He got down on one knee in the sand.
She pressed her hand over her mouth.
"Nimisha Shah Ranawat," he said. "I married you because my father told me I had to, and I spent a year being a coward about it, and I wasted a year that I'm going to spend the rest of my life making up to you." He held her gaze steadily. "Will you marryme? Again? For real this time. Because I'm choosing it. Because I'm choosing you."
She was crying. She'd known she would cry and she was doing it anyway, without apology, without trying to be fine.
"Yes," she managed. "Obviously yes. Always yes."
He slid the ring on her finger.
It fit perfectly.
Of course it did—he'd thought of everything.
She looked at it on her hand, then at him still kneeling in the sand.
"Chosen," he said. "Like you chose me."
"I didn't choose you," she said, pulling him up by his hands. "I fell in love with you. There was no choice involved. It just happened while I was trying to survive you."
He laughed—real laughter, the kind she'd worked to earn and now received freely.
"That's either very romantic or very worrying."
"Both," she said. "It's very much both."
He kissed her, and she kissed him back, and Bruno very deliberately walked into the ocean because he had seen enough and also the water was interesting.
That Night - The Villa
The night was long and warm and entirely theirs.
He took her apart and put her back together, and she did the same for him, and they saidI love youso many times the wordsbecame something beyond language—a rhythm, a refrain, the signature of something permanent being written between them.
My wife,he said, and it sounded different now. Not possession. Recognition.
My husband,she said, and meant everything that word had failed to mean for a year and meant now with her entire self.
They were tangled together in the white linen of the villa bed when he said: "Say it again."
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you, Samarth." She pressed her lips to his chest, over his heartbeat. "I love you. I love you. I've run out of different ways to say it."
"Keep saying it the same way."
"Forever," she said.
"Forever," he agreed.
Coming Home
The family was waiting.
This had not been coordinated—or perhaps it had, in the way that families sometimes coordinate things without quite admitting it. Raghbir was in the entrance hall. Saroj beside him, which was unusual. Shaurya barely contained his joy. Tanisha, still healing but present and genuine in a way she hadn't been before.
