by Holly Rayner
“Drink,” he told her. “Just tell me what happened.”
She took another drink, and it seemed to stabilize her.
“Amia was so depressed yesterday,” Alex said, sniffing. “We were playing, and she just couldn’t get into it at all. She broke down crying. It was so sad, Zaiman, it just broke my heart. She reached her limit, you know, with being locked up in the house. She just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Zaiman’s heart sank. A throbbing began in his temple, and he sipped his drink. He could already see where this was going, but he wanted to hear it all.
“So, I thought without you there, she would just be another little girl out with her nanny, completely anonymous. I didn’t think anyone would recognize her without you, since she’s been away from everything for so long, and she didn’t really interact with the public before that, anyway, and…”
Alex bit her lip, stemming the flow of her frantic explanation. She took a drink, cleared her throat, and began again, more slowly.
“I took her to the zoo. She had fun, but we didn’t stay long because the caged animals reminded her of herself. So we left, and went to the natural history museum. She—she wanted to see the dinosaurs.”
Alex’s lip trembled, stirring the storm of emotion brewing in Zaiman’s chest.
“She loved it. We stayed for hours, but…as we were leaving…” She broke, then, tears streaming down her face as she finished her confession. “Your brother was there, in the courtyard, and he recognized her. I didn’t understand what was happening—the way he talked to her, I figured he must know—I mean, he obviously knew her and he kept talking about her father…at worst, I assumed it was your younger brother, but…”
She shook her head, sobbing.
“Zaahir,” Zaiman finished numbly.
Alex nodded, trying to suppress her tears. She finished her drink in a single swallow, and Zaiman gestured to the bottle in silent invitation. She accepted without a word, pouring herself another drink.
They sat in silence for a long moment as Alex wrestled her nerves back under control.
“I am so sorry for the trouble I caused,” she said quietly. “I never meant for it to turn out this way. I did it for Amia. Please know that. I never wanted to hurt you, or her, and I’m so, so sorry.”
Her cheeks flushed a deep scarlet, and her eyes flashed angrily.
“But you should have heard her, Zaiman! She sounded like a prisoner who had given up hope of ever being released, and she doesn’t deserve that—she just doesn’t. She’s bright and wonderful, and she deserves to have a life!”
She swallowed several times and took a labored breath.
“You can’t keep a person trapped in a life they don’t deserve because of your own shame, Zaiman. You just can’t.”
Zaiman said nothing, only waited for her to finish. The silence stretched out, and Alex set her unfinished glass down and turned her face up to meet his eyes.
He looked across at her tear-stained face, the fierce conviction which shone behind it, saw her rebellion and stubborn adherence to personal welfare over tradition, and in that moment, he knew exactly what to do.
“You should go home,” he told her quietly. “Utah, wasn’t it? Your flight leaves in the morning. Bassam will drive you.”
Zaiman watched the blood drain out of her face and his heart nearly broke. He wrapped the pieces up in a conviction of his own and strode out of the drawing room.
Chapter 16
Alex
Numb. It was all Alex could feel. As she left the palace and her darling Amia behind, she couldn’t even find it in herself to cry. As the desert gave way to the ocean beneath the plane, she couldn’t find the joy she usually felt while skating through the sky. Numb. Everything was numb.
Her sister met her at baggage claim, looking a little fatter and a little more tired than she had when Alex had left—looking like home. But even the bittersweet of homecoming tasted like cold oatmeal in Alex’s mouth, and the brilliant azure of the Utah sky seemed dull and grey to her eyes.
“I put the kids in one room,” Kate told her as they drove back to her house. “They have ‘sleepovers’ every other night anyhow; it doesn’t even make sense to have them in two rooms yet.”
“I’ll find my own place, soon,” Alex promised tonelessly.
“No rush,” Kate said with an inquisitive edge to her tone. “Hey, you okay?”
“I’m…” Alex searched for a word to describe how she was, but came up empty. “I’m breathing.”
“Yeah, you know, that’s what I said when Bezzie had colic and didn’t sleep for three straight weeks. Breathing is one suffix short of breathless, Alex. What’s going on?”
