Zoya Thakur had a theory about her new next-door problem, and the theory was this: men that handsome were never actually funny. They didn't need to be. The face did the work, and the personality atrophied from disuse, like a muscle nobody bothered training because the mirror already did all the heavy lifting.

Dhruv was inconveniently, infuriatingly disproving her theory in real time, and she resented it the way she resented anything that made her laugh before she'd decided whether she was in the mood to.

She'd clocked him the first morning — obviously she had, the man had the subtlety of a marching band, standing on Aman Vashisht's porch in a flannel that fit him like a rumor, watching her destroy a hydrangea with the focused intensity of someone avoiding thinking about something else entirely. She recognized that particular quality of distraction. She'd been doing a version of it herself for six years, ever since she'd traded architecture-firm ambitions in Delhi for heritage restoration work in Shimla that her mother still introduced, at every single family function, as "Zoya's little hobby, isn't it sweet."

It was not a hobby. It was a business with actual clients and actual invoices and an actual waiting list, currently including two hoteliers and a Bombay film producer who wanted his grandfather's crumbling Chota Shimla bungalow turned into a boutique retreat. But try explaining "actual business" to Kamini Thakur, who had spent the last four years treating Zoya's unmarried status like a structural crack that needed urgent, expensive repair before the whole house came down.

That crack, as far as Kamini was concerned, had a name, and the name was Yuvraj Oberoi.

Zoya had met him exactly six times. He was handsome in the specific, over-lit way of a man who'd been photographed by a professional more often than he'd been photographed by accident — jaw like it had been architecturally reviewed, a laugh that arrived a half-second before whatever he'd said actually landed as funny, as if he'd rehearsed the timing rather than felt it. He talked about his father's ministry the way other men talked about cricket scores, with statistics, and he had once spent eleven straight minutes explaining to Zoya why heritage restoration was "sweet, but not really scalable," a phrase she had turned over in her head with murderous frequency ever since.

Her parents adored him. More precisely: her father owed his family something, some old debt from the year Zoya was nineteen that no one in the house discussed above a whisper, and her mother had decided, with the terrifying efficiency of a woman closing a decade-long project, that repaying it through Zoya's marriage was simply the tidiest available solution.

Zoya had spent that year — the bad year, the year the house had nearly come apart at its foundations over money and pride and a scandal she'd only ever gotten half-explanations about — learning to be so useful, so undemanding, so quietly competent that nobody would ever again have reason to look at her and think this is another problem. She'd covered for her father's silences at dinner. She'd talked her mother down from crying jags in the kitchen at midnight. She'd gotten perfect marks, made no noise, wanted nothing out loud, because wanting things out loud, she'd learned early and permanently, was what broke families.

Eight years later, that lesson had calcified into a marriage she'd never actually agreed to, being arranged around her like scaffolding she wasn't allowed to look at directly.

She thought about all of this — the Oberoi problem, the invoice she still hadn't sent the film producer, the crack in the Chota Shimla bungalow's east wall that kept her up some nights more than any man ever had — while she watched, from her kitchen window, the ridiculous stranger next door attempt to chop wood with the form of someone who had learned the theory from a video and none of the practice from a body.

He caught her watching. Of course he did. He straightened up, axe still hanging from one hand, and called across the low fence with the shameless confidence of a man who'd apparently decided embarrassment was beneath him: "Enjoying the show?"

"Immensely. You're going to lose a toe."

"I have excellent toe insurance."

"I don't think that's a real thing."

"It's aspirational." He swung again, missed the log's center by an embarrassing margin, and the log toppled sideways off the block with a soft, undignified thud. Zoya laughed before she could stop herself — a short, surprised bark of a sound she immediately regretted, because it invited him to grin at her like he'd won something. "There it is," he said. "I knew you had one in there."

"One what?"

"A laugh. I've been theorizing all week that you might actually be capable of joy, buried very deep, like a mineral deposit."

