The Girl in the Bookshop- - MG || (Part 14 |Page 10) - Page 10

Chapter Thirteen: Before Delhi

The next morning was not romantic. It was molecular biology.

Geet woke, saw the time, and sat bolt upright with such violence that Maan woke beside her convinced something had happened.

"What?"

"Exam."

"Yes."

"What time is it?"

He told her. She made a small horrified noise and launched herself out of bed. Within minutes she was brushing her hair with one hand and trying to read notes with the other, tea cooling untouched beside her.

"Geet."

"Hmm?"

"Your shoe."

She looked down. One shoe. She stared at her own foot as though it had personally betrayed her. Maan found the other beneath the chair.

"Thank you."

"Should I be concerned that biotechnology is destroying basic object permanence?"

"Not today."

He drove her to campus. At the gate she reached for the door handle, then stopped and looked at him, and for one second neither seemed entirely certain what married people were supposed to do before an exam. Then she leaned across and kissed his cheek, quickly, softly. Maan went still.

"Bye." She was already opening the door.

"Geet." She looked back. His expression made her smile.

"Good luck," he said.

Her smile warmed. "Thank you."

She left, and Maan remained sitting in the car for several seconds after she'd disappeared through the gate. His manager, calling at exactly that moment, received a distracted hello and wisely chose not to ask why.

By afternoon, the suite had begun accommodating two completely different lives. Geet occupied the desk with textbooks, loose pages, and handwritten diagrams; Maan worked from one of the armchairs with his laptop, phone, and several documents his manager had delivered. Their worlds touched at the edges. She muttered scientific terminology under her breath; he spoke quietly about valuations and project timelines. Sometimes one interrupted the other. Sometimes both forgot the other was there.

That, strangely, was when Geet became most conscious of him - not when he was looking at her, but when he wasn't. Maan concentrating had a stillness she hadn't seen in the bookshop. His face changed. The charm disappeared. He read quickly, expression sharpening, fingers occasionally tapping once against the arm of the chair before he made a decision. She liked watching him think. Perhaps too much.

Once he looked up without warning and caught her.

"Again?"

"I wasn't staring."

"You have now used that defense twice."

"I am studying."

"Yes, ma'am."

She smiled despite herself.

An hour later she had been reading cell signalling long enough that the words had stopped behaving like language. She dropped her pen. "Break."

Maan glanced up. She stood, stretched, and then, without thinking about it enough to stop herself, put both hands on the carpet and cartwheeled across the open space beside the bed.

He stared. She straightened.

"What," he said slowly, "was that?"

"A cartwheel."

"I identified the cartwheel."

"Then why did you ask?"

"I was hoping there was a rational explanation for why my wife just inverted herself in the middle of a biotechnology textbook."

She laughed. "My legs went numb."

"That explains stretching."

"Cartwheeling is more efficient."

"Is it?"

"No."

She was still smiling when her gaze dropped. "I used to do things like that all the time. When I was little."

Maan waited.

"After I came to live with Aunt Sunita..." She shrugged. "She liked the house quiet. Things put away. Homework done. Mehek could get away with more because she was-" she stopped, searching for it "-Mehek." A tiny smile touched her mouth. "I think I just got very good at not making trouble."

Maan closed his laptop.

Geet looked toward the strip of carpet she'd crossed. "Sometimes after everyone left the bookshop, I'd put music on very quietly and-"

"And?"

She looked embarrassed. "Dance. Make faces at myself in the mirror. Do impressions."

"Cartwheels."

"Sometimes." She looked at him cautiously, as though some part of her still expected amusement to turn into judgment.

Maan stood, and moved the armchair farther back.

"What are you doing?"

"Providing clearance."

"For what?"

"Another one."

Her eyes widened. "Maan."

"The room permits cartwheels."

A laugh escaped her. "No."

"Yes."

"I am not doing another cartwheel on command."

"Fine." He took two steps backward. She grew suspicious.

"What are you doing?"

Maan attempted a cartwheel. It was terrible - not catastrophic, but close enough that one leg came down much too early and he had to catch himself against the desk.

For a second she only stared. Then the giggle came out before she could stop it, a proper one, bright and helpless, both hands flying to her mouth.

