Chapter 7 · Chapter 7

The message came on the second day, which is how my family does things: long enough that a decision can be dressed up as deliberation, short enough that nobody has time to build an answer.

It came as a car, not a call. The driver stood at the outer door of my building and told the wall, not me, that the house wanted me before the afternoon — which is the polite way of delivering an order to a woman who is assumed to have no reply.

I made him wait while I chose the abaya. Not out of spite. Out of arithmetic. In that house, everything before the first word is a number, and I had spent twenty-eight years learning which number I was being given.

The inner hall of my uncle's house is the coolest room in it and the least used. Too low for guests, too formal for family. The blinds were half down, the light coming through them in stripes, and the mabkhara had been lit early so that the oud would have time to settle into the cushions before anyone sat on them.