The thing I remember most from the moment I walked into that wedding is the smell of warm wax and white roses, and how Rohan was already there, standing near the back row with his jacket half-buttoned, looking exactly like a man who had lost a bet.
I had lost a bet too. Sort of. My cousin Priya had called me six weeks earlier and said, “Please, Airi, I just need bodies in the seats,” and I had said yes before she finished the sentence because I loved her and because I was foolish and because I had not yet been told that Rohan would also be attending.
We had worked together for two years at the same architecture firm in Edinburgh. Two years of shared conference rooms and disagreements about sight lines and load-bearing walls and once, memorably, a full forty-minute argument about whether a staircase should curve left or right. He thought I was too cautious. I thought he was too reckless. We had arrived at a kind of armed truce somewhere around month eight, which meant we were polite to each other in the way that people are polite when they are actively choosing not to say what they actually think.
Priya’s new husband, Dev, was Rohan’s cousin. That was the connection. A thin thread of family that had pulled us both to a small hotel ballroom in the Cotswolds on a Saturday in October, surrounded by people we barely knew and floral arrangements that probably cost more than my monthly rent.
He saw me the same moment I saw him.
Neither of us smiled, exactly. But neither of us looked away.
“Airi,” he said.
“Rohan.”
That was it. That was the whole greeting. Priya’s mother, my Auntie Sheela, materialized out of nowhere and seized my arm and began pulling me toward the front, saying something about flower girls and a missing buttonhole, and I let myself be pulled, and I did not look back, and that was probably the right choice.
The ceremony was beautiful in the way that ceremonies always are when you’re watching someone you love make a decision that is clearly the best decision of their life. Priya cried before Dev even finished his vow. Dev cried first, actually. The officiant had to pause. Someone in the third row laughed, softly, and then everyone was laughing a little, and it was the kind of moment that makes you feel the specific ache of being happy for someone while also being very aware of your own solitude.
I sat in the fifth row. Rohan sat in the sixth.
I know because I could feel it. That sounds strange. I’m aware it sounds strange. But there is a particular quality to the awareness of someone you’ve spent two years carefully not-quite-looking-at, and I felt it like a low hum behind my sternum for the entire forty-five minutes of the ceremony.
At the reception, Auntie Sheela had arranged the seating with the confidence of a general deploying troops. I found my name card between a distant uncle named Barnaby who collected vintage maps and a woman named Gareth—“yes, like the name, my parents were unconventional”—who worked in marine biology and had opinions about coral reef restoration that were genuinely fascinating once she got started.
Rohan was at the next table.
Close enough that when the speeches started and everyone quieted, I could hear him laugh at the best man’s joke a half-second before I did, like he’d processed it faster. Which was exactly the kind of thing that used to irritate me about him. The quickness. The way he always seemed to arrive at things just slightly ahead of everyone else.
Barnaby leaned over at some point during the main course and said, in a very carrying whisper, “That young man keeps looking at you.”
“We work together,” I said.
“Ah,” said Barnaby, in a tone that suggested he found this explanation entirely insufficient.
I did not look over.
I looked over once. Briefly. He was talking to someone, laughing, his head tilted back slightly, and there was something about the ease of it—the way he laughed when he wasn’t at work, when there were no blueprints between us—that made me feel like I was seeing a room I hadn’t known existed in a building I thought I already understood.
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