Chapter 3 Mehar
MEHAR
The woman in the mirror had a rose tattoo climbing up the side of her neck—thorns and all, blooming from her collarbone toward her ear.
She had a tiny diamond stud in her nose that caught the bathroom light.
Her chestnut brown skin glowed against the blonde balayage sweeping through her dark hair, a color her ex-husband Ahmad would have called “whore paint.”
Good. Let him roll over in his hospital bed.
I traced the rose with my fingertip, remembering how Serenity sat next to me while the needle carved this new identity into my skin.
We’d gotten matching ones, hers on her wrist, mine on my neck.
We considered ourselves sisters in survival.
Two women who’d escaped their cages and were learning how to fly.
Eight months ago, I arrived in DC with bruises hidden beneath my hijab and fear woven into every breath. That woman was gone now. Dead. Buried somewhere between Ahmad’s blood on my hands and the first time I pulled a trigger and felt something other than terror.
I used to pray five times a day. Used to wake before dawn, perform wudu with cold water, press my forehead to the floor and whisper words I’d memorized before I could read.
Used to believe that if I was good enough, quiet enough, obedient enough, Allah would protect me from the monsters of this world.
Turns out, the monster was the one making me pray.
These past months living with Serenity had been everything Ahmad told me I didn’t deserve.
Freedom. Joy. Chaos. We’d been partying like the world was ending and rebuilding ourselves from the ashes at the same time.
Club hopping on weekends. Spa days during the week.
Shopping sprees where I bought everything that would have been forbidden—crop tops and mini skirts and heels so high I had to learn how to walk all over again.
I was twenty-six years old and learning how to be a woman for the first time.
But that was before last night. Before the grand opening. Before I watched my sister get dragged away in handcuffs for a murder she didn’t commit.
I gripped the edge of the sink, my reflection blurring as tears pricked my eyes.
Zainab was in jail. Pregnant. Terrified. And I was standing here staring at my transformation like it mattered.
Get it together, Mehar. She needs you strong.
I splashed water on my face, dried it with one of Justice’s fancy towels, and headed downstairs.
Justice’s house was chaos in the best way.
Dream was running around the living room in mismatched socks, her pigtails bouncing, screaming something about not wanting to wear the pink dress. Storie was at the kitchen table, earbuds in, scrolling through her phone with the bored expression of a twelve-year-old who was too cool for everything.
And Justice was in the middle of it all, a coffee cup in one hand and a hairbrush in the other, looking like he was one tantrum away from losing his mind.
“Dream, baby, we talked about this. The pink dress is for picture day—”
“I HATE the pink dress!”
“You picked the pink dress!”
“I WAS WRONG!”
I bit back a smile. There was something healing about watching this. A father who loved his daughters. Who showed up. Who was present even when it was hard.
Everything my father never was.
“You need help?” I asked, stepping into the kitchen.
Justice looked at me like I’d offered him a million dollars. “Please. Storie, tell your sister she has to wear the dress.”
“Dream, wear the dress.” Storie didn’t even look up from her phone.
“NO!”
Justice sighed. “That’s… not helpful.”
I crouched down to Dream’s level, catching her mid-sprint. She stopped, her little chest heaving, her face scrunched up in defiance.
“Hey, pretty girl. What’s wrong with the pink dress?”
“It’s scratchy,” she said, her bottom lip trembling. “And Madison said pink is for babies.”
“Madison sounds like a hater.”
Dream’s eyes went wide. “What’s a hater?”
“Someone who’s jealous because they can’t look as good as you.” I smoothed down one of her pigtails. “You know what I think? I think you’d look beautiful in the pink dress. But if it’s scratchy, we can put a soft shirt underneath. Would that help?”
Dream considered this with the seriousness of a Supreme Court justice. “A purple shirt?”
“If you have one, sure.”
She looked at Justice. “Daddy, do we have a purple shirt?”
Justice was already moving toward the laundry room. “Yep, I got you.”
Crisis averted.
I stood and caught Storie watching me, one earbud out, a curious expression on her face.
“You’re good with her,” she said.
“I’m the youngest of a lot of siblings. You learn how to handle the little ones.” I shrugged.
“Plus, Dream’s easy to love.”
Storie gave me a dry “uh huh,” and was already looking back at her phone. Conversation over, apparently.
“Hey. Have you seen Yusef this morning?”