"You've been theorizing about me?"

"Extensively. I have very little else to do. Aman won't let me leave the property, apparently there's a security perimeter now, which is new and unnerving information about your neighborhood."

She should have let that pass. Instead, against every piece of good sense she owned, she found herself leaning on the fence post, arms crossed, exactly the posture she'd have mocked in anyone else for how much interest it betrayed. "What did you do to end up needing a security perimeter, exactly?"

Something flickered across his face — there and gone so fast she almost doubted she'd seen it, the easy charm dropping half a degree before it slammed back into place. "Dramatic exaggeration on Aman's part. He's always been the anxious one. I once forgot to lock the office on a Friday and he built an entire disaster-recovery flowchart before Monday."

It was a good deflection. She noted, filing it away with the same instinct she used on a load-bearing wall that looked fine from the outside but sounded wrong when you knocked on it, that it was too good — smooth, rehearsed, the kind of answer a person gave when they'd practiced giving it. She let it go, for now, because she had her own reasons to not push too hard on other people's locked doors. She had one of her own, after all, several actually, tucked into notebooks in a desk drawer nobody in her family had ever thought to open.

"Well," she said instead, "your form is genuinely terrible. Grip lower, swing from the hips, not the shoulders."

He raised an eyebrow, delighted. "Are you offering to teach me?"

"I'm offering unsolicited criticism free of charge. Teaching costs extra."

"What's the rate?"

"More than you can afford, Loitering Boy."

"Fair." He picked the log back up, set it on the block with exaggerated care, like a man conceding a point in a negotiation he intended to win eventually anyway. "For the record, I'd pay it. I've got nothing but time and a truly aggressive amount of curiosity about you."

"That's called being nosy."

"I prefer 'invested.'"

She didn't have an answer for that one that didn't sound like flirting back, so she turned and went inside instead, feeling his eyes on her all the way to the door, feeling — infuriatingly, humiliatingly — pleased about it in a way she had absolutely no intention of examining tonight, or possibly ever.

---

Kamini Thakur was in the kitchen when Zoya came in, going through the week's calendar with the focused intensity of a general reviewing troop positions.

"There's a lunch on Thursday," her mother said, without looking up. "The Oberois. Just an informal thing, getting-to-know-each-other, nothing to fuss over."

"You said that about the last one, and I ended up hearing eleven minutes about scalability."

"He's a serious young man. Serious young men aren't always fun, Zoya, but they are reliable, and reliable is worth more than fun by the time you're my age, believe me."

"I'm twenty-seven, Ma. Not fifty. I'd like both, actually, if it's not too much to ask the universe."

Kamini's pen stopped moving. She looked up — and there it was, the specific look Zoya had learned to dread since she was nineteen, the one that carried an entire unspoken conversation about debts and duty and a year none of them talked about above a whisper. "Your father's name means something to that family. It's meant something for eight years, and it's time we — that we acknowledge it properly. Is that so terrible? To want to see you settled with someone stable, from a good family, instead of—" She stopped herself.

"Instead of what?"

"Nothing. Wear the blue on Thursday. Not the green — the green makes you look like you're hiding from something."

Zoya went up to her room without answering, because answering was how arguments started, and arguments were the one thing this house could not currently survive, not with her father's blood pressure the way it had been since the spring, not with whatever fragile, silent peace her parents had built out of eight years of not discussing what actually happened the year everything nearly fell apart.

She sat on her bed, pulled her site-notebook out of the drawer where she kept it hidden under old college textbooks, and sketched — a restoration plan for the Chota Shimla bungalow's crumbling veranda, careful and precise, the one place in her entire life where nobody got to tell her what she was allowed to want.

Through her window, faintly, she could hear the rhythmic thud of an axe finally, competently, meeting wood, and she told herself the small, warm feeling in her chest was just satisfaction that he'd finally listened to her advice.

She was, it turned out, an excellent liar to everyone except herself.