Chapter 5 · Chapter 5

The pen did not stop for me. It went on down the page, because a pen in this house stops for the man who holds the room and not for the woman who has just drawn a line down the middle of the carpet, and no one was holding the room then but the coffee and the Oud and thirty people who had all decided at the exact same moment to be very interested in their own hands.

Then the scribe lifted his head.

He was a thin man with a careful hand, and before he spoke he read the last line back under his breath, the way a man checks a thing he does not intend to be corrected on.

"I have it that a look passed between Salman Al-Humaid and Huda Al-Enezi," he said. "Before the second pour. Do I enter it, ya ustadh?"

My cousin turned his cup a quarter turn on the tray. He had waited all evening for a cheaper line than mine, and now a clerk had handed him one for nothing.

"Ask her," he said. "She is the one answering tonight."

The hall did not move much.