Chapter 8 · Chapter 8

The car was still there at eight.

It had moved once before dawn. Lights up, lights off, a man walking the length of the perimeter wall and back at the deliberate pace of someone paid by the hour and determined to look indispensable. By seven, the sun had laid a flat white blade along the parapet, and the gate guard had stopped watching it—the quiet shift when a stranger’s car becomes part of the masonry.

I put on the abaya and the shaila at twenty to eight and descended at eight precisely, because Ammi Fahad had named the hour, and I have never handed this family the small satisfaction of my lateness.

Downstairs, the majlis carried the cold residue of morning bakhoor and had been swept. The document I had left on the carpet the previous evening—refusing to hand it directly to the steward—now rested square on the low brass table, its corners aligned with the marquetry.

A neat line had been drawn beneath a single paragraph in fresh blue ink that was not mine. That was how this house disciplined defiance: it took whatever you dropped and filed it against you.

Ammi Fahad sat at the sadr.