He straightened with the remnants of his dignity. "That was awful."

"Yes."

"You nearly broke your neck."

"Possibly."

"Maan!"

"But you laughed."

She did again. He watched her, and something about the way he looked at her changed the laugh into a smile - soft, almost shy.

"You don't mind?"

"What?"

"This."

He looked around theatrically. "I have concerns about the structural integrity of my spine."

She shook her head. "No. Me being-" she couldn't finish it. Silly sounded childish. Too much sounded worse.

"Geet." Maan waited until she looked at him. "You don't have to stop because I'm here."

He paused. "Actually, I'd prefer you didn't."

Her eyes warmed at his answer, and then he ruined it, slightly. "Within reasonable limits. I draw the line at juggling fire."

She giggled again. "Idiot."

Maan smiled as though he'd been given something. And perhaps he had.

They did not become effortlessly comfortable overnight. Some things became easier. Others became more noticeable precisely because they were married now.

Earlier that same evening, while they sat side by side on the bed going through her notes, her bare foot accidentally brushed his ankle. She pulled it back immediately.

"Sorry."

"For having a foot?"

"It was cold."

"I noticed."

Her face warmed. He didn't reach for it, didn't turn the contact into something more - he simply pulled the edge of the blanket over her feet and went back to the question on his phone. The tenderness of that tiny gesture stayed with her absurdly long afterward.

That second night, she woke and realized she'd pulled more than her share of the blanket toward herself. Mortified, she pushed half of it back.

Maan stirred.

"Sorry."

"Hmm?"

"The blanket."

"What about it?"

"I stole it."

A sleepy pause. "Did you?"

"Yes."

"Return it in the morning."

She smiled in the dark.

Their kisses were still deliberate too. Sometimes one of them would look at the other and the room would change; sometimes Maan would ask; sometimes Geet would simply lean in. But there was still nervousness in the first few seconds. Still awareness. Still discovery. Nothing between them had yet become ordinary. She liked that.

On their second evening in the hotel, she was halfway through revising when she looked up from her notes. "Maan?"

He glanced away from his laptop. "Hmm?"

"Have you told your family yet?"

The warmth in the room shifted almost imperceptibly.

"No."

Geet's fingers stopped against the page. "You said you would after the registry."

"I know."

"Maan, that was two days ago."

He leaned back. "I want to tell them in person."

"Why?"

"Because I don't want to tell my parents I got married over the phone while we're here and you're trying to finish exams."

Geet looked down at her notes. "I thought they'd know by now."

That landed differently.

"They will."

She looked at him again. "When we go to Delhi?"

"Yes."

"Before I meet them?"

A pause.

"Yes."

Geet nodded, though the small unease didn't entirely leave her, and returned to the book. He watched her for another second before returning to his own work. To him, postponing the conversation and hiding his wife were two entirely different things. She wasn't sure they were. But two days into a marriage was an odd time to discover how much meaning could live inside the difference between two words, and she filed it away.

The following morning, while Geet sat her final exam, Maan's manager arrived at the hotel with news. The trustee acknowledgement had cleared faster than expected. The administrative handover of Geet's estate was essentially complete.

Maan stood beside the windows listening.

"And the parcel documentation?"

"Preliminary valuation is done. We have two possible structures drafted."

"Protections?"

"Outlined. Nothing final."

He nodded. His manager hesitated. "Once she has control, we can approach her."

"I'll approach her."

"You leave for Delhi tomorrow?"

"If she wants to."

His manager glanced at the folder. "Do I hold this?"

Maan looked down at it. Everything was nearly ready - a fair valuation, possible equity structures, dilution protections, exit provisions, all of it designed so that when he finally put the question to her, she could take the proposal to independent counsel of her own. He had solved every problem that could be solved on paper.

"No. Keep preparing it. Valuation, structures, protections. Nothing goes to her until I speak to her."

"When?"

Maan closed the folder. "After today."

His manager didn't ask what after today meant. That was fortunate. Maan wasn't entirely sure himself.

Geet came out of the examination hall just before noon. For several seconds she stood at the top of the steps in the bright mountain sunlight, stunned by the absence of anything else she was supposed to revise. Three years. Done.

