More than anything, Nina wanted to pay her respects. To see for a first and last time his family and the garden that he loved, even just the window of his room so she could imagine the world he saw when he was not with her. But to do so would be to risk being found out by her family. And so she told her father she was sick, and the rest of last night, she faced the wall so no one could see her tears.
Until. Until this morning, her cousin told her what else he’d heard in Soran’s town: talk that Soran left the city to meet in secret with the government, that he’d turned. With this, she knew she had to come forward. Not to her family but to his. So they would know their son was never a traitor—that he was, quite simply, a man in love.
What if you should not love the person who your heart picks?
His words beat in her mind. Love is the only thing that makes me not think. I cannot talk myself out of loving someone.
Nina takes in stories and sifts through pictures. There is a delicate, polite lift of her brow that changes right before a cry, and though Olivia knows that they’re welcoming her like a new member to the family, she also knows it will be the only time they see her. They are kind and loving, their arm around her shoulders, their shaking fingers holding photos, but they are arming her with more heartbreak. This young woman will leave with the bittersweet taste of the family she never had and with more memories of the man she loved. She will go home to her own family and feel their judgments like a weight that now cannot be lifted. And Delan. Understandably, he begs for stories of his brother in London, and as he does, Olivia feels the tip of her own loss as well, because for her—though in a much, much smaller way—this is also a goodbye. Maybe Nina glimpses this. Maybe she senses the skipping beats of Olivia’s heart, for at one point their eyes meet, and Nina holds her gaze, then reaches out to squeeze Olivia’s hand. A look passes between them. An understanding of the love for these brothers that at the end of the day, maybe neither can have.
“Will his name be cleared?” she asks Delan that night. Her last night in Kurdistan. She watched the knob of her bedroom door turn when dark had settled and now is curled against him, her arm across his chest.
“We will say what we can. That there was a woman and that was why he left. But it’s more important to keep her safe. If her family found out—it wouldn’t be his wish to clear his name if it meant hurting her. Everything he did, he did to keep her safe.”
A life lived in secret. Glances stolen through crowds.
“Imagine,” she says, “the freedom and life they had in London with no one looking.”
“At least they had that, then. That taste.”
“They were allowed to fall in love and then told not to. Is that better or worse?”
“The age-old question. And I know the answer. It’s better. Always better.”
The past few days tug at her. Such a slender gap of time. Barely there in the calendar of her life, and yet that makes the days seem charged with the heat of compression. Her very cells feel changed. She lets her eyes close and feels him thread her hair in his fingers.
“Someone started the rumors,” he says.
She opens her eyes. Readjusting. “But you know the truth.”
“About him, we know the truth, but not why he was killed. He was accused as a traitor by some Kurds yet killed by the government. Why? Why would they target him? I need to find out. Then I can come home.”
She props herself up on her elbow. “You said all it takes is looking the wrong person in the eye.” With her finger, she traces the scar at the corner of his eye. A quill, she’s always thought. An old-fashioned quill. As if with every gaze, a story was being told.
“Yes. That could be.”
“You don’t think it is.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
When she lies back down, her head on his chest, she again feels him lift her hair to the light from the window. Just barely, she opens her eyes to find him studying the strands as if burning the shade to memory. Then he raises her hand. Examines the length of her fingers, the bones in her wrist. She watches him do this, and the act of such memorization undoes all his words. He’s not coming back. At least not anytime soon. Because this, she knows, is the painful study of a last glimpse.
CHAPTER 12
A gray, sad send-off. Even her footsteps sound hollow, as if the acoustics have changed and her room’s retreated into itself, sullen with her departure. Delan cleared it with the other—and now sole—owner of Soran’s car, and after breakfast, he will drive her to Baghdad in time for her evening flight. She thinks of doing the trip alone, the flights and mix of languages, and realizes she’s not afraid. There’s too much sadness to allow for anything else.
Breakfast is drawn out and wrong. Eggs overcooked. Tea not as warm as usual. Everyone lost in their own worlds. The sound the plates make when Olivia stacks them
