Even when you were little, when you were running around with that cripple, you thought you were so clever, with your books and poems.”
“What good are all your smarts to you now? What's keeping you off the streets, your smarts or me?”
“I'm despicable? Half the women in this city would kill to have a husband like me. They would kill for it.”
He rolled back and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “You like big words? I'll give you one: perspective.”
“That's what I'm doing here, Laila. Making sure you don't lose perspective.”
What turned Laila's stomach the rest of the night was that every word Rasheed had uttered, every last one, was true.
But, in the morning, and for several mornings after that, the queasiness in her gut persisted, then worsened, became something dismayingly familiar.
One cold, overcast afternoon soon after, Laila lay on her back on the bedroom floor. Mariam was napping with Aziza in her room.
In Laila's hands was a metal spoke she had snapped with a pair of pliers from an abandoned bicycle wheel.
She'd found it in the same alley where she had kissed Tariq years back.
For a long time, Laila lay on the floor, sucking air through her teeth, legs parted.
She'd adored Aziza from the moment when she'd first suspected her existence.
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