Then she saw Maan, leaning against the car at the edge of the road, jacket off, sleeves rolled up again, watching the stream of students come through the gates. His face changed when he saw her. Her stomach did that increasingly familiar little turn, and she walked faster without meaning to.

He straightened. "Well?"

She stopped in front of him. "Done."

"All of it?"

"All of it."

She heard herself say it and suddenly understood what it meant. No next semester. No timetable waiting to be printed. No exam whose date she had forgotten because she'd somehow managed to get married in the middle of finals. Three years had ended on an ordinary Thursday morning.

Her smile widened. "I don't have to explain apoptosis to you ever again."

"I was beginning to enjoy apoptosis."

"You asked whether cells could simply refuse."

"It seemed reasonable."

"It was not reasonable."

He reached for her bag, and she let him take it this time. "Happy?"

She considered, then smiled. "Very."

He looked at her for a second longer than necessary. "Good."

They walked rather than getting straight into the car. She wanted to - the day was too clear to waste behind glass. They passed shops she'd known for years, people she recognized, the tea stall where too much of her life had somehow happened in less than three weeks. At one crossing Maan placed his hand lightly at the small of her back to guide her past a scooter. The touch lasted perhaps two seconds. She felt it for considerably longer.

That was what these days had done to her - made her aware of him everywhere. His hand near hers. His voice behind her. The weight of him lowering himself onto the other side of the mattress. The way he bent his head to listen when she spoke softly. The startling physical fact of him, yes - but also the stranger intimacy of knowing that when she woke tomorrow, he would still be there.

She glanced at him.

Maan was already looking at her.

For a second neither looked away.

"What?" she asked softly.

His mouth shifted. "Nothing."

Geet smiled. "That's my word."

"I'm borrowing it."

She slipped her hand into his. His fingers closed immediately around hers. Then she remembered.

"Now?"

He knew what she meant. His family. His promise. Delhi.

His expression settled. "Now."

"You'll tell them?"

"In person."

She stopped walking. He stopped with her. She looked up at him.

"Before I meet them."

"Yes."

"You promise?"

Something moved across his face so quickly she couldn't name it. Then he squeezed her hand.

"I promise."

She nodded. She believed him. Why wouldn't she?

For now, beneath the clean Shimla sunlight, with her exams finished and her husband's hand warm around hers, Delhi was only the next place they were going together.

_________________________________

Author's Note

Part 13 is up 💛

This chapter felt like a little pocket of happiness before everything changes again. I wanted Maan and Geet to have a few ordinary, almost domestic moments together - studying, teasing, laughing, wandering through Shimla - because sometimes the smallest moments are the ones that make a relationship feel the most real.

And of course, beneath all that softness, there are still things Maan hasn't said. 👀

Please comment and tell me:

• Did this chapter make you feel like Maan and Geet are beginning to settle into marriage more naturally?
• Which of their little moments together did you enjoy the most?
• Do you think Geet is becoming more confident and comfortable around him?
• How nervous are you about Delhi now that Maan still hasn't told his family about the marriage? 😭
• And most importantly: which moment in this chapter stayed with you after you finished reading?

I read every comment, and I genuinely love seeing how differently everyone reads Maan, Geet and their choices. Even a one-line reaction or your favourite scene means a lot, so don't lurk quietly 😄💛

Also, if you enjoy my writing and would like to support my published work, I have books available on Amazon as well:

The Price of her Freedom

Written in the Storm

Vampire & Angel

12

maan n geet are settling in hotel room

geet find room bigger that her friends flat

both become informal with passing time

geet had her exam next and day after that

13

geet is asking maan when he is going to inform his parents about their marriage

maan need time n wants to say it in person

geet finish her exam n ready to step new life ahead with maan

waiting to know how geet is going to react knowing maan want her land for business

