Part Six: What Came After
Safiya spent that night at her mother’s house, which was small and warm and smelled of cardamom, and which she had not visited in three weeks because the preparations for the reception had consumed every day. Her mother asked no questions, which was one of the things Safiya had always loved about her. She made tea and sat across the table and let Safiya be quiet for a while, and then they talked about her brothers and about a neighbor’s new baby and about whether the guava tree in the back was going to produce well that year, and none of it had anything to do with palaces or silk dresses or men who had forgotten what respect cost.
She slept for nine hours. She had not slept nine hours continuously in months.
In the morning, there was a message on her phone from a number she did not recognize, which turned out to be Layla’s personal number. The message said: I know three people who need someone like you. If you want, I will make introductions. No urgency. Whenever you’re ready.
There was a second message, from a different number, which she looked at for a long time before opening. It was from Rashid. It was not long. It said: I owe you an apology. I owe you more than one. I know that words don’t settle debts like this. But I wanted to say it clearly: I was wrong. What I did was wrong. And not just once. There was a pause in the timestamps — she could see he had typed and then stopped and then typed again — and then: If you would allow it, I would like to find a way to make what I took from you right. Your salary. The years. All of it. Whatever you say is fair.
She set the phone down on the kitchen table and poured herself a second cup of tea and looked at the guava tree through the window. The morning light was coming through the leaves in the particular way it does in that hour, breaking into pieces.
She thought about seven years. She thought about the women who had laughed, and about the ones who hadn’t. She thought about Layla, standing in the crowd and not looking away. She thought about the name badge on the table and the way the room had sounded when she set it down.
She thought about the dress, which she had returned to Layla’s room before leaving the palace — folded carefully, the way her grandmother had taught her to fold fabric that deserved attention.
She picked up the phone and replied to Layla first. Thank you. Yes. Whenever you think is right.
Then she opened Rashid’s message again and read it once more from the beginning. She sat with it for a while, the way you sit with something that costs you something to receive, because receiving an apology from someone who has not apologized before requires its own kind of generosity, and generosity is not the same as forgetting, and neither of those things is the same as trust, and trust, she knew, was a thing built in increments, over time, by behavior, not by words.
She did not reply that morning. She finished her tea, and helped her mother in the garden for an hour, and called her youngest brother who was studying engineering in another city and who made her laugh three times in the space of ten minutes, and then she went inside and sat down and wrote a reply that was brief and did not promise anything except that she had received the message and had read it.
That was enough, for now.
