Chapter Akyl
Akyl
She doesn’t speak in the car. I don’t ask her to.
The drive is forty minutes, through streets that empty as the city folds in on itself for the night.
I keep my eyes forward, on the road, on the wet smear of headlights through the windscreen.
But I’m watching her in my peripheral vision the way I watch everything I have decided to claim: constantly, without appearing to.
She has her forehead against the window.
Her eyes are closed. The midnight blue silk of her dress has wrinkled slightly across her lap, and her left hand rests against her abdomen, not pressing this time, just resting the way a person rests a hand over a wound when they’ve finally stopped pretending it doesn’t exist.
The house is lit when we arrive. Kasimir, my housekeeper who has been with my family in one way or another for nineteen years, has never once asked me a question he didn’t need the answer to. When I called ahead from the broker’s study, I gave him a list.
I get out of the car and open her door. She looks up at me with those grey-green eyes, exhausted in a way that’s gone past tired and settled into her bones. Like her body’s been running on empty so long it’s forgotten what rest even is.
“I can walk,” she says.
“I know.” I offer her my hand anyway, and she takes it after a pause. She lets me take most of her weight as she steps out of the car, and I feel her exhale as her feet touch the ground, a controlled breath that she releases slowly, managing the transition of movement.
Inside, the house is warm. The entrance hall is lit with low, amber lighting.
Katriona looks at the space with the same expression she had at the dinner: measuring, calibrating, assessing what she’s walked into.
“The guest suite is ready,” Kasimir says from the hallway.
He is a compact, grey-haired man who moves without making sound.
He doesn’t look at Katriona with surprise.
If he has opinions about the fact that I have arrived at one in the morning with a woman in a dinner dress and instructions about a bath and light food, he keeps them to himself.
“The bath first,” I say. “Then food.”
Katriona turns to me. Her expression is careful, guarded, looking for conditions. “You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to.”
She doesn’t argue further. That tells me something important. Beneath the composure and the careful negotiation and the dry, precise wit, she is running on empty tonight. The performance has cost her, and she is too tired to refuse help she genuinely needs.
I take her up myself. The guest suite is on the second floor, at the end of the hall, with windows that face the garden rather than the street. I chose this room because it’s quiet, because the morning light doesn’t reach it until late, and because the bathroom has a deep, freestanding tub.
The bathroom is warm. Kasimir has run the bath already, the water deep and steaming, with something that smells faintly of eucalyptus and lavender. On the marble counter, he has laid out a robe, thick and white and fluffy. Beside it, a small glass of water and two white tablets in a dish.
Katriona sees the tablets and goes still.
“Naproxen,” I say. “Anti-inflammatory. I checked your file on the drive over. Your current prescription is the same. I have it.”
She is looking at the dish as though it is something she can’t quite identify. Something she has seen described before but never encountered in person.
“How long has it been since you had a full dose?” I ask.
A pause. “Three days. I was rationing them. I only had fourteen left and I didn’t know…” She stops. Swallows. “I didn’t know how long I’d need them to last.”
The rage that has been sitting in my chest since I read her medical file tightens, but I keep it off my face.
This isn’t the moment for my anger. This is her moment, and what she needs from me right now is not fury on her behalf.
She has had enough of her suffering reflected back at her.
What she needs is the opposite: someone who sees it clearly and moves through it toward a solution.
“You’re not rationing anything anymore.” I say it plainly. “Take the dose now, with food when it’s ready. There’s a heat pad in the top drawer of the cabinet under the sink. The bath will help with the muscle spasms.”
She finally looks at me. “You researched endometriosis on the drive over…?”
“I started in the study, after I read your file. The drive gave me more time.”
“Most people don’t know anything about it.” She says it without accusation. Just the flat, factual delivery of someone cataloguing evidence. “Most people hear ‘women’s issues’ and their eyes glaze before I’ve finished the first sentence.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No.” She looks at the bath, the robe, the tablets in the dish. “You’re really not.”
I leave her to the bath. I close the door behind me and stand in the hallway for a moment, listening to the sound of water moving as she steps in, and then the long, quiet exhale of a body finally surrendering to warmth.
I go downstairs to the kitchen.
Kasimir has left things on the counter: a small pot of ginger broth, already simmered, with a lid to keep the heat.
Beside it, plain crackers on a board, and a bowl of steamed rice with nothing on it.
Gentle things. Settling things. The kind of food that asks nothing of a stomach that has been under siege.
I find a tray and lay it out with a cloth, the bowl, the crackers. I add a second glass of water and a small pot of the peppermint tea that I know, from the forty minutes of research I conducted on my phone while a driver took us through the city, can ease nausea caused by inflammation.
