And then I let Casey close.
I let Casey close in a supply closet, when I was too desperate to maintain the controls, and I spent the majority of this trip, methodically, with all of my training, trying to undo the closeness, and I have failed. Because Casey does not respond to walls. Casey crosses walls the way a six-foot-three golden retriever crosses fences, which is to say cheerfully, without noticing they were there, and now he is on the inside of every wall I have built, and the universe knows he is there, and the universe knows what to do with people I love, and I am sitting in this room because I am nine years old and I am waiting for the phone to ring.
The phone is not going to ring.
Casey is not on a stage in a public square.
Casey is in a hotel sixty kilometres from here. That is the only fact I have about him. He has not responded to a single message. I do not know what he is eating, or whether he is eating. I do not know if he is sleeping. I do not know if he has cried, or is past crying, or never cried at all. I do not know if he has been on his phone, scrolling through the fourteen messages I have sent, reading each one and putting the phone down again, or if he has not opened any of them, or if he opened the first one and could not bear to open the others. I have no data.
I have spent two weeks acquiring data about Casey Welling at a rate that would, in any other context, alarm me. I know how he takes his chai. I know the exact pressure of his hand when he is anxious. I know the specific cadence of his breathing in the eighteen minutes between him falling asleep and entering REM. And now I know nothing, and the absence is unbearable in a way I have not let myself fully look at until this moment, because the absence is information too. The absence tells me he is hurt enough to withdraw. The absence tells me he is hurt enough that the very thing my nervous system most needs, his presence, his voice, his confirmation that he is still in the world and still reachable, has been removed, and I have been sitting in this room treating the absence as a verdict.
But the absence is not a verdict. The absence is a hotel room sixty kilometres away, occupied by a man who has not, despite three days and considerable provocation, gotten on a plane. He has not flown to Toronto. He has chosen, of all the places in the world he could have removed himself to, a hotel within driving distance of the estate where I am sitting. And I have taken that proximity, that staying-within-reach, that quiet, stubborn refusal to put the actual distance between us that a man who was finished with me would have put, and I have read it as silence, because silence is what I was looking for. Because silence is what I expected. Because the simulation I have been running for three days has been a simulation in which Casey has already decided,and a hotel sixty kilometres away is, in fact, the data point that contradicts the simulation, and I have refused to see it.
The simulation is the only place a Kapoor man cannot be shot.
But the simulation cannot love me back.
The simulation cannot put a hand over my heart in the dark.
The simulation cannot leave a holographic triceratops on a nightstand.
I look at the sticker. I look at it the way I have not let myself look at it for three days, not as evidence, not as a relic, not as a piece of forensic data, but as what it actually is, which is a thing a man left behind for me because he did not have time to gather every small object before he walked away in pain.
Casey is not a bullet in a brain.
Casey is reachable.
Casey is reachable because he is not gone. He is hurt. There is a difference. There is, my father would say, sitting at his desk in the library, all the difference in the world.
The fear does not leave. I want to record this honestly. The fear does not vanish in a moment of insight, because insight is not absolution, and a wound that has shaped twenty-four years of behaviour does not close because I have located it. The phone in my pocket could ring, tonight, tomorrow, in ten years, and tell me that someone I love has been taken from a place I thought was safe. That is a true fact about the world. I have always known it was a true fact about the world. The difference, the only difference, the difference that may be enough, is that I have spent years organizing my life around preventing the call, and I have just realized, sitting on this bed in the room where I was when the call came, that the call comes anyway. That the call has always come anyway. That the only choice I have ever had is what kind of life I want to be living when it does.
I would like to be living one that has Casey in it.
I put the sticker back in my pocket.
I lie down on the bed that smells like clean sheets and nothing else.
I close my eyes.
I do not sleep, but the not-sleeping is different now. It is not the not-sleeping of paralysis. It is the not-sleeping of someone whose hands are finally, quietly, unclasped.
Chapter 30
Daadi's Cane
Arjun
The summons arrives at dawn.
Not a knock. Not a text. Not Priya's sharp voice through the door or Karan's tentative tap or Yash's diplomatic interception. A member of the household staff, one of Daadi's personal attendants, appears at the guest suite at five-thirty in the morning, before the sun has cleared the garden wall, and says, with measured formality: “Daadi-ji requests your presence in her private rooms. Immediately.”
I have not slept. My eyes feel like they have been rubbed with gauze. The sticker is still in my pocket. The fourteen unanswered texts are still on my phone, joined now by a fifteenth that I sent at three in the morning, which simply says: I'm sorry.
No response.
I shower. Quickly, mechanically, because Priya's commentary about my compromised hygiene has apparently lodged itself in my subconscious and because whatever is about to happen, I will face it clean. I put on a clean shirt. I button it correctly this time. I walk through the pre-dawn corridors of the estate, past the closed doors and the sleeping household, to Daadi's private rooms whichoccupy the oldest section of the haveli, the rooms that have been hers since she married into the Kapoor family at twenty-one, the rooms she has occupied for six decades, since the estate was a fraction of what it is now and the Kapoor name was local rather than national.
Daadi's rooms smell of sandalwood and old paper. The walls are lined with photographs, some framed, some pinned directly to the plaster with the casual disregard for aesthetics that is the privilege of someone who has lived in this house for years and has stopped caring what anyone thinks of her interior design. There is a carved wooden bed, low and wide, piled with cushions. There is a reading table with a lamp and a magnifying glass and a stack of newspapers in three languages. There is a window that overlooks the garden where Casey and I danced mere nights ago.