Chapter 12

Geet was indeed conscious

At least Maan made her feel comfortable

Enjoyed their banter

Geet'sthoughts were understandable

Liked their conversation

At least Maan asked for permission before he kissed her

Glad that Maan and Geet are getting closer

Maan needs to be honest with Geet

She indeed trusted him

As expected Maan wants to still until she finishes her exams

He really cares for her

Not surprised that she was unable to study

Great that they conversed about their schooling days

Chapter 13

Gosh woke up late and panicked

Liked that she kissed Maan on his cheek

Well they work in the same space

Adore Geet drooling on Maan

Of cos he caught her

Admire how Geet handled the situation

Wow she did a cartwheel

Maan was indeed shocked

Loved that she opened up to him

Sad how Sunita treated Geet

Geet really had a tough childhood

However she made it work

Ha ha Maan attempted a cartwheel

At least Geet had a good laugh

As expected Maan has yet told his family

Geet's remarks were justified

Maan and his manager discuss the land

Wish Maan told Geet everything from the beginning

Hope he does not do anything wrong

Finally her exams are over

Not surprised with Geet's question

Pleased that Maan assured her

Update soon thank you

Enjoying the story so far

Worried that Maan has not told his family about his marriage

Will they accept Geet?

Geet is becoming confident

wow....what a way to end their wedding day....sudden realisation exams the next day and then studying for it....but a comfortable space where both are working on their own stuff but fully aware of the other person in the room...getting slowly used to each other...

now comes the hard part and reality....

maan disclosing their marriage to his family

maan discloing about the property to geet...

scary...want her to be happy not going from fryign pan to fire...

dont want her to think sunita aunty was bette...atleast she was open about her feelings...nothing hidden there..unlke maan...

lets see

Part 13

Soft and Amazing Update

Firstly Geet doing a cartwheel in front of Maan was rather cute

while he attempted to do one himself and failed miserably

the fact that Maan still have not spoken to his parents about his marriage

may cause issues in Delhi , will they accept Geet

Geet trust Maan and I really don't want him betraying her

both sleeping and Geet taking most of the blanket was rather cute again

but when both were on the bed and Geet's cold feet touched Maan

he immediately covered her feet to warm them , so he does care about her

Wonderful update 😀

Chapter Fourteen: The Khurana House

The estate handover came through faster than Geet expected. It arrived without ceremony - a call from the solicitor who had handled her parents' trust, several documents in her inbox, and an explanation dry enough that she had to ask him to repeat the important part twice.

The trustees' authority had ended when she married.

Under the settlement her parents had created, management of the landed estate now shifted into the marital arrangement, with her husband assuming much of the authority the trustees had previously exercised over major property decisions.

Geet sat on the edge of the hotel bed, phone against her ear, staring at nothing.

"So I spent years being told I wasn't old enough to manage my own property," she said slowly, "and the solution was apparently to get married."

There was a careful pause from the solicitor.

"That would be an inelegant way of putting it."

"It would also be an accurate one."

Another pause.

"Yes."

Geet almost laughed.

Almost.

Her irritation was too old for surprise. She had spent years resenting a will written by two people who had loved her completely and still somehow imagined that adulthood would become safer once a husband stood between their daughter and difficult decisions.

The solicitor continued explaining signatures, transitional documents, records that would now need updating.

Geet listened.

Mostly.

When the call ended, she remained sitting for another minute.

The land was still hers.

That mattered.

The strange machinery around it had simply changed hands.

At least, she thought, putting the phone aside, the person standing there now was someone she had chosen.

The thought did not frighten her.

Why would it?

Maan told her about the parcel that evening.

He was halfway through tea when he set the cup down.

"There's something I should tell you."

Geet looked up.

Something in his face made her straighten.

"The project needs a parcel that belongs to your estate."

Geet stared at him for a moment.

Then held out her hand.

"Show me."

Maan blinked.

"The plans."

"Right."

He reached for his phone.

By the time his manager arrived - carrying several maps and wearing the expression of a man who had clearly received a more urgent summons than Maan intended to admit - Geet had moved her books aside and the table had disappeared beneath development plans.

She leaned over them.

Road access.

Survey lines.

Elevation markings.

Proposed structures.

Then her finger stopped.

"This is ours."

Maan followed her hand.

"The old eastern boundary," she said. "Uncle showed me once, when I was little. This whole piece belonged to my parents."

It was the same parcel she had once complained about to Maan - land sitting useless while a will written years ago continued deciding what living Geet could and could not do with it.

