Epilogue: The Badge
Three months later, Safiya was working as the operations director of an arts foundation that Layla had helped establish — a position that required every skill she had spent seven years developing and several more she discovered she had been carrying all along without knowing it. The work was demanding and varied and treated her, consistently, as someone whose judgment was worth consulting.
She did not think often about the palace. When she did, it was not with anger — anger requires ongoing attention, and she had better things to attend to. She thought about it sometimes the way you think about a school you attended: formatively significant, largely behind you.
Layla told her, some weeks after the reception, what had happened in the months that followed. Rashid had dismissed two members of his household staff — not Safiya’s colleagues, but the women who had laughed the loudest that afternoon — and had begun, slowly and with the particular difficulty of someone dismantling habits they did not know they had, to examine the culture of the household he had created. He had enrolled in nothing and read no books about it. He simply, finally, began to pay attention. Some of his other staff — people who had worked for him for years without being seen — reported, tentatively and then less tentatively, that something had shifted.
Whether it lasted, Layla said, she couldn’t promise. These things rarely transformed completely. But they changed.
Safiya had kept one thing from the evening. Not the dress — that belonged to Layla, and that was correct. But on her way out of the palace that night, she had picked up, without quite deciding to, the small rectangle of her name badge from the table. Not to keep as a relic of humiliation. More because it had her name on it, and her name was hers, and whatever the palace or its owner had tried to make of it, that had never changed.
She kept it in the drawer of her desk at the foundation. Sometimes, when she was solving a problem that was proving resistant, she would open the drawer and look at it, not as a reminder of what had been taken from her, but as a reminder of what hadn’t been — and couldn’t be.
Her name. Her dignity. The walk across a marble floor.
Those were hers.
They had always been.
— End —
