Pearls on Marble

Mithra Govindan knows exactly where the salt belongs on a wedding leaf.She knows how to feed three hundred guests from a kitchen held together by borrowed burners and sheer competence. She knows how to keep her family's catering business running when money is tight. And she knows she has no business being noticed by Siddharth Rajan, the wealthy, difficult owner of one of Kovai's grandest hotels.Then a wedding goes wrong.Guests fall ill. A video of Mithra on her knees, gathering her dead mother's pearls from the hotel's marble floor, goes viral. Bookings vanish overnight, and the family's livelihood begins to collapse.The evidence will eventually clear Mithra. The humiliation is harder to undo.And so is Siddharth.As Mithra rebuilds what was nearly taken from her, their lives become entangled in family loyalties, buried histories, old griefs, and an attraction neither of them knows what to do with. But Siddharth is accustomed to solving problems with power and money, while Mithra has spent her life learning how to stand on her own.For them, love will require something harder than rescue.It will require asking. And choosing.Set amid the wedding kitchens, temple hills and old mill fortunes of Coimbatore, Pearls on Marble is a story of food, family, class, and inheritance-and of the difference between being given a place and knowing you belong there.