She looked at him.

"How badly do you need it?"

He did not soften the answer.

"Badly enough that every alternative quietly turns into a different project."

"How different?"

"Smaller. Worse access. Worse economics." He glanced down at the plans. "We can build elsewhere. It just won't be this."

Geet studied the map.

Maan said nothing else.

After a while she looked up and found him watching her rather than the plans.

Not impatiently.

Waiting.

She looked down again.

For years, she had hated the idea of that land existing only as paperwork - technically hers, practically beyond her reach.

Now something could actually happen there.

Something she could see.

Visit.

Point to one day.

"I don't want it sitting there forever doing nothing."

Maan stayed quiet.

"Use it."

His eyes remained on hers.

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

"You don't have to answer tonight."

"I know."

"And if you want someone independent to look at what we're proposing-"

"Maan."

He stopped.

"I said yes."

A second passed.

Then some of the tension left his shoulders.

"All right."

Geet looked back down at the boundary.

For the first time, the development stopped feeling like one of Maan's business stories - numbers, land, projections, people she would probably never meet.

Her finger rested on the map.

"Then let this be the first thing we build together."

Maan looked at her.

Something softened in his face.

"I'd like that."

The paperwork moved quickly after that.

Much of the preliminary work already existed. Surveys had been done. Development plans had been prepared around several possible routes. The project entity and most of the supporting documents were already in place while the company waited to know which version of the project would actually survive.

Geet signed where her own signature was required and read what she was given before doing it, occasionally asking questions that made Maan's manager look pleasantly surprised.

Later that evening, walking back toward their room, the conversation had already wandered so far from land and paperwork that Geet stopped near the door and bumped her shoulder lightly against Maan's arm.

"That was inadequate."

Maan caught her around the waist before she could move away.

She rose onto her toes and kissed his cheek.

"Fine?"

"Still inadequate"

"It was a thank-you kiss."

Maan kissed her temple.

By the time they went inside, the land had already stopped being the most interesting thing either of them was thinking about.

The following morning, they flew to Delhi.

"I'm telling them before you walk in," Maan said, in the car. "Pulling my mother aside the moment we arrive, if I have to."

Geet looked toward the road ahead.

She spent most of the rest of the drive with her hands folded very deliberately in her lap.

"You're doing the thing," Maan said.

"What thing?"

"Sitting like you've been called to the principal's office."

She unfolded her hands. It didn't help. The city beyond the window was enormous after Shimla - flat, loud, moving too fast - and somewhere ahead of them waited a family she had never met, whose name she'd known before she'd ever known the man attached to it.

"They really don't know," she said. Not quite a question.

"No."

"Not even your mother?"

"No."

"Maan."

"I know."

"You're about to walk your secret wife into your family home."

"I'm aware of how it sounds."

"That wasn't a criticism of the sound. I'm only confirming the scale of it."

"Duly confirmed." He took her hand, steady and warm. "You're my wife. That isn't a negotiation, no matter how they react to hearing about it."

The gates rose ahead of them, and Maan's attention sharpened on something near the entrance before Geet had even registered it - a car, dark and unremarkable to her, parked close to the main door.

"Something wrong?"

"That's Ahluwalia's car."

"Who?"

"One of our largest strategic partners." He said it quickly, economically, the way he explained things he'd rather not have to explain at all.

"You recognize his car?"

"His driver."

Geet looked at him. "That is somehow worse."

"I didn't know he was coming today."

"Business?"

"Probably."

The house was not gaudy, which would almost have been easier. No absurd fountains, no gold-plated walls - only age, scale, the quiet confidence of wealth that had never once needed to prove itself. Trees older than the house. Wings Geet couldn't see the end of. Staff who moved through the halls with a discretion that suggested they'd been specifically trained never to be noticed while noticing anything.

"You could lose people here," she murmured.

"We have."

"Maan."

"Temporarily."

That helped, a little. Inside, generations of Khuranas watched down from paneled walls while Geet wondered how many of them would disapprove of her before she'd even had the chance to learn their names. Maan didn't let go of her hand.

