Chapter 5

Three days later, her mother died.

It happened at dawn. Aya had been asleep in the chair, her head resting on the edge of her mother's bed, and she had woken to the sound of the monitors changing, the pitch of the beeping shifting, becoming slower, more irregular.

She had called for the nurse, she had watched them work, she had stood in the corner and held her breath. But it wasn't enough. The machines had flattened, and the doctor had come and checked and shaken his head.

"Time of death, 6:47 a.m."

Aya had stood there, in the bright, clinical glare of the room, and she had felt the world crack open beneath her feet. She had watched the nurses shut off the machines, had watched them cover her mother's face with a thin white sheet, had watched them wheel her away.

She hadn't cried. She had gone numb, too empty, too hollow for tears. She had followed the orderly to the morgue, had signed the forms, had called her aunt, had made the arrangements.

It was only when she was back home, standing in the empty kitchen of her mother's house, that the sobs had come.

She had collapsed onto the floor, on the worn linoleum where her mother had stood for forty years, and she had cried until there was nothing left. She had hugged herself, wrapped in the midnight-black jacket that still smelled of him, and she had wished – achingly, desperately – that there was someone there to hold her.

There was no one.

Her aunt arrived the next day, weeping and talking, filling the house with noise. Her brothers came, and their wives, and there were children running through the halls and food being brought to the table and the eternal drone of condolence visits. Aya moved through it all like a ghost, mechanical and polite and empty.

She didn't call the number on the card.

She didn't know why. She had thought about it, in the quiet moments, when she was alone in her mother's room, sorting through her things. She would take the card from her pocket, hold it in her hand, look at the name and the number – Tariq Al-Rashid, no title, just a name.

She would think about his hands, his voice, his quiet demand that she take care of herself.

And she would put the card back in her pocket, a small, unkept promise.

The funeral was three days later. It was a simple service, as her mother had requested, with only family and close friends. Aya stood at the graveside, in the thin morning light, and she watched her mother's body lowered into the ground, and she felt nothing at all.

It was the numbness that scared her the most. She should be weeping, she knew. She should be collapsing, screaming, falling apart. But instead, she stood there, a hollow shell, and she watched the earth cover the coffin, and she felt only a great, vast emptiness.

After the burial, her aunt took her by the shoulders and squeezed.

"You did well," her aunt said. "You were there for her. That's what mattered."

Aya nodded, a small, mechanical motion.

"Go home, habibti," her aunt said. "You need to rest. You need to eat."

Aya nodded again, and she let herself be led away.

That night, she sat alone in her mother's house, in the dark living room, the midnight jacket wrapped around her shoulders. She had gone through her mother's drawers, her cupboards, her small box of treasures. She had found old photographs, yellowed letters, a tattered prayer book.

She had found a box of her own baby clothes, carefully folded and wrapped in tissue paper. A small, knitted hat. A pair of tiny booties.

Her mother had kept everything.