Chapter 9 · Chapter 9

The attendant set the dallah out before I came down, and by the time Saad entered the majlis the gahwa had gone to that flat, patient smell that tells you a pot has been waiting longer than the guest.

I came down with the Tarha pinned at the shoulder and the Abaya over everything that was mine, because the majlis is not the wing.

He came at the hour he had named. White thobe, collar closed. He took the seat that was not the sadr, as he always did, which was its own long sentence about what he believed he was owed.

I poured. He received the finjan in his right hand and did not raise it. The oud in the mabkhara had burned down to nothing, and no one had thought to feed it, and neither of us said so.

"I have had a night to consider," he said. "I considered the same thing from dark until first light. It did not change its clothes."

"Then it was never a thought. It was a decision dressed as one."

He did not smile, and he did not look away.