Chapter 6 · Untitled Chapter

They sent word at dawn that they would come, and then came at ten, which was their hour and not mine, and the house received the change without comment.

I was dressed before the first car reached the gate. Abaya, then the Tarha over my hair, black on black, pinned where it has always been pinned. Oud was still in the corners from the night before; the bakhoor had gone out hours ago but the smoke had not.

I sat where I have sat for four years, at the low end of the majlis, the ledger closed on my knee, and I put both hands on it so that they would see my hands were not doing anything else.

The delegation from my birth house came in without hurrying, which is how a family enters a room it believes it already owns.

They took the far side of the carpet. The women came with the men, all of them together, and not one of them crossed the carpet to greet me. My uncle's word had come ahead of them on the telephone at dawn, and it stood in the room now, ahead of the coffee.

Saud was at the Sadr.