The Shaadi Set-Up

by Lillie Vale

  “Thanks.” His Adam’s apple bobs. “So, were you seriously going to steal our table?”

  My mind latches on to the our and brings it close. “Steal is a strong word.”

  His mouth crooks. “Liberate, then?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything to anyone but us,” I say. “Or, well, I guess just me. I’m the only one who’d want it.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  I wring my hands. “Oh, did you— I mean, is there an offer? Someone who saw the pictures and wants— I know the whole point of bringing me in to flip this house was to sell it furnished, but—”

  “Rita,” he says gently, ceasing the flow of my babble. “I meant me. I want the table.”

  “So you came here to steal it?”

  His cheeks flare with color. “I know what you put into it. I didn’t want someone else to have it. I was planning on smuggling your table out, replacing it with its twin we saw at the store, and retaking the dining room picture for the website.”

  “You got a little streak of deviousness in your old age,” I say to lighten the mood, but all it does is reignite our banter, which last time led to . . .

  We both find ourselves looking at the couch and then at each other.

  “I was planning on giving it to you,” says Milan.

  “But we had a fight,” I say. “You said we were done. Time to go back to our lives.”

  “It was in the heat of the moment,” he says, hanging his head for a moment. Then he shoots back up and I’m taken aback by the fierceness in his eyes. “I was a jackass, Rita. I almost walked away from you again— No, I did walk away. I was hurt that you weren’t ready to be out in the open with me, outside of the fairy tale of this house. And instead of examining why you were hurt, and the role I played in it, I did the same exact thing you were afraid of.”

  “You did,” I say quietly.

  “But, Rita, try to see it from my point of view. You didn’t want to tell your folks about Neil. And I get why. But you wanted to keep me on the DL, too. It felt like a pattern. Worse, like a punishment. And I know that isn’t how you intended it, but if our breakup has taught us anything, it’s the thin line between intent and effect.”

  “You always call me on my shit,” I tell him. “All of it. And it is infuriating. Especially when you’re right. I tried to break that pattern by coming here.”

  “By turning to a life of crime?”

  “By giving you a reason to come after me.” I grab Raj’s phone from where she left it on the coffee table, bypass the security code, and open the notes app. I turn the phone to face him. “The first pro on my list.”

  I love him. I could learn to live without him again, but I really don’t want to.

  He reads the list silently, ignoring the other random strings of letters.

  “I waited for you a long time, Milan. I don’t intend to make the same mistake again. You’re right. I could have come to you any time over the last six years and I didn’t.” I give him a tiny smile. “We knocked down those six years apart into just six days, for what it’s worth.”

  A slow, unsure smile spreads over his face. “And we’re both here. Does that mean . . . No, you tell me what it means.”

  “It means I want to be with you. I want everything you want, everything I’ve ever wanted, ever since I was fifteen years old.” I press my hand to my chest. “I want my heart to always beat like this. For you.”

  He closes the distance between us in two long strides. His arms are around me in an instant, crushing me to his chest. “I wish—” He breaks off, a frustrated crease appearing in his forehead. “I wish we could live here. Start fresh. But I can’t afford to, not after all the money invested in flipping it.”

  I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. What comes next.

  “What if we leased it?” I find myself asking. “If we’re both doing okay for money right now, then maybe we could find someone willing to rent, and maybe we could put our money toward paying down the mortgage and, one day . . .”

  “One day live here ourselves,” he breathes.

  I nod, a rigid, jerky thing. I don’t even dare to hope.

  “I’d have to take a look at the numbers. See what we could rent it out for. Maybe downsize my apartment, find someplace cheaper. Figure out how long we’d have to wait until—” He stops again. But I can still sense he’s crunching numbers in his head, trying to work out whether the impossible could actually be within our reach. “This is what you want, Rita? Is that what would make you happy?”

  “You make me happy,” I say. “And I love this house. But I love you so much more. And I’m willing to fight and make up with you every day to prove that, if I have to.”

  His arms tighten around me. Our foreheads rest against each other, noses bumping. “Tell me more about the making-up part. Does it go like this?”

  He kisses the question off my lips with a sweet, searing intensity that I feel all the way down to the tips of my toes and a hundred other places, too. The kiss deepens as our tongues touch, and his abdomen tenses against my stomach when I breathe his name into his mouth.

  “Rita,” he rasps in return, devouring me in another kiss, digging his fingers into my hair. I gasp, pressing myself against the solid feel of him, feeling the hard heat of his torso and the bump of his nose as he makes his way along the shell of my ear and down my neck. Everywhere his lips linger alights with fireworks, setting me up to soar, knowing he’ll catch me if I fall.

  The kiss goes on for what feels like minutes, and maybe it does, because the next thing I hear is Raj shouting, “I hope the silence means you’re kissing each other!”