She'd chosen the green silk that morning - the one Maan had given her during her exam days after the wedding - wanting, she supposed, to arrive looking like someone who was glad to belong to this, rather than someone merely visiting it. In the car she'd touched the sindoor (vermilion) at her parting and asked, quietly, "Is this too much?"

Maan had looked at her as though the question made no sense at all. "No."

His mother met them in the central hall. Geet knew her instantly, even before Maan said anything - not from photographs, but from something in the shape of her face that lived recognizably in his. She stopped when she saw them, and her gaze moved, in order, from their joined hands to the sindoor at Geet's parting to the mangalsutra at her throat, and something in the room changed before Maan had said a single word.

"Maan. You didn't say you were bringing anyone."

"Mother." He didn't release Geet's hand. "This is Geet. My wife."

The silence that followed wasn't the ordinary kind, the kind that comes from people simply needing a second to respond. It was structural - the kind that changes the shape of a room. Somewhere behind them, a cousin paused on the staircase. Staff looked away with practiced, professional care.

"Your-"

"Wife."

"I heard you." His mother's eyes hadn't left Geet since the mangalsutra. She didn't look disdainful. That would have been easier. She looked, plainly, like a woman doing arithmetic that had already finished before she wanted it to - the green silk, the sindoor, the gold at Geet's throat, all of it unmistakable, all of it saying what Maan hadn't yet needed to.

"Your uncle moved the Ahluwalia meeting here today," she added, almost as an afterthought, as though it were the smaller of the two impossible things currently happening in her hall. "They're in the west drawing room. With half the family."

Maan's jaw tightened. He hadn't known that either. The window he'd meant to pull his mother aside in had already closed.

An older man appeared in the drawing-room doorway - silver-haired, immaculately dressed - and beside him a young woman a few years older than Geet, elegant in a way that seemed entirely unstudied. Geet didn't know her. There was no reason yet that she should.

Naina did not have that luxury. Her gaze went straight to the joined hands, then up - the sindoor, the mangalsutra, the unmistakable, complete grammar of a woman who was somebody's wife - and something in her face simply came apart.

"You married her?"

It wasn't aimed at Geet. It landed on Maan like a slap, and Maan, who had braced for exactly one kind of disaster walking through that door, felt an entirely different one open up beneath him.

"Naina-"

"Weren't you-" She stopped herself, visibly gathering something back together, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped, quieter and worse for it. "Maan, weren't you supposed to marry me? Isn't that where everyone said this was going? Dad thought you knew that. I thought you knew that."

Geet went very still. Nobody had told her there was a Naina to be accounted for, let alone one standing eight feet away, asking a question about a future Geet hadn't known existed until this exact second.

Something in her head had started, very quietly, to go to static - not thought exactly, not yet panic, just a low, continuous interference underneath everything, the sound a radio makes in the space between stations. She would try, much later, to remember the next several minutes in order, and fail. They arrived instead as fragments floating in that same noise, unanchored from each other, none of them quite finishing before the next one started.

Naina caught the stillness a moment later - really looked at her, properly, for the first time - and whatever had been building in her face folded, quickly, into something closer to embarrassment. "You didn't know," she said to Geet. It wasn't a question.

Geet didn't answer. She didn't have one ready. She wasn't certain, underneath the static, that she had a voice currently available to supply one with.

Mr. Ahluwalia hadn't moved, hadn't raised his voice, hadn't so much as changed his expression beyond a slight, cool stillness that was somehow worse than his daughter's outburst. Behind him, the drawing room Geet had assumed held perhaps three or four people turned out to hold considerably more - she caught, in the space of a few seconds, an older man rising slowly from a chair near the window, two women exchanging a glance across the room, a teenager being steered firmly out through a side door by someone Geet would later learn was a nanny, a child's half-finished question hushed by whoever's hand had found their shoulder first. The Khurana family, it turned out, did not do anything in twos and threes.

The older man from the window crossed toward them first - broader through the shoulders than Maan, a heavier, more confrontational version of the same face. "Maan." No greeting. His gaze moved from Geet to their hands to the Ahluwalias and back again. "Explain this to me."

"He says they're married," his mother said, before Maan could answer for himself.