“Guest room.” She didn’t look up. “He’s being weird. Just sitting there staring out the window.”
No concern in her voice. Just observation. Like she was reporting on the weather.
My chest tightened. “I’m going to go check on him.”
Storie shrugged as she put the earbud back in and resumed scrolling through whatever had her attention. I made a mental note—twelve going on twenty-five with that attitude. Justice had his hands full with this one.
The guest room was at the end of the hallway, the door cracked open just enough for me to see Yusef sitting on the edge of the bed.
He wasn’t looking out the window anymore. He was staring at his hands, turning them over like he was searching for something he couldn’t find.
My heart cracked.
This boy had been through so much. Too much for any thirteen-year-old. His father in prison. His mother murdered. The killing of his bully. Then Rashid’s “discipline.” The kidnapping. The trauma of whatever the hell happened in that compound that had stolen his voice and left him hollow.
And now this. Watching his aunt, his main caretaker get arrested in front of everyone.
I knocked softly on the doorframe. “Hey, Yu. Can I come in?”
He looked up. Nodded once.
I sat beside him on the bed, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. Didn’t say anything. Just sat with him in the silence, letting him know he wasn’t alone.
After a long moment, he reached for the notebook on the nightstand. The one Sloane had given him for when the words wouldn’t come out loud.
He wrote something and turned it toward me:
Is she going to be okay?
“Yes.” I said it with more confidence than I felt. “Prime already hired the best lawyer in the city. Camille. She’s going to fight for Zainab. And Prime…” I paused, choosing my words carefully. “Prime would burn down the whole world to bring her home. You know that.”
Yusef’s jaw tightened. He wrote again:
She didn’t do it.
“I know.”
I know she didn’t because I was there.
Zainab had told me about what happened that day. How they both found Zahara bleeding on the floor.
His hand trembled as he wrote:
When we found her together. She couldn’t have killed her.
The words hit me like a punch to the chest. I’d known the story—Zainab had told me everything at that mall food court, tears streaming down both our faces. But hearing it from Yusef, seeing the trauma still living in his eyes after all these years…
“You’re her alibi,” I whispered. “Yusef, you could clear her name.”
He shook his head hard. Wrote faster:
I can’t talk. I can’t testify. I can’t do anything. I’m useless.
“Hey.” I grabbed his hand, stopping the frantic writing. “Look at me.”
He did. His eyes were wet.
“You are not useless. You hear me? You’ve survived things that would break most adults.
The fact that you’re still here, still fighting, still trying—that makes you one of the strongest people I know.
” I squeezed his hand. “And your voice will come back when it’s ready.
Sloane is helping you. We’re all here for you. You don’t have to carry this alone.”
A tear slid down his cheek. He didn’t wipe it away.
I pulled him into a hug, and he let me. Let himself be held like the child he still was underneath all that armor.
“We’re going to get her back,” I whispered into his hair. “I promise you. Whatever it takes.”
We spent the next few hours doing homework.
Since the ordeal with Rashid, Prime had been homeschooling Yusef with help from the family and various tutors—couldn’t risk sending him back to regular school, not with everything that had happened.
So I sat with him at the dining room table, working through algebra problems and reading comprehension passages, pretending everything was normal.
It wasn’t. But pretending helped.
Yusef was smart. Scary smart. The kind of smart that made you realize he was always watching, always processing, even when he couldn’t speak. He flew through his assignments, only pausing occasionally to show me his work, his eyes asking for approval.
“Perfect,” I told him each time. “You’re doing amazing.”
And he was. Despite everything.
Around noon, I made lunch—just some sandwiches and fruit from what Justice had stocked in the fridge. We ate together at the table in comfortable silence, Yusef sketching between bites, me scrolling through my phone pretending I wasn’t refreshing for updates about Zainab every thirty seconds.
Justice had left for the office hours ago, dropping the girls at school and preschool on his way. Said he had meetings he couldn’t miss—something about the casino permits and lawyers. He’d be back by dinner.
So it was just me and Yusef. The house too big. Too quiet.
The afternoon stretched on. I stayed with him, watching him sketch in another notebook, the drawings dark and abstract but somehow beautiful.
At six o’clock, his phone buzzed with a reminder.
Sloane - Video Session - 6:00 PM
He looked at me, something vulnerable in his expression.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be right out here if you need me.”
He nodded and retreated to the guest room, closing the door behind him.