  “It does!” he calls back.

  I stifle my laughter. “You can come out now, by the way.”

  In a strangled voice, Milan calls, “Please don’t!” Then, to me, in a voice that promises another six years and another and another, “I think we still have some making up to do.”

  I hum under my breath. “Six years’ worth, if we’re keeping track. And I want it with interest.”

  He looks somber for a moment before nodding as if he’s come to a decision. “Gone but not forgotten.” His expression turns impish on a dime. “Kind of like that shirt of mine you’re wearing. I always wondered where it went.”

  “Yours?” My mouth drops. “Uh, you are very much mistaken there, buddy.”

  He runs his warm hands up my arms, then folds back the left sleeve. “Look familiar?”

  I glance down, breath stolen by the sight of a small embroidered black heart. It’s almost invisible against the black fabric, scarcely bigger than a thumbnail, and pressed almost flat.

  I remember stitching this. Back in the days he only wore gray and black, when he was so difficult to shop for, I’d made this birthday gift a little bit more special by giving him my heart on his sleeve. When I look back at his face, Milan knows I remember.

  “Wait, how did you even know the heart was—oh. That day in front of the bookshelves.”

  The memories whoosh back like a plug’s been unstoppered. That pensive, preoccupied look on his face that I couldn’t place. The way he’d seemed to be putting something together while I trembled on the precipice of coming apart under the roughened pads of his thumbs.

  I take in a long, controlled inhale, then let it out, heart expanding about a dozen sizes. All these years, all these long six years, I’d been reaching for him and I never even knew it.

  He grins. “Don’t worry. I don’t want it back. Looks cuter on you, anyway.”

  “Good, because you’re not getting it.” My eye catches on movement through the glass-enclosed dining room. “Milan, I think I see a pony out there.”

  “From here?” He taps his foot against the living room floorboards.

  I’m already moving for the porch. “I swear I saw something.”

  But
when we get there, the beach is empty. I scan up and down the coastline, but whatever was there is gone now. Only our footprints remain.

  Milan waits a respectful .02 seconds before saying, “I bet it was a real cute dog.”

  I elbow him good-naturedly, trying not to laugh. “Shut it, you. Let me have this.”

  He can’t stop smiling. “Your imaginary wild pony?”

  “Are you going to tell this story to everyone we meet?”

  He wraps his arms around me, bringing me flush against him for a soft, unhurried toe-curling kiss. His hands are clasped at the small of my back, thumb working erotic little circles on my tailbone. “Oh, only for the rest of our lives.”

  I tilt my head back to look into his eyes. The teasing smile is gone, replaced by a solemnity he doesn’t often wear. “You and your cheeky declarations,” I whisper, flattening my palm against his cheek, savoring the hint of stubble. “Maybe it wasn’t a Banker. Can’t have everything, I guess.”

  The smile in his eyes spreads, breaking over his entire face. “Yes,” he says, sliding an arm around my waist and bringing me close for another toe-curling kiss. “I’m making you a promise, Rita. We can have everything. Our new beginning. Everything your table and the house represents, not just now, but in the future. And I’m going to prove that to you.”

  “Our table,” I say, giving him a peck on the lips. “Our house.” I repeat the kiss.

  “Ours,” he agrees.

  “And we’ll prove it to each other,” I say, and then reach up on my tiptoes to kiss him.

  Three Years Later

  MyShaadi Success Story Testimonial

  Rita & Milan!

  It’s so weird to be writing this. Three years ago we would never have thought we’d be here today, announcing our engagement on MyShaadi! It’s funny, you know, because we were pretty torn on whether we wanted to fill out this testimonial. See, unlike most people who find love here, we had met and fallen in love many years earlier, so our situation was . . . well, pretty unconventional!

  It was a huge surprise to both of us to find ourselves matched by MyShaadi. Ironically, this was a double whammy because our mothers had already conspired to get us in the same room together to see what should have been obvious: We were still very much in love with each other.

  It took us a long time to rediscover each other as the new people we’d grown into and there were some growing pains along the way, but once we decided to get engaged we both thought it made sense to bring our MyShaadi journey full circle.

  P.S. We are super stoked to share that while we are still working in realty and interior design, we will also be starring in our new HGTV show, Make Yourselves at Home, this spring! Join us as we move into the homes of in-over-their-heads homeowners who don’t know the first thing about renovation or luxe-for-less DIY, and turn their “oh hell no” into “welcome home”!

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  Rita and Milan are planning a June wedding at their beautiful property, Bluebill Cottage, on Rosalie Island.

