You call this fate?

Chapter 48

It had been only a day since out last talk, but he seemed to be everywhere now. Whenever I turned my head, there he was, standing in a corner or sitting on the sofa, almost as if unseen forces were pushing us together for unimaginably malicious outcomes. As if they knew nothing was resolved and they couldn’t let it go on like that.

Yet every time there had been someone else in the room, Granny or Clara or the girls, and fighting with him before people already angry with me just didn’t hold that much appeal. So we had stayed silent, skirting each other like a hunter might his prey, eyeing for potential weaknesses that could be explored.

I knew that this arrangement couldn’t have lasted for long, but I really wished it hadn’t been so soon.

“Ella just went under,” I said, rubbing my head. “I was going to bed now.”

“I am getting myself some warm milk,” he said. “Do you want some?”

I lifted my head, feeling an irrational laugh bubbling in my throat. The tiredness was catching up. “Warm milk,” I said. “This is what I will miss most about this place. The difference. I mean, walk milk? Seriously?”

He frowned, stopping behind the kitchen counter with a mug in his hand. “What’s wrong with warm milk?”

I sat on the sofa again. “Nothing’s wrong with it,” I said, throwing my head back. “Back home nobody drank milk to calm themselves. Drinking milk was a chore, something you did when you mother held a rolling pin to your head. Besides, the smell of milk makes me gag.”

He snorted. The mug clicked against the counter. “Did it ever occur to you that you people might have been totally mad?”

I smiled. “Many times.”

He sighed. We fell silent.

After a moment, he said, voice soft: “Has she been crying?”

Without looking, I rested a hand on Ella’s head, stroking the mass of red curls. “She is still very much against the idea of leaving.”

He didn’t say anything. The refrigerator door was pulled open.

“What,” I said, looking teasingly up at him, “no pearls of wisdom today? No telling me that this is crazy, that this is wrong?”

He shut the door and took excruciating care in placing the milk bottle on the marble countertop. “I don’t have anything else to say.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t think my heart could break any further, but it did. It is all my doing, I thought. All of it. “You will give up?” I asked.

“You did,” he said simply.

“I have my reasons.”

“So have I.”

This time I got up and strode to the kitchen. “Really?” I asked, depositing myself on a stool. I felt drunk, euphoric and despairing all at the same time. “What are your reasons?”

He had already filled the mug. His moves practical and methodic—uncaring, foreign—he turned to place it in the microwave. “You have never told me yours,” he said. “Why should I?” Setting the timer, he ran his hands through his hair and leaned against the counter, watching me. “Besides, there’s nothing to say. I have nothing.”

“I told you my reasons,” I said. There was a magical quality to the air. It didn’t escape my notice that it had been right here, on this kitchen counter, that I had told him about Asim. We hadn’t spoken a word since. And now, again right here, with the house silent and unmoving around us, the night full of false promises and hopeless hope, I couldn’t seem to let it go. “You know my reasons.”