I carry the tray upstairs and knock lightly on the door. There’s a pause long enough to make me wonder if I should knock again, then: “One moment.”
When she opens the door, she is in the robe.
Her hair is damp, loose around her shoulders.
The midnight blue dress is folded over the back of the chair, and she has found the slippers Kasimir left at the end of the bed.
Without the armor of the dinner, without the heels and the silk and the careful posture that managed her pain through performance, she looks younger.
She looks like what she is: a twenty-six-year-old woman who is exhausted and hurting and trying very hard not to need anything from anyone.
She looks at the tray. Then at me.
“Ginger broth,” I say. “Rice. Crackers. Peppermint tea. Based on what I read, the nausea is worse when the inflammation spikes. This should help settle things. Eat what you can.”
She sits on the edge of the bed and accepts the tray across her lap. She wraps both hands around the mug of broth first, as though warming them, and I watch her close her eyes for a single, private second before she opens them again.
“Sit with me,” she says. It isn’t quite a request and not quite a command.
I take the chair by the window. The room is quiet, and all the noise of the city beyond the glass is dampened under a dark sky.
She drinks the broth in small, careful sips, eating a cracker between each one.
“The bath helped,” she says, without looking up from the bowl.
“Good.”
A comfortable silence spreads between us, which surprises me.
I don’t usually find silence comfortable in the presence of others.
Silence in my world is something that fills up with calculation and threat assessment.
With Katriona sitting across from me in the lamplight, eating rice and looking out at the dark garden, the silence feels different. It feels inhabited.
“Tell me about the doctors,” I say.
She looks up at me. “Which ones?”
“All of them.” I lean forward, forearms on my knees. “Start from the beginning. How old were you when the symptoms started, and what did they tell you?”
She sets the bowl down and wraps her hands around the tea instead.
“Sixteen,” she says. “The pain started at sixteen. I thought everyone felt like that. I thought I was weak. The first doctor I saw told me periods were uncomfortable and suggested pain relief.” The ghost of something crosses her face.
Not bitterness exactly. Something quieter and more practiced.
“The second one said the same thing. The third referred me to a gynecologist who had a six-month wait. By the time I got in to see her, I’d missed two weeks of school and been vomiting through the pain for three years and she said… ”
She pauses. Sips her tea.
“She said that some women simply experience these things more intensely than others and that I might find relief with hormonal contraception.”
“She masked it.”
“For four years.” The word mask passes between us with weight attached.
“I was twenty-three when I finally got a proper diagnosis. By then the adenomyosis had developed, and the endometriosis had spread into the pelvic sidewall. All of it entirely preventable. All of it entirely consistent with what happens when you tell a teenage girl that her pain is normal for long enough that she stops reporting it.”
She says it clinically. I’ve heard this tone before, in men who’ve described violence done to them. The careful, flat recitation of facts. The voice of someone who has processed their suffering into information because information is easier to carry.
“And after the diagnosis?” I ask.
“After the diagnosis, I was referred to a specialist who confirmed surgery was necessary. He gave me the cost. He said waiting was medically inadvisable. Then he gave me a leaflet about payment plans.” She sets the tea down.
“I went to every doctor I could reach after that. Three private consultations I couldn’t really afford, just to see if any of them disagreed. They didn’t.”
She goes quiet and I wait it out, knowing one of us will fill the silence and it won’t be me.
“The last one I saw…” she says, trailing off.
“Dr. Richard Hale. I was referred through a friend who thought he was reputable.” She pauses again, and the way her face twists tells me this is hard for her.
“He was thorough with the examination. Thorough with the consultation. And then thorough in explaining that the surgery would cost sixty-five thousand dollars that I didn’t have, and that his fee could be considerably reduced if we came to an… alternative arrangement.”
With a shrug of resignation, she lifts the mug to her lips and sips the mint tea.
“He had his hand on my knee,” she says.
I say nothing.
“So, I left,” she says. “I didn’t report it.
Partly because I had no energy left for the fight, and partly because I knew how those reports tend to go for women without resources.
His word against mine, his reputation against my file full of ‘dramatic’ and ‘psychosomatic’ and ‘oversensitive’.
” She picks up the tea again. “I kept a record of his name, though. I keep everything.”
I nod, once. I file the name away with the other things that need dealing with. It won’t be tonight, but Dr. Richard Hale is a problem now, and in my experience problems like that have a way of sorting themselves out once the right amount of pressure gets applied.
The same way I resolve everything.
Permanently.