Part Five: After
Rashid Al-Mansouri stood in the center of his perfect hall for a long moment.
No one spoke. The guests looked at him with the particular careful attention of people who do not want to be seen looking. The musicians held their instruments at their sides. The extra staff members who had been stationed around the room were very still.
His sister crossed the room toward him, unhurried.
“Layla—” he began.
“Don’t,” she said quietly. Not harshly — there was no anger in it, only a tiredness that was deeper than any particular incident. “Just don’t.” She looked at him with seven years’ worth of accumulated observations behind her eyes. “She is not the first person you have done this to. She is simply the first who had something to wear.”
Rashid said nothing.
Layla picked up the name badge from the table where Safiya had left it and held it in her palm. She looked at it for a moment — a small rectangular piece of plastic with a name on it, the kind of object you forget exists because it is always where it is supposed to be — and then she set it back down.
“Think about what you are actually like,” she said. “Not what you intend. What you are actually like, to people who have no choice but to absorb whatever you decide to be.”
She walked away. The crowd parted for her.
Rashid stood alone in the middle of the space that was his by inheritance and his by wealth and his in every legal and material sense, and for the first time in many years he felt its size not as power but as distance. Distance from the door Safiya had walked through. Distance from his sister’s back as she moved away from him. Distance from the seventy people in the room, who were now beginning, carefully, to resume their conversations, to refill glasses, to return to the music — but differently, all of it differently, with the particular altered quality of a room in which something true has happened and everyone knows it, even if no one says so.
He looked at the empty spot on the table where the badge had been.
He looked at the doors.
