Chapter 5 · Untitled Chapter

I went down before the tray came in.

Waiting to be sent for would have cost me the last thing I still owned, which was arriving on my own feet. So I settled my abaya at the top of the stairs, took the rail the way I had been taught to take it, and walked into the majlis while the room was still deciding where to sit.

I stepped out of my shoes at the edge of the carpet. No one looked up. That was colder than being watched.

The men sat along the walls in crisp white, my uncle Abu Fahad at the head, and the brass tray set in the center of the carpet with the folded page upon it, thin as a dried leaf, and not one hand resting near it.

Faisal sat where he had sat the night before. Not at the head. He was younger than half the room, yet the cushions had been shifted for him without a word.

The steward came in with the dallah, pouring high so the stream fell clean into the finjan, filling it less than half full. Abu Fahad took his first, with his right hand, while I looked down at the wool and counted the knots along the border.

"How long does one page take to read?" Abu Fahad asked.

"It has been read," Faisal answered evenly.

"Not in this room."

Faisal set his cup down. Then he reached across and lifted the page from the brass, the metal ringing once under the edge of his thumb.

He read it the way a man reads an agreement he has already decided against. Down the center first. Then the sum: two million and four hundred thousand riyals, written out in longhand under my name, in a script I had never seen. He read the sum twice. Then he turned the sheet to the bottom, where such a paper should carry a signature and an imprint, but found neither.

Silence settled over the room. The steward held the pot still, waiting.

Then Faisal laid the page down. Not across the tray toward Abu Fahad, but flat where he had taken it from, resting two fingers across the crease, and kept them there.

The majlis understood the gesture before I did. A paper returned across the tray belongs to the house. A paper kept beneath a man's hand belongs to the man.

"The sum is not in question," Abu Fahad said at last. "The sum is a matter of record."

"The sum is arithmetic," Faisal replied. "The signature is the question."

"The signature is an internal concern for the family."

"Then let the family produce it, and I will read the page again when a name is affixed to the bottom." Faisal had not raised his voice in the slightest, yet the man at the far wall stopped turning his beads. "A paper that names no writer places the guilt upon whoever stands nearest. Tonight, that is her."

"She stands in this majlis. She may answer for it."

They turned toward me. Not all at once, but enough to weigh the air.

I had rehearsed a dozen answers on the stairs, and every one of them began with my father's honor, and every one would have sounded like an appeal for mercy. So I spoke the only truth that belonged to me.

"I will answer a paper that carries an author's name," I said, my voice steady against the quiet. "This page carries mine and no other. I will not carry this house's accounting on my shoulders simply because leaving off a name was easier."

A murmur rose along the wall, someone remarking softly that this was what came of allowing a girl a voice before her elders.

"Her name is Layla," Faisal said, without looking around. "The room will address her by it."

Abu Fahad rose to his feet. The rest of the council rose with him, the white thobes rustling like dry grass in the wind, and the majlis cleared by precedence—the elders first, then the men along the perimeter, and lastly the younger cousins who had waited for a dispute to flare. Faisal remained seated until the end. He lifted his hand from the page, leaving the sheet exactly where his fingers had held it.

"Clear the tray," Abu Fahad instructed at the threshold.

"Leave it," Faisal said.

The steward glanced toward Abu Fahad, but the elder continued out into the hallway, and the steward followed without touching the brass.

I remained standing before a cooling finjan and a folded decree. The paper bore the crease of men's handling, and the sum remained written in full beneath my name—the only name left upon the page.

I had descended the stairs expecting to be condemned before the house. I turned back toward the stairs having heard the figure repeated twice, and my name sheltered by the only man who had refused to sign it away.