From USA Today bestselling author Sonali Dev comes the heartfelt story of a woman determined to reunite a lost ring with its owner, who ends up finding herself along the way.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Sonali Dev’s There’s Something About Mira, which releases on 1 February 2025.
Mira Salvi has the perfect life—a job she loves, a fiancé everyone adores, and the secure future she’s always imagined for herself. Really, she hasn’t a thing to complain about, not even when she has to go on her engagement trip to New York alone.
While playing tourist in the city, Mira chances upon a lost ring, and her social media post to locate its owner goes viral. With everyone trying to claim the ring, only one person seems to want to find its owner as badly as Mira does: journalist Krish Hale. Brooding and arrogant, he will do anything to get to write this story.
As Krish and Mira reluctantly join forces and jump into the adventure of tracing the ring back to where it belongs, Mira begins to wonder if she is in the right place in her own life. She had to have found this ring for a reason…right? Maybe, like the owner of the lost ring, her happy ending hasn’t been written yet either.
CHAPTER ONE
There’s something especially embarrassing about having to reschedule a trip with your fiancé to celebrate your engagement. My future mother-in-law calls it an engagement-moon (which is only slightly less embarrassing), and I just spent an hour on the phone rescheduling mine, for the second time.
“This is the last change allowed,” Shay, the lovely airline employee, warns with finality, and I smile into the phone as I speed walk along the Naperville river trail, getting my steps in for the day. Shay’s own engagement broke up last week, so I spent the first half of our conversation convincing her that her life is far from over and that someone even more perfect for her is out there waiting.
I’ve known Druv since middle school but I only found him–found him a year and a half ago, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, so I know a thing or two about second chances.
“You’re the luckiest girl in the world,” Shay says wistfully, voice equal parts envy and hope, as she lets me go. It’s a sentiment I’ve heard repeated so many times since my engagement six months ago that my brain tends to skip over it. So I take a moment now to count my blessings and to really let myself feel gratitude for being such an incredibly lucky person. Whose fiancé has canceled on our engagement-moon twice.
Your orthopedic surgeon fiancé, my mother’s chiding voice says in my ear. My mother’s guiding force is the fear of tempting the fates. In her mind, all good fortune is precariously balanced on the knife edge of bad fortune and under constant threat from the evil eye of those who want what you have. The only path to preventing my gifts from disappearing, as miraculously as they appeared, lies somewhere between never acknowledging them out loud (Do not put happy pictures of yourself with Druv on the Instagram!) and never letting anyone forget exactly how lucky I am (If we do not invite the entire community to the engagement party, how will everyone know you got Druv?).
Most important: I am never ever to forget how very lucky I am to have bagged Dr. Druv Kalra, MD, or how critical an orthopedic surgeon’s commitments are. I don’t disagree. I’m proud of how wholeheartedly Druv gives himself to his work. Obviously, rebuilding spines takes precedence over a trip to New York with someone he’s going to spend the rest of his life with anyway. I do get the irony in celebrating our first step into domesticity by getting away from our families and responsibilities.
Not that the cancellations matter anymore. We’re going to New York. We get another chance at not losing the $5,000 my parents and Druv’s have so generously spent on gifting us the trip.
I’m going to New York! Anticipation races up my spine.
Druv loves New York. He finds it preposterous that I’ve never been, and wants to fix that ASAP. Or as soon as his surgical schedule opens up, which he’s assured me it has next week. He’s got his partner covering him for emergencies. All the scheduling, and the rescheduling, and the re-rescheduling that I’ve done was worth it. I’m good at that. At taking everyone’s needs into consideration and making things work out, especially when no one else knows how.
It’s why I love being a pain management therapist. What’s more rewarding than finding a way to soothe physical pain? There’s nothing more universally human than pain. And yet, identifying what causes it, then understanding how to address it: there’s nothing more individual than that. The search for sources of discomfort comes easily to me, of tracking the clues the mind and body hand us, of acknowledging the trauma that’s always at the root of pain.
Unfortunately, most of my clients have no interest in digging into sources. They just want the pain gone. Now. Bandaging festered wounds always makes them worse in the long term. You have to open them up, let them breathe, treat the infection.
I stop in my tracks and drop onto a wooden bench facing the DuPage River where it slips under a curved bridge. Should I worry about the fact that Druv has canceled our getaway twice? Do I need to dig into the why a little more?
Before I can give that thought more oxygen, Druv calls. “Hey, beautiful,” he says in that lovely tranquilizer voice that I swear takes away half his patients’ pain even before they tell him what’s wrong. I know this because a lot of my patients are his patients too. Yet another reason we work so well. An orthopedic surgeon and a pain management therapist: a match made in heaven for this accident-prone earth.
“Hey yourself,” I say, already calmer. “How was the laminectomy?”
“Straightforward. The patient’s age was a concern, but I’m not expecting complications.” He takes a breath, and I know the word complications was not used in vain. “Speaking of complications,” he adds, “you know how I said next week was taken care of for our trip?” He barely pauses, but my heart finds the gap and drops in my chest. “Well, Jake can’t fill in for me anymore. He tripped down the stairs this morning and broke his arm.”
