He pulled her closer. "Yes," he said, and she could hear the smile in it. "It does."
Outside, Mumbai went about its business—relentless and indifferent and vast.
Inside this room, in this bed, in the dark that had once been a hiding place and was now simply night, two people who had been forced together by other people's politics and had found their way to each other in spite of everything held on.
And kept holding.
EPILOGUE
Ranawat Estate - Two Years Later
The estate had been transformed. Not with the cold, calculated grandeur of the Ranawat Foundation galas or the formal precision of family dinners designed to impress. This was something else entirely—warm and chaotic and alive in the way that only children could make a space feel, like joy had physically rearranged the furniture.
Yellow and white balloons clustered at every doorway. Hand-painted banners in Nimisha's handwriting—slightly crooked, entirely earnest—hung between the columns of the main entrance. The gardens had been taken over by a small jungle of decorations: tiny elephants and lions in soft fabric, a cake table with a three-tiered confection that the baker had described as "safari themed" and Shaurya had described as "aggressively optimistic."
Bruno had described it by sniffing the bottom tier and walking away with dignified restraint.
It was half past ten in the morning, and the birthday boy had already been awake for four hours.
Aryan Samarth Ranawat—one year old today, possessed of his father's dark eyes and his mother's mouth and an opinion about absolutely everything—was currently sitting in the middle of the garden in a tiny white kurta that he'd already managed to get mango on, systematically dismantling a plush elephant that had been gifted to him approximately twelve minutes ago.
Bruno sat three feet away, watching the dismemberment with the expression of a creature who understood both the satisfaction of destruction and the importance of supervision.
"Boo," Aryan said, which was not quiteBrunobut was close enough.
Bruno's ear twitched.
"Boo," Aryan said again, more insistently, offering a piece of stuffed elephant.
Bruno looked at the offering. Looked at the child. Accepted the piece with extraordinary gentleness—more gently than he'd accepted anything in his life, with the focused delicacy of a creature who understood the difference between things that could be rough with and things that couldn't.
He set it down immediately on the grass in front of Aryan.
Here. I held it. Now it's yours again.
Aryan found this hilarious.
His laugh—big and uninhibited and completely disproportionate to his size—rang across the garden, and everyone within earshot turned toward it involuntarily, the way people turned toward warmth.
Nimisha stood at the edge of the terrace with a cup of tea she hadn't managed to drink yet, watching her son and her dog, and felt something so complete she had no word for it.
She looked different than she had two years ago—or perhaps she looked more like herself. The composure was still there, the grace, the quiet attention she brought to everything. But it sat differently now, without the armor underneath. Without the careful management of a woman trying to take up less space.
She'd published two more books in the past two years. The latest had debuted at number one.
Her editor called it her most emotionally honest work yet.
She hadn't told her editor that she'd written most of it in the first three months of Aryan's life, at two in the morning, nursing an infant who refused to sleep, while her husband sat beside her reading the chapters as she produced them and occasionally stopping her to argue about the hero's choices.
Arms came around her from behind.
She leaned back without looking.
"He's trying to feed Bruno the elephant," Samarth said against her hair.
"Bruno is being very patient about it."
"Bruno would die for that child." He pressed his lips to her temple. "Dramatically. With fanfare."
