The thing about June in Delhi is that it doesn't arrive so much as it sits on you, like a large disapproving relative who has decided your whole personality needs correcting. By ten in the morning the marble floors of our house were already warm enough to feel through socks, and by noon the garden outside my window had gone the particular sun-bleached yellow-green that meant even the gardener had given up and gone to sleep under the guava tree.

I was upstairs, technically packing — I'd been home from college three days and had not put away a single thing, because unpacking felt like admitting the year was over — when I heard the gate.

Not just the gate. The particular sound of the gate when someone important was arriving, which was different from the sound it made for the vegetable man or my cousins or literally anyone whose visit didn't require Meena to iron the good tablecloth at seven in the morning muttering about ungrateful children who don't warn her in advance.

I went to the window like every nosy person in the history of nosy people has gone to a window, and that's how I first saw him again — not through the door, not introduced properly, but from above, the way you see a chess piece before you understand it's about to take your queen.

Viraj Sethi got out of the car like he was already annoyed at the car for taking so long to stop.

I want to be extremely clear about what I expected, because it matters for how spectacularly wrong I was. I expected the Viraj from photographs at my father's dinners — dark suit, unreadable, good-looking in a way that reads more like a warning label than an invitation. I expected, honestly, the boy from when I was eleven and he was twenty, the one my mother used to talk about in that voice she used for people she'd decided to be kind to, the voice that meant we are helping this family, please be gracious about it. That Sethi boy, poor thing, after what happened with his father. I remembered him mostly as someone who ate quietly at the far end of the table and left before dessert, like he'd calculated exactly how long his welcome lasted.

The man getting out of the car three days into my summer was not eating quietly at the far end of anything.

He'd have been six foot two if he ever stood up straight for the joy of it instead of because a posture coach probably scared him once. Dark hair cut close and precise, not a strand of it consulting him for permission to move in the heat. He said something to the driver — Bahadur, I'd learn his name was, though at the time he was just the driver who Viraj Sethi spoke to like a person and not furniture, which I noted and filed away without understanding yet that I was already building a file — and then he looked up.

Not at me. At the house. At our house, the way you look at a building you're about to be responsible for making sense of.

I had approximately four seconds of pure, uncomplicated looking before Meena's voice came up the stairwell like a fire alarm with better manners. "Ira baby, come down, come down, your father is calling, the Sethi beta has come—"

The Sethi beta. Twenty-nine years old, a company that used to be a punchline at parties and was now apparently the reason my father smiled the way he only smiled at money, and I was standing at my window in an old college t-shirt with my hair in the world's saddest bun, cataloguing the way a stranger's forearms looked when he rolled his sleeves.

In my defense: it had been a very long, very single first year of college.

---

By the time I made it downstairs — after the bun was abandoned for something that looked accidentally effortless and took eleven minutes — the whole ground floor had rearranged itself around him the way furniture rearranges itself around a fire. My father, expansive, delighted, one hand permanently on Viraj's shoulder like he was worried the good fortune might get away if he let go. My mother, gracious in the way that meant she was recalculating something in real time behind her eyes. Karan, my brother, hovering with that tension of a man who has been told this merger is good for the family and is trying very hard to believe it.

And Viraj himself, in the middle of all that noise, doing something I found instantly, deeply irritating: being quiet about it. Answering my father in short, exact sentences. Not performing gratitude, not performing anything. Just standing there being looked at like he was used to it and had opinions about whether he deserved it that he wasn't sharing with the room.

"Ira." My father's hand extended toward me like I was a product he was pleased with. "You remember Viraj. He'll be staying in the east wing through the merger — treat him like family, beta."

Treat him like family is one of those sentences that sounds simple and is, in fact, never simple, in any house, ever.

"Of course," I said, and put on the smile I'd been perfecting since I was nine, the one that made aunties say what a sweet girl and made me want to throw something. "Welcome back to the house of people who used to feel sorry for you."

There was a silence with actual texture to it. My mother's teacup paused halfway to her mouth. Karan made a sound like he'd swallowed a laugh sideways.

Viraj looked at me — really looked at me, dark eyes doing a fast, unhurried assessment that ran down my spine before I understood what it was — and something moved at the corner of his mouth that wasn't quite a smile. More like the ghost of one, filed for later use.

"I remember you were shorter," he said.

"I remember you left before dessert."

"I had reasons."

"Everyone always does."

My father laughed, delighted, oblivious, already turning back to business — let me show you the study, the papers are ready, Karan, bring the merger file — and just like that the room's attention moved off us the way weather moves, and I was left standing in the front hall in my accidentally-effortless outfit having apparently just had an entire conversation with a stranger using only eleven words and a raised eyebrow.

I went and found Rhea on video call within the hour, lying on my bed with my phone propped against a pillow, the ceiling fan turning too slowly to do anything but rearrange the heat.

"Okay but describe him like I'm a jury," Rhea said, already eating something crunchy directly into her laptop mic.

"Tall. Rude. Extremely — " I stopped, hunting for the word, and landed, with some private horror, on the honest one. "Competent-looking. Like he knows exactly how good he looks and finds it slightly beneath him to mention."

"So hot."

"I didn't say hot."

"You described a man as competent-looking with your voice doing a thing. That's a scientific term for hot, Ira, I did a whole semester of psych."

I threw a pillow at the phone, which achieved nothing except knocking it off the stand, and lay there afterward staring at the slow ceiling fan, thinking — not about the merger, not about my father's delighted hand on a stranger's shoulder, but about four seconds at a window, and a man who'd looked up at the house like he already half owned it.

Treat him like family, my father had said.

I had, historically, an excellent track record of doing the opposite of what I was told. I just hadn't yet decided, that first stifling afternoon, whether that instinct was about to get me into trouble, or exactly where I wanted to be.