"You want to do what to your wardrobe," Rhea said, in the tone of someone who has been handed excellent gossip and intends to milk it for structural integrity.

"Not my whole wardrobe. Just — dinner. Tonight."

I was sitting cross-legged on my bed with my closet doors thrown open like a crime scene, phone propped against my knee, and Rhea's face on the screen doing that delighted-scandalized thing it did whenever I was about to make a bad decision with good production values.

"Ira Ahuja. Are you telling me you want to dress up for the emotionally constipated finance man."

"I want," I said, with as much dignity as a person could have while holding two dupattas up to the light for color comparison, "to remind a grown man that I am also, in fact, a grown-up. That's it. That's the whole plan. It's practically educational."

"It is not educational to wear the green kurta that makes your waist look like that for educational reasons."

"Which green kurta."

Rhea sent me a photo — I'd forgotten I'd even shown her, from a shopping trip in March, a deep bottle-green silk with gold thread at the collar that I'd bought on a reckless whim and never once worn downstairs, because it felt like a dress for a person I wasn't quite yet.

I looked at the photo. Then at my closet. Then, treacherously, at the memory of a jaw setting instead of clenching at breakfast, a man absorbing a small humiliation with his whole controlled body and looking, for one unguarded second, like someone worth being kind to.

This is the part of the story where I should say I thought about it more carefully. I did not. I am twenty years old and I had just spent a year in a college dorm being told by exactly no one that I was pretty in a way that mattered, and here was a man who looked at me like I might be, if I gave him the right amount of evidence.

"It's not about him," I told Rhea, which was true the way a lot of things I told myself that summer were true — technically, around the edges, while the actual center of the sentence quietly lied.

"Sure," Rhea said, delighted. "It's about you. As a feminist statement. About yourself."

"Exactly."

"Send pictures the second it lands. I need to see his whole face fall apart in real time."

---

Karan found me in the hallway outside my room at six, tie back on, looking marginally less exhausted than the morning but not by much.

"Papa wants Viraj at dinner tonight, formal, he's inviting the Khanna family too," he said, leaning against my doorframe with that weary posture of an eldest son who has become, this summer, the family's unofficial events coordinator. "Politics. Aditya's father wants in on some infrastructure tender, Papa's using the merger dinner to soften him up."

"The Khannas? As in Aditya Khanna?"

"You've met him. Nice enough. Bit boring." Karan looked at me properly for the first time, took in the dress I was already half into, the effort visible even from the doorway. "You're dressing up for a business dinner."

"I'm allowed to look nice."

"You're allowed to look nice at breakfast too and you don't."

"Breakfast doesn't have guests."

Karan considered this with the specific squint he did when he suspected he was missing something but couldn't locate what, a look I'd been dodging since I was twelve years old and had learned exactly how much information my face was willing to leak under pressure.

"Just — don't let Papa marry you off to Aditya Khanna over some tender negotiation, all right? You deserve better than being a bargaining chip in Papa's infrastructure ambitions."

"Wow. Romantic."

"I'm serious, Ira."

"I know you are." I reached up and fixed his collar, the way I'd done since I was small enough that it required standing on a chair, and felt something soften in my chest at how easily he still let me. "I'm not marrying anyone over a tender. I'm barely finishing my second year of college."

"Good," Karan said, and kissed the top of my head like I was still eleven, and went to go supervise whatever crisis awaited him downstairs, leaving me alone with a green silk kurta and the growing, treacherous suspicion that I was about to do something a great deal more complicated than looking nice for a business dinner.

---

The Khannas arrived at seven-thirty in a flurry of good manners and better tailoring, Aditya trailing his parents with that patient boredom of a twenty-seven-year-old who has attended four hundred of these exact dinners and could, if asked, perform every possible conversational beat from memory. He was handsome in an unthreatening, well-groomed way — good jaw, kind eyes, hair that had clearly been cut by someone expensive — and he greeted me with genuine warmth that I appreciated and felt absolutely nothing about, which told me something useful, filed away for later.

Viraj came down at seven forty-five in a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled to his usual precise fold, and I timed my entrance for seven fifty, because I am nothing if not committed to a bit.

The room noticed before I understood what I'd done.

My mother's eyes did a fast, assessing pass — approval and something more careful underneath it, a calculation I couldn't read yet. Aditya's mother said something warm and complimentary that barely registered. My father beamed, delighted, oblivious, the way he was delighted and oblivious about most things that weren't business.

And Viraj — Viraj, mid-sentence with my father about tender specifications, stopped talking.

Not dramatically. Not for long. A full sentence's worth of silence, maybe two, his eyes moving over me once, unhurried, the same fast read from the window and the breakfast table, except this time it caught on something and held a half-second longer than it should have before he recovered and finished his sentence to my father like nothing had happened.

That half-second traveled through my whole body like a struck match.

I sat across from him at dinner — engineered, obviously, by arriving exactly when the only open seat left was the one across from his — and spent the next two hours performing easy, warm conversation with Aditya Khanna on my left while cataloguing, from the corner of my eye, every place Viraj's gaze landed and didn't quite manage to land anywhere else for very long.

"You're very good at this," Aditya said quietly at one point, under the noise of our fathers arguing happily about tender clauses, and for a horrible second I thought he'd caught me.

"Good at what?"

"Dinners like this. Making it look effortless." He smiled, a little rueful, a little tired in a way that had nothing to do with me. "I never manage it. My mother says I look like I'm doing long division at these things."

"You look fine," I said, and meant it, and not for the last time that summer, a small guilty tenderness rose in me toward a man I was actively using as a stage prop.

Across the table, Viraj reached for his water glass, and I watched his eyes come up, brief, deliberate, meeting mine over the rim of it for exactly as long as it's possible to hold a stranger's gaze at a family dinner without anyone else noticing.

I see what you're doing, the look said, entirely without heat, entirely without anger.

Good, I thought back at him, smiling at something Aditya's mother had said, not breaking eye contact until Viraj did first. That was rather the whole point.