Present day — three weeks before the will is read

Arjun Devraj stood in his grandmother's study for the first time since her funeral, because he could no longer avoid it.

Nothing had been touched. Her reading glasses still sat folded on the desk, as though she'd only stepped out for tea. The lamp she refused to replace despite its flicker. The framed photograph of the first hotel she'd ever built, taken back when Devraj Hospitality was one crumbling property in Udaipur and a loan she'd secured by pawning her own jewelry.

He wasn't here for sentiment. He was here because the lawyer had called that morning, voice careful in the way lawyers get when they're about to ruin someone's week, and said the words there's a condition attached like it was a small thing.

It was not a small thing.

Arjun sat in his grandmother's chair — too soft, too worn, molded to a shape that wasn't his — and read the clause a second time, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something reasonable.

Married. Within sixty days. For no less than one year.

He thought of every woman he'd ever known well enough to call by name, and how none of them would survive sixty days of scrutiny from a family that had spent three generations perfecting the art of finding fault. He thought of the empire his grandmother had built with her bare hands and her stubbornness, and his cousin Rohan's face at the funeral — too composed, too patient, a man already measuring the curtains.

And then, strangely, he thought of his mother.

The day you help someone expecting them to thank you is the day you stop doing it for them.

He didn't know why the memory surfaced now. He hadn't thought of that sentence in years. But something about it sat differently in his chest than the panic did — quieter, older, like a door left slightly open in a house he'd thought was sealed.

He opened the bottom drawer where his mother had kept the files she never explained. It took him forty minutes to find the one with a Pune address and a single name written on the tab, no explanation attached.

Kulkarni.

He had no idea, yet, that he was about to build a marriage on a debt he hadn't paid, to a woman who had no idea it existed.

He only knew he was out of time, and this was the only door left unlocked.