Ali woke up alone.
The house was quiet, but not silent—he could faintly hear the washing machine rumbling downstairs in the midst of a spin cycle, and voices in the kitchen. Blearily, he pushed himself out of bed and stumbled for the door, feeling exhausted and run-down after last night’s row. But they needed to talk it out. He needed to apologize again for exploding and…well, being a hypocrite. Ali knew himself well enough to admit to it.
The voices turned out to be just Yazid’s voice, the deep roll and swell of Arabic both jarring and comforting. Yazid next-to-never spoke Arabic. He usually claimed to be too rusty, or said he’d forgotten most of it. It had been over a year before he’d uttered a single word of it in Ali’s presence, and Ali had always taken it as a sign of…trust. Or some
