Page 129 of Faking the Fiancé

“Our entire family is coming to Toronto,” he says.

“Our entire family is coming to Toronto,” I confirm.

“Kavita is packing spices.”

“Kavita is packing spices,” I affirm.

“My mother is going to walk into this apartmentand she is going to see the state of our kitchen and she is going to have opinions, Casey. She is going to have opinions that will reshape the geography of this apartment.”

“My mother is going to arrive with pie.”

“Pie will not save us.”

“Pie has saved civilizations, Arjun. We've been over this.”

He opens his eyes. He looks at me. Those intense green eyes in the afternoon light, warm and scared and completely mine.

“I love you,” he says. No clinical language. No strategic framework. No leather notebook. Just three words, simple and clear, the way he’s been learning to say them for four months, the way they sound when they’re not a performance or a defence or a carefully structured emotional assessment but just the truth, offered without armour, in a cluttered apartment in Kensington Market with two binders on the coffee table and a goldendoodle on our laps and a future that is terrifying and beautiful and entirely, completely, ours.

“I love you too,” I say. “And we’re going to need a bigger apartment.”

He laughs. I kiss him. Oliver tries to eat one of the denim swatches.

Somewhere in Rajasthan, Meera Kapoor is finalizing her travel arrangements and rehearsing her opinions about Canadian tailoring. Somewhere in Muskoka, Brenda Welling is testing lemon cake recipes and has already called Doug about the folding tables.

And somewhere in between, on a couch in a cluttered Kensington Market apartment, two men who started with a lie and ended with a ring are sitting in the wreckage of competing binders, holding each other, laughing at the chaos that is coming, and knowing, with a certainty that is absolute and non-clinical, that they have survived everything the world’s thrown at them and are still here, holding hands and choosing each other, and that whatever comes next, they’ll face it the way they face everything.

Together. For real this time.