Coming Home (English Version)

48. Broken

Layla

"Happy New Year!" Reem grins as she enters my office.

I get up from my chair so I can hug her, I missed her during our little New Year break. "Happy New Year, dear."

"You got here early," she says as we break apart from our hug.

I walk back to sit down again. "Yeah, I had a few things to do."

She looks behind her to the Crown Prince office. "Is Sheikh Maktoum coming in today too?"

"I'm not sure," I shrug.

I decided to stay at this office even after Hamdan became the Emir. He now works from what used to be his father's office in Zabeel but I like Nad Al Sheba better and the fact that I'm closer to home and Saeed made me stay. However, I'm beginning to wonder if it would have been better to move my office as well. I could probably see more of my husband now that he's working twenty-five hours a day.

"I brought you these," Reem puts a dark box of fine chocolates on my desk.

"Aw, thank you!" I take the box with both hands. "They look delicious."

"Try the orange infused one, it's my favorite," she advises.

"Hmmm," I hesitate. "Maybe later, I had a big breakfast."

I wonder if I will ever go back to the old me, the one that never stopped to think about calories when it came down to chocolate. Could I ever enjoy it again?

Reem tilts her head to the side like a confused puppy. "Okay, I'll go check the correspondence."

She disappears into her office to open and read the tons of letters that I get, mostly from people asking for money, she filters the ones that are causes that we could actually support and then I take a look at those.

After a while of working on my computer, I get distracted with the cute pictures of Saeed that Krisha sends me. They seem to be having a blast in the pool and as usual, that thread of guilt hits me; why am I here working and not there with him? Shouldn't it be me the one taking those pictures? I put the phone down and try to regain my focus on work so I can leave as soon as possible and have lunch with them.

"Layla," Reems shows up again with a straight face and no color on her cheeks. "You need to see these," she hands me a teared open envelope and sits on one of the chairs in front of me.

I retrieve the contents; a bunch of pictures and a short letter. I look at the pictures first and recognize them immediately. They're about ten years old, from a dark period in my life right after I found out about Hamdan's engagement. Once I was fed up with crying my eyes out, I decided to cope with my pain by partying a lot and drinking, I got a boyfriend who was a really nice guy but alcohol and sex was what connected us, he was running too from his own demons and we found each other. He took his camera everywhere with him and always took a bunch of pictures of everything we did. I never imagined I would see these pictures again; it doesn't make any sense. With my heart drumming in my chest, I move on to the letter.

Good old times, huh?

I bet you forgot about all of this, I can also forget about it for 1 million pounds.

:)

"That's it?" I ask out loud, flipping through the pictures and the envelope looking for more information.

"Yes!" Reem replies. "There's no sender on it!"

"Fuck..." I breathe out, resting both elbows on the desk to hold my head with both hands.