"Married." Viren - Maan's uncle, his father's younger brother - didn't so much as glance at her. "How long?"

"A little over a week."

The number settled over the room like a weight. The marriage was young. The relationship younger still. Viren looked at him the way a man looks at a sum that has failed, publicly, to balance.

"You went to Shimla for the development."

"Yes."

"And came back married."

"Yes."

It was a second man's silence, not Viren's questions, that Maan felt first - his father, Rajendra Khurana, standing further back near the window Viren had just left. Rajendra had not raised his voice in Maan's presence more than a handful of times in twenty-six years, and did not raise it now. He simply watched, arms folded, an expression on his face that Maan recognized from exactly one other memory - a shareholder meeting, years ago, where a man Rajendra had personally vouched for had been caught lying to the board. That same still, terrible arithmetic. Maan would have preferred shouting.

It was Mr. Ahluwalia who spoke next, his tone unbroken, perfectly courteous, which made it worse rather than better. "Maan. Forgive me - I'm trying to understand the relevance of this. The Shimla parcel was the one unresolved obstacle when we last spoke. Your uncle tells me the company now has control of it." His gaze flicked, briefly, toward Geet, and back. "Is this marriage connected to that?"

Mr. Ahluwalia's question didn't frighten Maan because the man could somehow undo the marriage. He couldn't. Geet was already his wife, legally and now, in front of every person who mattered to either of their families, publicly. Whatever loosely defined possibility had once sat unaddressed between the two families over Naina - a door Maan had simply never bothered to close because closing it had never once felt urgent, right up until it very suddenly was - that possibility was finished the moment he'd walked through this house holding Geet's hand. He understood that. Mr. Ahluwalia, watching all of it with that same cool stillness, understood it too. That fact wasn't what could still break.

What could still break was everything around it.

Three years of positioning sat behind Mr. Ahluwalia's measured face - capital already committed, distribution arrangements already mapped, access to markets the Khuranas had wanted badly enough that Maan had spent years personally proving he could secure them, an agreement he'd helped negotiate and champion inside the wider Khurana machinery partly because the older men in his family had wanted to see whether he could carry something of that scale himself. And underneath all of it, quietly, sat the unspoken understanding about Naina - years of it, never formalized, never actually promised, but real enough that its sudden, public collapse added another layer of apparent recklessness to what the room was already trying to understand.

A man had gone to Shimla to solve a stalled land acquisition and returned, weeks later, secretly married to a woman nobody in his family had ever heard of, having never formally closed a door his family and the Ahluwalias had apparently assumed was still open. If Maan said the true thing now - that he had simply fallen in love, quickly and completely, with a stranger in a bookshop - what did that make him look like to a man who had staked real capital and years of positioning on Maan's judgment specifically? Impulsive. Careless with people, not only with agreements.

The marriage could not be undone.

The alliance still could.

It wasn't going to be the whole truth. It wasn't going to be a lie either, not exactly - men like Mr. Ahluwalia understood ugly but rational far more comfortably than they understood reckless. He believed he could explain the rest of it to Geet privately within the hour, once the room had emptied.

"I married her for the land," he said.

For one full second, nobody moved. The words seemed too small to have done what they'd just done.

Then Geet's hand went slack inside Maan's, and her fingers rose, without her quite deciding to, to the sindoor at her parting - the same sindoor he had applied himself, just over a week ago, with hands less steady than she'd ever seen them - and then to the mangalsutra at her throat, as if checking, in the space of half a second, whether the things he'd given her were still real, now that the reason for all of it had just rearranged itself twice in front of a room full of strangers.

