Part Five: What They Came to Collect
He returned at three in the afternoon. This Maro had not expected — the speed of it, the daylight brazenness of it. But she supposed, thinking about it afterward, that she should have expected it, because a man who smiles at news like that in a hospital corridor is a man whose urgency has been resolved, whose waiting is over, whose calculation has reached its answer and is now moving directly toward its conclusion.
He was not alone.
The woman beside him was perhaps twenty-five, wearing a brightly colored dress that struck an odd note against the institutional grey of the hospital corridor, the way out-of-place things strike notes — not wrong exactly, just in the wrong register entirely. She was attractive in the direct and deliberate way of someone who has learned to use attractiveness as currency and does so without apology. She was laughing at something as they came through the corridor doors, and the laugh was real and unguarded, the laugh of someone in a good mood moving toward a thing they want.
Beside her, her mother — an older woman who shared her daughter’s broad, confident face and something of her ease. The three of them moved together with the purposeful relaxed quality of people who have planned an outing and are arriving at the planned destination, which was, Maro understood with a cold contraction of her chest, not the right way to move through a hospital corridor in which someone’s wife was allegedly dying.
Maro was too far away to hear the corridor exchange. She would learn later what was said — from the recording, from Ani’s account, from the statements taken in the days that followed.
The mistress had said: Soon everything will be ours.
Arman had replied: The apartment alone — we sell it, and then we’re abroad.
They were laughing when they entered the room.
