Day five. Six days to the wedding.
Meera sat in the blue room in the early morning with a cup of chai that was actually hot for once and had a very serious conversation with herself.
The conversation went as follows.
She had been in love with Veer Malhotra for five years. This was an established fact. She had tried, at various points in those five years, to be not in love with him — through reason, through deliberate avoidance, through the concentrated power of telling herself it was impractical and complicated and based on a one-sided investment that was not going to pay off. None of these attempts had worked, which she had known they wouldn't, but she'd felt obligated to try.
She was marrying him in six days.
And she had decided — she had made a clear, executive, final decision, effective immediately — that she was going to stop. She was going to stop hoping for something specific, stop looking for evidence of something that might not be there, stop reading into moments and touches and shared car journeys and five minutes in a garden at dusk. She was going to be a practical person. She was going to be an adult. She was going to marry Veer Malhotra and build something from scratch, the way people did, and she was going to stop tormenting herself with the five-year hope that had gotten her exactly nowhere.
She was done. She was letting it go. She was going to feel absolutely nothing.
She drank her chai with great resolution.
She was going to be completely fine.
— ✦ —
The morning was a logistics meeting. Naina had called it at nine and everyone whose input was required had been required to attend, which meant the main sitting room contained Meera, Anaya, Naina, Rhea, Kabir, Arjun, Veer, and Dev, who was present not because his input was required but because no force known to the family had ever successfully kept Dev out of a meeting he wanted to attend.
Meera was feeling nothing. She sat next to Anaya and felt nothing throughout the entire discussion about the seating chart, during which Dev made three suggestions that were vetoed, Kabir made one that was accepted, and Naina updated the chart with the focused efficiency of someone who had scheduled time for this exact task.
She felt nothing when Veer pointed out a logistical issue with the reception floor plan that nobody else had noticed and was correct. She felt nothing when he looked briefly in her direction to confirm that she agreed, which she did, and she nodded, and he nodded back, and that was that.
Nothing. Completely fine.
"The catering schedule needs to shift fifteen minutes earlier," she said, because she had a practical contribution to make and she was a practical person now.
"Agreed," said Veer.
She felt nothing about him agreeing with her. Nothing whatsoever.
The meeting ended at eleven. People dispersed. Meera went to find the event coordinator to confirm the updated catering timeline, and on her way through the main corridor she walked into the specific problem she had been doing so well at not walking into.
Veer's Uncle Kishore — a man of approximately seventy, deeply traditional, deeply particular about his own opinions, and completely comfortable expressing all of them to anyone who was standing still for long enough — had found Meera in the corridor and had decided that this was an excellent moment to discuss his views on her career choices (she worked in publishing; he felt this was not serious enough), her family background (he had several thoughts), and whether she had considered that a household like the Malhotras' required certain specific abilities that he was not entirely sure she possessed.
Meera stood very still and breathed through it. She was an adult. She was a practical person. She could handle one uncle's extended monologue with grace.
She'd been managing it for approximately six minutes — nodding, saying 'ji, of course,' thinking about literally anything else — when someone materialised at her elbow.
Veer.
He appeared the way he always appeared — not loudly, not dramatically, just there. He put his hand briefly at the small of her back, a touch so light it might have been accidental if she hadn't known by now that he didn't do accidental, and he said to his uncle in a voice of complete pleasantness: "Kishore chacha, Baba was asking for you. Something about the pandit's requirements for the ceremony — I think he needs your guidance on the traditional aspects."
Uncle Kishore was a man who responded to being needed. He brightened immediately. "Of course, of course — I'll go to him right away—" and he was gone down the corridor, purpose restored.
Meera exhaled.
Veer's hand was gone from her back. She hadn't noticed when he'd removed it. That was, she told herself, completely fine.
"You didn't have to do that," she said.
"He likes feeling useful," Veer said. "Baba will find something for him to weigh in on."
"Is Baba actually asking for him?"
A pause. "He will be by the time he gets there."
Meera looked at him. He looked back, and there was something in his expression — not quite a smile, not quite the carefully maintained neutrality she was used to from him, something in between — that made her forget for a moment that she had made a very firm decision this morning about feeling nothing.
She remembered it a second later and told herself it didn't matter.
"Thank you," she said, for the second time in as many days.
He nodded. Turned to go.
"Veer."
He stopped.
She didn't know why she'd said his name. She hadn't planned to say it. It had just — come out, the way things did when you were feeling nothing and then suddenly felt something.
He turned back. Looked at her.
She said: "Nothing. Never mind."
He looked at her for one more moment. Then he nodded again and went.
Meera stood in the empty corridor and pressed one hand briefly against the small of her own back, where his hand had been, and thought with the weary affection of someone who knew themselves very well: oh, I am absolutely still doing this.
She was not going to feel nothing. She had known this when she'd decided it. She'd just thought the decision sounded better than the truth.
Six days.
She went to find the event coordinator.