“I know our marriage is fake, but if you care about me even a little bit, you’ll understand what I’m saying. I just need time to process this. Time to get over it all. Can you give me that, Zahir? Please?”
Zahir
It’s the way she says ‘please’ that does it. I hear her voice break and in that tiny word I hear her heart break too. I would give her anything it’s within my power to offer in this moment.
“Yes.”
I don’t see relief on her face though. Instead, there’s a thundercloud and then her eyes clamp shut, blotting me out.
“But don’t go to America.” Before she can object to my tone or imply that I’m commanding her, I reframe my suggestion. “Stay here, in the city. There is a royal apartment only ten miles away. Go there. Be on your own for as long as you need. But stay close.”
I can’t say why, but I need to know she’s here. On my time zone, in my country, within an easy drive. Not halfway around the world.
I stand still, waiting, looking impassive even as every cell in my body is hanging on her response.
“And my father?”
I gentle my tone. “You forget, habibti, I knew what I was doing when I had him brought here. Nothing that has happened today changes my pledge. Leave your father where he is. He won’t cause any harm; my people are making sure of that.”
17
Zahir
DO YOU REMEMBER THAT before you left, you offered to do whatever I needed?
I send the text, staring at the phone for several minutes before pushing it aside. I wait for her reply, but a month after Amy’s departure from the palace, I haven’t heard directly from her once. Her staff has kept me informed of her movements, but there is nothing there that tells me how she is.
I note that she rarely leaves the apartment. Aliya says they’ve come to an arrangement where Amy is given complete privacy within her bedroom, the kitchen and lounge room. She does not want staff attending to her.
When she goes out, it’s only to grab essentials.
I lie in bed that night with the same sense of absence perforating my gut that I’ve lived alongside for four weeks. Longer, if I factor in the time she was with her father.
Her presence was something I started to take for granted, and now she’s gone and there is a crater in my life.
Yes. Why?
Her text buzzes into my phone close to midnight. Something bursts in my gut.
There’s a state dinner on Friday. At the palace. It would be appropriate for you to accompany me.
I am on tenterhooks. I don’t think I’ve felt this nervous since …ever. I half-expect her to send a teasing response. Something along the lines of, ‘Is there a question in there somewhere?’ but she doesn’t.
Send Aliya the details.
It’s a concession, I think, but hardly ringing with enthusiasm. Can I blame her? I have replayed our final conversation in my mind so many times, trying to understand her, trying to work out what I could have said or done differently to get her to stay. She was in shock. I get that. She had no idea that her father’s guilt was a fact. I’d told her so, but without the proof, she didn’t believe me. I knew that. We argued often enough. I should have prepared her better.
But there was something else, something more.
She was upset about not being pregnant. It was disappointing and surprising, but selfishly I’d relished the prospect of another month as just the two of us before the concern of pregnancy interfered, another month of trying to conceive, of spending nights in one another’s arms, talking until the early hours, making love, tangled in sheets and limbs. It doesn’t make sense, because the need for an heir is reasonably urgent, but I can’t deny how I feel.
She wanted a baby.
My baby.
The thought fills me with a primal rush of pleasure, and reminds me of our earlier conversations, conversations in which she was adamant she didn’t want to conceive because it was a lifetime commitment.
Did that mean she’d changed her mind? That she was now happy to be tied to me for the rest of her life?