Chapter 12 · Untitled Chapter

Saud Al-Dosari did not put a hand on me in that majlis, and I have since decided that this was the first thing he did correctly.

He rose. The room rose with him, half a beat late, the way a room rises when it has not yet settled whether it is standing for the man or for the name. He crossed the carpet to the mouth of the passage and stopped there and waited, facing the door and not me, and the whole hall understood that the waiting was the offer, and that refusing it would have to be done out loud, in front of everyone, by me.

I stood. My Abaya had never left my shoulders and my Shaila had never slipped, and I was grateful for that in a way I could not have explained, because a woman being moved out of one man's account and into another's is expected to look as though nothing is being moved.

"Ammi," I said, to my uncle, at the head of the carpet. "Your papers."

"In the morning." He had not sat down again.