Alex shook her head. “I got fired, like I told you.”
“Yeah, but you’ve been fired before, haven’t you?”
Alex gave her a pointed look. “From a coffee shop that I didn’t even want to work at in the first place. That’s different.”
“I guess,” Kate sighed. “But, okay, why did you get fired?”
“I violated the terms of the contract,” Alex said blandly as she stared out the window. “It’s amazing how many different things are called a desert.”
“Is that a weak attempt at changing the subject, or a weak attempt at making a point?”
Alex shrugged. “A little column A, a little column B. I mean, if one person says to paint a desert and they’re thinking of the Sahara but the artist only knows deserts like this”—she gestured out the window—“then the artist can do their very best work and still get fired from the position. Right?”
“Nice try,” Kate said with a smirk. “I know you, Alex. You would never follow an instruction like ‘paint a desert’ without some follow-up questions and satisfactory answers.”
“Yeah,” Alex said with a sigh. “That makes it worse.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…okay, so say the client wants a picture of a desert to go in a particular room which already has a color palette of salt, blue, brown and beige. A Sahara painting would be jarring in a room like that; it wouldn’t work properly.”
“Unless they intend for that painting to be the focal point,” Kate pointed out.
“Even if they did,” Alex argued. “It wouldn’t sit right. Yellows and golds against washed-out salty colors would be amateur and off-putting.”
“So, the artist should consult a few times and try to talk them into the great basin picture,” Kate said as she turned off the highway.
“Yeah, and if the client is still on the fence after a few consultations, maybe the artist starts working on the great basin picture anyway. And maybe that would be okay, as long as the artist could get it done in secret, and just show the client the finished product.”
“But if the artist can’t keep the secret…” Kate prompted.
“Then the artist gets fired,” Alex finished with a heavy sigh.
“Well then, just take solace in the fact that you were right and they were wrong, and find yourself a client who prefers American deserts,” Kate suggested pragmatically. “There now, problem solved. What do you want for dinner?”
The problem wasn’t solved and Alex didn’t want anything for dinner, but she kept those feelings to herself. Sitting down to a home cooked dinner with her sister, brother-in-law, and four kids should have been enough to break her out of her funk, but it wasn’t.
“Miah, use your fork,” Kate admonished her son.
His name sent a jolt of agony through Alex’s soul. She had never missed a kid so much in her life, not even after spending a year with the same family.
Kate looked at her sharply. “Are you pregnant?” she demanded.
“What? No, of course not,” Alex scoffed.
“Really? Because you just turned white for no reason.”
“Jet lag,” Alex said weakly. “I think I need a nap.”
“I show you your room!” Bezzie exclaimed in her squeaky little voice. “Come on!”
Al
ex allowed herself to be dragged by the finger back to the bedroom. It was cotton-candy pink, which depressed her, and the walls were decked out in big blue flowers, but the bed had been made in more subdued colors. Grey and slate blue, exactly the way she felt.
“They put the ugly blankie on,” Bezzie said, wrinkling her nose. “You can has my pony one!”
“No thanks, Bezzie,” Alex said gently, her heart cracking again. “I like the blue.”
Bezzie shook her head judgmentally and skipped out of the room. Relieved for the relative quiet, Alex closed the door and crawled into bed. She wished it would swallow her whole.
Chapter 17
Alex
“Eighteen,” was the first thing Kate said to Alex when she stepped out of the room the next morning.
“What?”
“That’s how many hours you slept,” Kate said. “I’ve hosted your couch-surfing butt between world travels before, and you have never stayed asleep for longer than eight hours.”
“I’m getting old,” Alex said drily.
“No, I’m getting old,” Kate said, pressing a hand to her back. “You…you’re something else. You ever gonna tell me what happened out there?”
“What’s to tell?” Alex shrugged. “He wanted a prison guard, and I’m a nanny.”
“Uh-huh,” Kate said, her voice dripping with disbelief. “If that was all it was, you would have been out of bed bright and early, bouncing all over the want ads from every corner of the globe, looking for your next adventure.”
“Maybe I’m tired of adventure,” Alex snapped.
