Chapter 17 · Chapter 17

The lamp had been filled before the door was shut, and it would burn until morning if nobody turned it down, and neither of us turned it down.

He sat by the shutters with his hand flat on the phone and did not look at me. I had watched him sit like that across a table with eleven men in the majlis, letting the quiet do the arguing for him, and I had never once been the only other person in the room while he did it.

So I let the quiet work, and then I stood up.

The shaila had two pins in it. My hands found them without being told to, the way a woman’s hands learn a thing once and never have to learn it again, and the silk came away from my hair and the room was suddenly a different temperature than it had been. I did not shake it out.