She shook her head and sat back on her heels, wearing nothing but an exquisite wisp of scarlet silk he had bought her and then fought to make her accept. ‘It might be Maraban,’ she whispered. ‘It might be news of your father.’
Guilt evaporated his pleasure instantly and Khalim reached his hand out and snatched up the phone.
‘Khalim!’ he said.
As soon as he started speaking in rapid Marabanese, Rose knew that something was very wrong—even if the dark look of pain which contorted his features hadn’t already warned her.
He spoke in an unfamiliar, fractured voice and nodded several times, and when he put the phone back down Rose knew without being told that the worst had happened.
‘He is dead?’ she asked, in a shaking voice.
He didn’t answer for a moment, shaking his head instead. The inevitable. The expected. And yet no less hard to bear because of that.
‘Yes, he is dead,’ he answered, in a flat, toneless voice. ‘He died unexpectedly an hour ago.’
‘Khalim—’ she went to put her hand out to him, but he had already swung his long, dark legs over the bed and begun to dress. ‘Can I do anything? Do you want me to phone Philip?’
‘Philip is already on his way over,’ he said, still in that strange, flat voice. ‘The plane is being fuelled—and we will leave for Maraban immediately.’
Rose bit her lip. ‘I’m so sorry, Khalim.’
He turned then and she was shaken by the bleak look of emptiness on his face.
‘Yes. Thank you.’
He looked forbidding, a stranger almost, but Rose didn’t care. She couldn’t stop herself from moving across the room and putting her arms around him in a warm gesture of comfort. His body felt stiff, as if it was trying to reject the reality of what he had just heard, but she hugged him all the tighter.
‘I should have been there,’ he told her brokenly. ‘I should have been there!’
‘You couldn’t have known! You were planning to leave first thing! It was unexpected, Khalim. Fate!’
‘Fate,’ he echoed, and tightened his arms around her waist.
Let it go, she urged him silently. Let it go.
And maybe her unspoken plea communicated itself to him in some inexplicable way, for she heard him expell a long, tortured breath and then his arms came round her, his head falling onto her shoulder, and she felt his long, drawn-out shudder.
They stood like that for moments—minutes, aeons, perhaps—until the insistent jangling of the doorbell could be heard.
He raised his head to look at her, and there was the unmistakable glimmer of tears in the black eyes.
‘Khalim?’ she whispered.
The great black cloud of grief which was enveloping him lifted just for a moment as he met the soft sympathy in her eyes, and grief became momentarily guilt.
This was the moment, he realised. The moment of truth. He would have to let her go.
And he didn’t want to.
‘May the gods forgive me for saying this at such a time,’ he whispered, knowing that there would never be another moment to say it, ‘but I do not wish to lose you, Rose.’
Oh, the pain! The spearing, unremitting pain of imagining life without Khalim. ‘It has to be.’ How rehearsed the words sounded, but that was because they were. She had been practising a long time for this very moment. ‘It has to be.’
The doorbell rang again.
He lifted her chin, sapphire light blinding from her eyes. ‘I must be in Maraban,’ he told her, and then he said very deliberately, ‘but I can come back.’
She stared at him as hope stirred deep within her, even while logic told her that any hopes she harboured would be futile. ‘How?’ she whispered.