Marriage ended the Trust. Her husband took over.The project needed the eastern parcel. He knew. He proposed. Maps. His hand against the boundary. You're sure? Her own voice: Use it. Papers. Her signatures. Then let this be the first thing we build together.Geet's stomach turned. Her yes had not been what opened the land to him. Marriage had. Before the maps. Before the question. Before he had asked whether she was sure. He had already become the person with the authority to act. Because she had married him. And he had known. He married her for the Land not for her....her Land...the parcel of land ...piece of her ancestral inherited land...that's it....that was her to him...access to Land

He turned to her as he felt her hand go slack. Her face hadn't crumpled. There was no gasp, no sound at all. She was only looking at him, very steadily, and Maan watched it happen - watched the whole of the marriage rearrange itself behind her eyes without hearing a single memory spoken aloud. Her mother's blue saree. The blush when he'd stared at her outside the registrar's office. Will you? His own fingers, unsteady at the clasp of the mangalsutra. Now you'll actually look married. The exam week. A woman named Naina she'd learned existed ninety seconds ago. All of it sliding into a new, uglier alignment, one recollection at a time, becoming evidence against him in a trial he had no way to enter.

Geet did not cry. At least she did not think she did.

The first tear slipped down her face without warning, so quietly that she only became aware of it when something cool reached the edge of her jaw. She did not lift a hand to wipe it away. Another followed. Her expression never changed - still that same steady, unreadable stillness, her eyes fixed somewhere past his shoulder while the static went on turning underneath everything. Her body, it seemed, had understood something before the rest of her had caught up to it.

That, more than anything else in the room, was what told Maan exactly how badly he'd failed her.

"Geet-"

She drew her hand out of his, slowly, almost gently, the way a person sets down something they've only just realized is broken.

Beside her father, Naina looked down at the floor, and didn't look triumphant about any of it - only embarrassed, and quietly, genuinely sorry, in a way Geet registered distantly and had no space left to do anything with. Viren's expression, when Maan made himself glance toward it, had stopped being about the alliance entirely and became something closer to disgust. It was his father's stillness that Maan actually felt, standing a few feet further back, silent, arms still folded, watching his son with an expression that held no surprise in it at all - only the particular, bottomless disappointment of a man recalculating exactly how much he'd once trusted someone. Only Mr. Ahluwalia's face had settled rather than tightened - the alarm in it visibly altering, the problem becoming legible to him at last. Ugly, perhaps. But legible. He had gotten exactly the answer he'd needed. Nobody in the room moved to fill the silence.

He had assumed, walking into this house, that Geet was the one part of his life secure enough to wait - that business needed protecting now, and whatever this cost her could be repaired afterward, privately, once the room emptied. He had never once considered that a single sentence, spoken by his own mouth, might not be something she could simply be told the truth about later. That it might already be the truth she believed.

And for the first time since a storm had trapped them together in a bookshop, Geet looked at Maan Khurana as though she had never met him at all - as though a week of index cards, just over a week of marriage, nights spent asleep against his chest, and a mangalsutra fastened with unsteady hands belonged to a life that had happened to somebody else, and she had simply been standing close enough to mistake it for her own.

___________

Author's Note

Part 14 is up 💛

Well... the Shimla bubble had to burst eventually. 😭

This chapter was always meant to feel like Geet walking straight from the warmth and intimacy of the last few parts into Maan's world - his family, his status, old expectations, business relationships, and complications she barely knew existed.

And then, of course, Maan says that. 👀

I'm especially curious about this chapter because I don't want to tell you what to think about Maan here. His actions can be read in very different ways depending on how much you trust him, what you think his original intentions were, and how you interpret everything that has happened between him and Geet so far.

Please comment and tell me:

• What was your reaction when Maan introduced Geet as his wife?
• How did you feel watching Geet enter the Khurana house genuinely hoping to belong there?
• What did you think of the family's reaction to the marriage?
• What did you make of Naina and the revelation that another marriage had apparently been expected?
• At what point did you realise the evening was going badly wrong?
• And the big one: what did you think when Maan said he married Geet for the land?
• Did that sentence change how you interpreted his proposal, the wedding, or their time together afterward?
• Do you think Maan was telling the truth, lying, simplifying something more complicated - or do you genuinely not know yet?
• What do you think Geet believes now?
• And most importantly: which moment in this chapter stayed with you after you finished reading?

This is one of those parts where I'm particularly interested in completely different reader interpretations, so please don't worry about having the "right" reaction. I want to know what you believed while reading it.

Even a one-line reaction counts, so don't disappear silently after that ending. 😂😭💛

Also, if you enjoy my writing and would like to support my published work, I have books available on Amazon as well:

📚 My books on Amazon

Book 1