“Oh no! Is he okay?” Suddenly our stupid engagement-moon feels insignificant. At least Druv didn’t topple down a staircase.
“It’s barely a hairline crack. But no surgeries for a month at least.”
“Poor Jake,” I say as my brain starts making plans to bake the lemon cookies Jake loves so much. I’ll take them over to his place later when I go check on him.
“Can we reschedule for next month?” Druv brings me back to the problem at hand.
“Next month is the wedding shopping trip, remember?” I’m going to India with our mothers. No one even asked Druv to come, because: surgical schedule. “Also, neither the airline nor the hotel will let us change the dates again.”
“I’m sorry, babe,” he says. “I know how hard you’ve worked to make the trip happen.”
I have. I’ve spent hours on the rescheduling alone. But that’s not why disappointment squeezes my chest so hard I can’t make words.
I breathe through it. Druv didn’t break Jake’s arm, and he can’t leave his practice when his partner is unable to perform surgeries. I should say something soothing, but nothing comes out.
“Mira,” he says, the regret in his voice making everything worse, “I’ll make it up to you.”
How? I want to ask him. I already feel like I don’t deserve him. “Druv, is there something else? Do you even want to go?” The engagement-moon was his idea, not mine. Actually, it was his mother’s idea, wholeheartedly backed up by my own mother. But Druv was the one who got excited and ran with it. I only got excited when we chose New York.
“That’s not fair, babe,” he says. “Spending time with you is my oasis, you know that. You’re the only stress-free thing in my life.” He sounds so tired. I’ve never known anyone who pushes himself harder. “But getting away for five days? I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I wish we were having this conversation in person so I could comfort him. “We don’t need to get away. Isn’t that the best part of being each other’s oasis?”
“I love you,” he says, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Maybe you can ask them to roll the refunds over for our honeymoon. You can make it happen. You’re impossible to say no to.”
That should make me feel good. It shouldn’t rattle me. Druv’s mother loves to tell the story of how Druv was absolutely not interested in marriage until we met at that wedding. Look at her! She was impossible to say no to, my future mother-in-law loves to say. Everyone loves that story; no one cares that I never offered myself up for him to say yes or no to. Even Druv, for all his thoughtfulness, has always assumed that I was available and interested.
I was, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that everyone assumed that I would be. I’m almost thirty and not married. Obviously, either I’m not impossible to say no to, or I haven’t been interested. Or both. Not that any of it matters anymore. Truth is I’ve never met anyone gentler or more sincere than Druv. Everyone else might see him as “the catch of the community” I won like some lottery, but Druv is the first man around whom I can breathe.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I say, knowing that the money for the trip is already lost. I get off the bench and start walking again, working to shake off my disappointment.
I was looking forward to Central Park, to Times Square, to the Empire State Building. All the romantic comedy hallmarks I grew up with. In my head Deborah Kerr from An Affair to Remember presses an elegant hand to her throat and silently sobs for me. Meg Ryan’s wispy blond bangs fly around her face as she tries to cheer me up with that brave-sad imp’s smile. I’ve internalized that smile as the language of my soul. I flash it at an older man who jogs past me, and he brightens.
Much as I will miss seeing New York City, that’s not what’s at the heart of my disappointment. That would be Rumi, my twin brother.
I haven’t seen Rumi since he moved to New York two years ago. I understand why he hasn’t spoken to our parents in more than five years, but he’s been avoiding me, too, lately. He hasn’t RSVP’d to our wedding invitation, which is a punch to my heart. I can’t imagine getting married without him. This was my chance to convince him to come. Something I can only do in person, because it’s too complicated to do over the phone so long as the phone has a disconnect button.
“Thanks,” Druv says, “for being so understanding. Every other woman I know would have pitched a fit. I love how you manage to keep things so zero-drama. I hope you know how much I value it.”
“Thanks,” I say because how can I not be grateful for someone who values the thing I cherish most about myself? It’s why I’m with Druv, why our first conversation led to the next and then the next, because with Druv everything is always even keeled, and I like even keeled. It makes me feel safe.
“Mira?” he says in his kind way. “What I just said, I didn’t mean you can’t tell me when things upset you. If something is bothering you, you’ll tell me, right?”
The fact that we’re not going to New York is bothering me, but he already knows that. Neither one of us can do anything about it, and I’m not going to make him feel worse than he already does. I turn down the street that leads to the house I live in with my parents and take a breath.
“Are you saying you’d like more drama?” I say in my best teasing voice.
“God no,” he says, his relief obvious.
“Because at your mom’s dinner party tonight we’re going to have to tell our parents that the trip is off. So, you’re going to get that wish. The Two Moms are going to go into total Tragedy Queen mode.”
He groans dramatically and laughs. “How will we survive this, beta!” he says in his mother’s voice.
“Que the weeping violins,” I say. And just like that, I’m laughing, too, because I did manage to comfort him after all.
Excerpted from There’s Something About Mira: A Novel by Sonali Dev. © 2025 Published by Lake Union, February 1, 2025. All Rights Reserved.
