Chapter 15 - Zara
Dubai’s morning isn’t the gray and apologetic light of New York mornings, not the flat fluorescence of newsrooms and late nights and the inside of cars moving through a city that never quite goes dark.
This light fills the room with molten gold, reflected at me by the earrings on the bedside table where I placed them last night on the dark wood surface.
This is the confirmation I was seeking all along. She was here, wearing these against her skin.
My mother was here.
The overwhelming force it arrived with yesterday in the stripped-out cabin is the same force it floods me with today. I lie in the warm morning light and let it wash over me.
She was here. She left these. She was alive.
The door creaks open, revealing Mikhail entering with a tray laden with coffee, fruit, something warm in a covered dish. He sets it on the table near the window.
“You don’t have to—” I begin, getting up.
“I know,” he interrupts.
As I reach for the coffee, he sits in the chair near the window, turned toward the city. Outside, Dubai is already entirely committed to its morning.
We go out mid-morning, and the speed with which he agrees surprises me most.
“All right,” he concedes when I suggest it.
Like two bumbling tourists, we move through the city. The streets we choose are not the ones tied to the investigation. We walk through a market quarter that smells of cardamom and warm stone and the sharp fragrance of Arabic coffee being brewed in small brass pots by an expert.
My steps slow without intent.
The smell incites something—some false memory of a childhood I possess mainly because of accounts of social workers who knew me by case number rather than name.
Something about the combination of spice and warmth and the quality of light falling across the man’s hands on the brass pot reaches back into me.
Mikhail also slows down next to me, curious.
He looks around the market stall, hands in his jacket pockets and his dark eyes open and inquisitive.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks quietly.
“N-nothing specific.”
He nods.
We resume our pace, and the city opens around us. We find a place to eat that is small and terrace-fronted, the tables shaded by an overhang that filters the midday heat into something bearable, the chairs wooden.
Mikhail orders in Arabic, which I had not known he could do.
The waiter responds like he recognizes Mikhail personally, and the exchange is brief and easy. I wonder how many lives this man has lived that I know nothing about.
“You speak Arabic,” I observe, cocking my head.
“Some,” he says.
“How much is some?”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Enough.”
Which actually means a lot. My cheeks hurt and that’s when I realize that I’ve been grinning like a fool all this time.
The food is great; the coffee is better.
Mikhail watches me try something on my plate that I cannot identify and am immediately glad I tried. He tracks every move of mine like I’m an interesting spectacle he can’t tear his eyes away from.
The morning holds us in its warm and indifferent palm, and for a few hours I exist inside the illusion that the world outside this terrace, this city; this version of the two of us cannot be taken away.
His phone vibrates on the table and he looks at the screen.
The attentive and relaxed man in front of me disappears into a man I’m very familiar with, shattering the illusion.
His jaw hardens, eyes shifting from watching me to watching the space around us, scanning the terrace as he remembers where he is and what that means.
And I know, before he says a word, that the morning is over.
He does not tell me what the message says, swiping the device off the table into his jacket in a smooth and casual motion.
We leave within four minutes from when the text arrives.
With how tightly his knuckles are coiled around the steering wheel, I know asking about it in the car is not the move I should make. Pressing at the wrong moment costs more than it earns with him.
I look out the window instead and watch Dubai move past. The light is harder now, the shadows shorter. The ease of the morning sits in my chest like something I was holding in my hands that has been snatched from me.
Our hideout receives us silently. Mikhail moves toward the kitchenette, and I go to the bedroom to look at the earrings on the bedside table.
I pull my phone out from my jeans when a sudden chime of an incoming text startles me.
Unknown number again. Anonymous like last time—constructed to deliver and not to receive. I click on it, pulse racing in my ears.
You will find them. I promise you that. But when you do—you will understand why your husband has never let you look too closely. And you will not forgive him for it.
I read it again.
Why your husband has never let you look too closely.
Mikhail has been beside me all this time, present, strategic, and offering to help by choosing to come with me to Dubai, choosing to search the boat, standing in the cabin while I held my mother’s earrings in my hand.
Present for all of it.
You will not forgive him for it.
He’s holding a different phone to his ear, papers spread across the counter when I stalk to the kitchenette.
I erase the distance between us and hold out my phone, screen forward, the message facing him. His eyes fall from me to the screen, a furrow present in his brow as he reads what’s on the screen.
His lips fall into a flat line, throat bobbing slightly.
He knows what it means.
He’s decidedly not reacting. I know him well enough to decode his tells.
“What does it mean?” I demand sharply, knuckles white around the screen. “Mikhail, what does this mean?”