"Ghar nahi jaana mujhe
Chhod ke yeh sama
Tere bina yahan bhi
Kahan hoon main"
~ Ik Vaari Aa – Arijit Singh

~ Jodhpur, Palace – Late July ~

Coming back from Greece felt like being asked to wake up from a very good dream.

Not a bad kind of waking up. Just the specific disorientation of returning from a place that had held you softly for a week to a world that had kept moving without you.

The palace received us with the warmth it always had. Maa had flowers put in our room. Baba had already arranged a dinner for the first evening back. Dadi found me in the corridor within twenty minutes of arrival to ask if I had eaten properly in Greece—she had concerns, apparently, about the reliability of European food.

"Dadi, the food was extraordinary."

"Hmm. Did you have enough dal?"

"There was no dal—"

"That's what I thought." She patted my hand with the expression of a woman whose concerns had been confirmed. "Come. I had them make dal makhani this morning."

I followed my grandmother-in-law to the palace kitchen at nine in the morning for emergency dal makhani.

Aadyant, passing us in the corridor, saw my expression and had to face the wall.

"Say nothing," I told him.

"I'm saying nothing," he said, to the wall.

~

The few days at the palace before the return to California had a particular quality: the warmth of a family that had expanded and was still discovering what that meant.

Devika found reasons to sit with Kashvi every morning. Not always with a purpose—sometimes just chai, the inner garden, the jasmine, conversation that didn't need to go anywhere. She asked about the collection and listened with the full attention she brought to everything.

Aadhir, in his precise and measured way, began including Kashvi in conversations he had previously had only with Aadyant—the family business, the palace management, the forward planning. Not as a test. As an inclusion. As if to say: You are here now. These things are also yours to know.

Dadu said nothing in particular. But he had started acknowledging Kashvi's presence in rooms with a small nod, the same nod he gave Aadhir, the same nod he gave Aadyant. Which, in the vocabulary of Vikram Rathore, was the highest possible form of recognition.

Aadya, who had flown directly to the palace from wherever she'd been, spent approximately six hours demanding a full Greece debrief before she would discuss anything else.

"The white bikini," she whispered to Kashvi, who sat right next to her. 

"And?"

"You are getting flowers when we return to California."

Aadya looked delighted.

"I KNEW IT—"

"Do not," Aadyant said, into his coffee.

"You also got flowers, metaphorically speaking—"

"AADYA."

~

~ Back to California ~

We flew back on a Thursday.

The penthouse, when we arrived, smelled like itself: Aadya's specific brand of chaos, Aadyant's coffee, the faint trace of my fabric swatches that had permanently colonized the living room regardless of how many times they were relocated.

Standing in the entryway with my suitcase, I looked around at all of it.

The couch where we watched movies on Friday nights. The kitchen island where I'd once asked Aadyant why he looked at me like that and he'd said like what and we'd talked until two in the morning. The balcony where Aadya and I had stood the night of the engagement announcement. The window where I kept my sketches because the light was better.

Mine.

All mine.

Different now, though. Not less mine—more. The way a place becomes more yours after you've left and come back and chosen it again.

Aadyant appeared behind me and looked at the penthouse over my shoulder.

"Home," he said.

"Home," I agreed.

He pressed a kiss to the side of my head.

"Come on. Aadya has already unpacked and she's going to reorganize your sketches if we don't stop her."

From the living room: "I'm not reorganizing them, I'm improving their spatial relationship—"

"AADYA."

"It's a more efficient use of the wall—"

I walked in to rescue my sketches.

The penthouse noise settled around me like something fitting back into its shape.

Home.

~

College resumed with the particular momentum of a second year that knows what it is.

The courses were harder. The studio hours were longer. The friend group had changed in the invisible way groups do over summers—same people, slightly different configurations, having each separately had experiences that were now part of how they moved through rooms.

Kashvi threw herself back into the work with the focused energy she always had post-inspiration. The collection sketches from Greece covered the dining table within forty-eight hours of our return, and then spread to the floor, and then to the secondary sketchbooks stacked beside the couch.

"There's a system," she said, when I moved a sketch to set down my coffee.

"Kashvi. I cannot see the table."

"The system accounts for that."

"How does the system account for the absence of a visible table surface?"

"You're looking at it wrong."

"I'm looking at—" I picked up a sketch. Put it back down. Accepted that this was what the table was now. "Fine."

"Thank you."

"I'm getting the coffee table."

"The coffee table is occupied."

It was.

I sat on the floor with my laptop and my coffee and worked beside her, the sketches spreading around both of us.

This, I had discovered, was one of the specific pleasures of being married to a designer in the middle of a collection: the entire apartment became the workspace, and trying to resist it was like trying to argue with the tide.

She glanced at me at some point, cross-legged on the floor with my corporate law notes.

"You're good at this," she said.

"At sitting on my own floor?"

"At being in my space without needing it to be different."

I looked at her.

She was already back to sketching, the pencil moving fast, but there was something in the corner of her expression—soft and certain.

"I like your space," I said.

She didn't look up. "I know."

But she was smiling.

~

The first Friday movie night back was, by unanimous unspoken agreement, exactly what it had always been.

Vihaan was on the floor cushion forty minutes early. Ritika arrived with her current book and her opinions. Aashika brought her camera. Shivansh brought food. The movie debate started before everyone had sat down.

The only difference was Kashvi.

Not in anything dramatic. Just: the way she moved through the penthouse had changed. The specific quality of someone who is completely at home—who has stopped making the small unconscious adjustments of a guest and is simply existing in a space that belongs to them.

She sat beside Aadyant on the couch. His arm went around her automatically. She leaned into him the same way. Neither of them was thinking about it.

Vihaan watched this for approximately thirty seconds.

"This is significantly more domestic than it was before the wedding," he said.

"Thank you for that observation," Aadyant said.

"I'm noting it for the record."

"What record—"

"The record of Aadyant Rathore becoming a person who sits on couches with his arm around someone without looking like he's doing a photo shoot."

A pause.

"That's—" Aadyant started.

"It's a compliment," Vihaan said. "Accept it."

Kashvi pressed her face into Aadyant's shoulder.

~

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