Zainab fled. She didn’t use her cane; she ran on instinct and agony, her feet finding the path back to the hut through sheer desperation. She sat in the dark for hours, the cold earth seeping into her bones.
When Yusha returned, the air felt different. The woodsmoke scent of him now smelled like burning deception.
“Zainab?” he asked, sensing the shift. He set a small parcel on the table—bread, perhaps, or a bit of cheese. “What’s happened?”
“Were you always a beggar, Yusha?” she asked. Her voice was hollow, a reed snapping in the wind.
The silence that followed was long and heavy, thick with the things left unsaid.
“I told you once,” he said, his voice stripped of its poetic warmth. “Not always.”
“My sister found me today. She told me you are a lie. She told me you are hiding. That you use me—my darkness—to keep yourself in the shadows. Tell me the truth. Who are you? And why are you in this hut with a woman you were paid to take away?”
She heard him move. Not away from her, but toward her. He knelt at her feet, his knees hitting the packed dirt with a dull thud. He took her hands in his. They were shaking.
“I was a physician,” he whispered.
Zainab pulled back, but he held on.
“In the city, years ago, there was an outbreak. A fever. I was young, arrogant. I thought I could cure everyone. I worked until I was delirious. I made a mistake, Zainab. A calculation error in a tincture. I didn’t kill a stranger. I killed the daughter of the provincial governor. A girl no older than you.”
Zainab felt the air leave the room.
“They didn’t just strip me of my title,” Yusha continued, his voice cracking. “They burned my home. They declared me dead to the world. I became a beggar because it was the only way to disappear. I went to the mosque to find a way to die slowly. But then, your father came. He spoke of a daughter who was ‘useless.’ A daughter who was a ‘curse.’”
He pressed her hands to his face. She felt the wetness of tears—not hers, but his.
“I didn’t take you because I was paid, Zainab. I took you because when he described you, I realized we were the same. We were both ghosts. I thought… I thought if I could protect you, if I could make you see the world through my words, maybe I could earn my soul back. But then I fell in love with the ghost. And that was never part of the plan.”
Zainab sat frozen. The betrayal was there, yes—the lie of his identity—but it was wrapped in a truth so much more painful. He wasn’t a beggar by fate; he was a beggar by choice, a man living in a self-imposed purgatory.
“The fire,” she whispered. “Aminah mentioned a fire.”
“My past burning,” he said. “I have nothing left of that man, Zainab. Only the knowledge of how to heal. I’ve been treating the sick in the village at night, in secret. That’s where the extra copper comes from. That’s how I bought your medicine last week.”
Zainab reached out, her fingers trembling as they traced the contours of his face. She found the bridge of his nose, the hollows of his cheeks, the wetness of his eyes. He wasn’t the monster her sister had described. He was a man shattered by his own humanity, trying to glue the pieces back together with hers.
