no staff and no one requiring anything from either of us."
She studied him. "You planned a holiday."
"I planned a honeymoon," he corrected. "Since we never had one."
Something soft moved through her chest.
"We never had a proper anything," she said.
"We're fixing that." He rounded the desk, pulled her up from her chair, and held her face in his hands. "Two weeks. Just us. Bruno."
"You're bringing Bruno on our honeymoon."
"He'll feel left out."
"He's a dog."
"He's family." The word came easily, completely naturally. "Pack light. Everything you'll need is already there."
She looked at him—at this man who had been so determined not to need anything and had built an entire secret language of care while convincing himself he wasn't.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"You'll see when we land."
"Samarth—"
"Trust me."
She did.
That was the thing she'd learned, over a year of watching him from a distance and the past weeks of being let close—she trusted him. Completely. It had happened without her quite deciding to, like most true things.
"Alright," she said.
Private Island, Lakshadweep - Day One
The island was small enough to walk across in twenty minutes and large enough to feel like the only place in the world.
The villa sat at the center of it, open-sided and draped with white linen that moved in the sea breeze. The beach was white sand that went pink at sunset and silver at night. The water was the particular blue of something too clean and clear to be real—the blue of absolute clarity.
Nimisha stood at the water's edge in the early evening of the first day and felt, for the first time in longer than she could accurately remember, completely and entirely at peace.
Bruno was thirty feet down the beach, investigating something with the focused intensity he brought to all things, his dark coat glossy in the last of the sunlight.
Samarth appeared behind her and handed her a glass of something cold.
She took it without looking. "It's perfect," she said.
"Yes." He was looking at her. "It is."
She felt his gaze and turned.
"You're not looking at the island," she said.
"No."
She leaned back against him, his arm coming around her waist, her head resting on his shoulder.
"Two weeks," she said. "What are we going to do with two whole weeks?"
"Everything," he said. "Nothing." His lips pressed to her temple. "Whatever you want."
They stood in the water's edge until the sun finished going down and the sky went through its progression of colors—orange, rose, violet, the particular deep blue that preceded dark—and the first stars appeared.
Bruno trotted back to them, sat, looked at the sky, then at his people, and decided it was all acceptable.
The Beach - That Night
The sand was still warm from the day's sun.
They'd eaten dinner on the villa terrace and come back to the beach because neither of them wanted to be inside when the night was this—the stars overhead undimmed by city light, the ocean moving in its patient rhythm, the air tasting of salt and warmth and possibility.
Nimisha lay on her back in the sand and looked up.
"I can see the Milky Way," she said.
Samarth lay beside her. "Can you?"
"I've never seen it with my eyes before. Only photographs." She traced the sweep of it with her finger. "It looks like someone spilled sugar across the sky."
"It looks like everything," he said.