  Acknowledgments

  By the time this book releases, (I’m sure) you’ll all be sick and tired of hearing its droll origin story, so I’ll leave it at this: The Shaadi Set-Up is the book I’ve always wanted to read about the Indian-American diaspora experience, but since it didn’t exist, I knew I had to write it.

  In the past, I’ve struggled to relate to South Asian characters and narratives that I’m told are supposed to share my experiences, instead yearning for more stories where a Desi character gets to just be, where their ethnicity isn’t the most interesting thing about them and they aren’t culturally torn in two. Where they are of their heritage and traditions, but it is not wholly theirs. Where being enough isn’t even a thought that crosses their mind because they are everything they are meant to be and everything they strive for is within reach.

  So the first thank-you is for you: anyone who sees a part of themselves—maybe, like me, for the first time—in the characters who inhabit the world of The Shaadi Set-Up.

  It is still surreal and mind-boggling that I somehow managed to sell and write (in that order!) this book during a global pandemic, after a confluence of incredibly serendipitous events during the most unimaginable circumstances. The heart of this book has always been a love letter to the places we call home and the people we find our way back to, and it felt especially affirming to draft this book during a time when so many of us were looking for comfort and connection. Writing is solitary at the best of times, but publishing is very much not, so it’s hard to write a book about love and friendship and family without thinking about all the people who made it possible in the first place:

  Thank you to my extraordinary agent, Jessica Watterson, for all-caps BELIEVING in this book from the start and finding it the perfect home. I count myself lucky to have your unwavering guidance, enthusiasm, and fierce heart. Thanks also goes to Andrea Cavallaro and the rest of Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency for their knowledge and savvy.

  Thank you to the entire team at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, starting with my editor Gabriella Mongelli, who is so tremendously wonderful to work with and without whose support this book wouldn’t be what it is today. Our shared love of HGTV (thank you Island Life and Flea Market Flip for being such an inspiration!) made this book extra fun to work on!

  Margo Lipschultz, while we didn’t get to work on this book together, your first enthusiastic Yes! meant the world. I will always be thankful.

  My gratitude also goes to the publicity team, including Sydney Cohen and Kristen Bianco; to the marketing team, including Nishtha Patel; to copyeditor Lara M. Robbins; to production editor Joel Breuklander; to the art director and jacket designer, Vi-An Nguyen; and to the publisher, Sally Kim. To anyone who helped bring this book to life, I appreciate you.

  Big thanks to Alex Cabal, who illustrated such a gorgeous cover and perfectly captured the impish and dead chuffed expressions (respectively) on Harrie and Freddie’s faces. AND THE KEY CHAIN. Still swooning.

  I’m immensely grateful to Rachel Lynn Solomon, Sarah Hogle, Farah Heron, Elizabeth Everett, and everyone else who gave their time so generously. Thank you for gracing me with your words.

  Nicole Aronis and Kate Holliday, thank you for reading the very first draft!

  Thank you to my parents, both of whom were the first in their families to marry for love, and who have never made me question that love as Rita does her parents’. Thank you again to my mom, first and best beta reader. Thank you to Granny, who is just as charming and wily as Rita’s aji, and is in no small part her inspiration.

  Thank you to my grandfather, who didn’t get to see me publish my first book, but who truly lived the most storied life of anyone I know: he taught on a naval ship; he was an inventor and entrepreneur; he was an engineer on the Canadian Pacific Railway; he traveled the world with the eyes and spirit of his favorite author, Louis L’Amour; and he even met Queen Elizabeth. At my birth, he gave me my first-ever book, and continued to make sure I was well stocked with plenty of Enid Blyton. But his ultimate gift was in passing down his love of stories to my mom, who passed it down to me, which is undoubtedly why I’m an author today.

  Thank you to the booksellers, librarians, and bloggers who have championed this book—I appreciate your hard work and passion so much. Thank you to my friends in the Romancing the 20s group chat and all the ’21/’22 authors with whom I’ve found so much support and solidarity. LlamaSquad, meeting all of you gave me a community I can’t imagine myself without. You all remind me every day that it really does take a village. I’m blessed to count you as mine.

  Thank you to absolutely none of my exes. I don’t want a second-chance romance with any of you! ☺

  My final thanks is for you, my readers. Thank you for buying, borrowing, tweeting, hyping, and supporting me on this journey, but most of all, thank you for the privilege of letting my words make you feel thing
s. Thank you for this most incandescent and ordinary of magics.

  Photo of the author © Lillie Vale

  Lillie Vale is the author of the young adult novel Small Town Hearts. She writes about secrets and yearning, complicated and ambitious girls who know what they want, the places we call home and people we find our way back to, and the magic we make. Born in Mumbai, she grew up in Mississippi, Texas, and North Dakota, and now resides in an Indiana college town. The Shaadi Set-Up is her debut novel for adults.

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  @LillieLabyrinth

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