“Okay, now I know there’s something wrong. Come on. Coffee. Kitchen. Now.”
Alex groaned but followed obediently, dodging kids and toys as she went. Kate deftly took a sharpie out of her four-year-old’s hand with her left, and scooped an errant marble out of a baby’s mouth with her right on the way to the kitchen.
“Do you want to talk while we handle them?” Alex asked. “I mean, you turn your back for one minute with these guys, and—”
“And nothing,” Kate interrupted. “Make your coffee; I’ll be right back.”
Alex watched curiously as Kate walked back into the living room. She scooped up each of her kids and plopped them inside a hexagonal fence, then switched the TV on. Any objections from the kids were immediately smothered by the bright sounds of cartoon intro music.
“There,” Kate sighed as she sat down heavily, dragging a coffee cup toward herself. “The poor woman’s nanny.”
Alex grinned and shook her head. She watched Kate wince and adjust herself in her chair, and suddenly realized.
“Oh my God.”
“What?” Kate asked defensively.
“You’re pregnant again!”
“Took you long enough to notice,” Kate said, sticking her tongue out. “You are preoccupied with this firing, jeez.”
Alex brushed off her judgment with a wave of her hand.
“So, when did this happen?”
“Oh, sometime around the two days you were in Abyamar,” Kate said with a wicked twinkle in her green eyes. She tossed her hair back and grinned.
“Oh! So my pep talk worked,” Alex teased.
“It sure did. I tell you, I don’t even notice that my entire life exists in three square miles when I’m brewing up a baby.”
“Ah, purpose. The cabin fever loophole.” Alex smiled sadly into her coffee as Kate chuckled.
“Hold on a second!” Kate suddenly glared at her. “You’re trying to derail this whole conversation!”
“To be fair, a new niece or nephew is much bigger news than me getting fired.”
“Not around here, it isn’t,” Kate said, gesturing at the brood in the living room. “Mine is an annual event, yours is…not. What were you, seventeen the last time?”
“Sixteen,” Alex said morosely.
“So every, what, twelve years? Yeah, we’re talking about your thing.”
Alex sighed, but there was no way around it and she knew it. Kate would just keep hounding her until she spilled the beans. If she were honest with herself, Alex actually appreciated her interest; she was still reeling from the pain of utter rejection in the wake of her mistake.
But she was far from ready to talk about it. She compromised, sticking to the points which sketched a picture complete enough to satisfy Kate, but brief enough that she wouldn’t break her own heart all over again.
“All right,” she sighed. “So I was hired to take care of this beautiful little girl. She’s bright and funny and creative, and was in desperate need of a best friend.”
“Best friend?” Kate asked, raising a brow.
“Yeah, keep that skepticism,” Alex said bitterly. “I didn’t. Which is why I’m here, I guess.”
“What…you know what, no. Continue.” Kate settled back with her coffee, resting a hand on the gentle swell of her belly.
Alex waved a hand and went on with her story.
“So, anyway, I come to find out that this kid hasn’t played with kids her own age—or any kids, for that matter—in three years. Her dad eventually tells me that she’s his illegitimate daughter, and if his family—well, part of his family—finds out about her, that he’ll be disowned, and it’ll destroy their way of life.”
Kate radiated skepticism and doubt, but Alex hurried on before she could say anything.
“Anyway, eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore, and neither could she. She wasn’t allowed to leave the palace, Kate.”
“Palace? Oh, wow, you did get yourself into something, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Alex sighed. She paused for a long time, wrestling with her responsibility. “It was in my contract,” she said quietly. “Right there, in black and white. Never take the kid out of the house. I signed it. I understood it.”
“And then you disregarded it,” Kate finished as she rose from the table. Miah, the oldest, was complaining about being trapped in the playpen. Alex followed Kate into the living room, where she opened the pen and the back door, letting her four preschoolers scatter as they pleased.
“And that’s why you did it,” Kate said, gesturing to her tumbling brood. “Because kids can’t grow in a cage, and you know that.”
“Yeah,” Alex sighed. “But it doesn’t change anything. Or, I guess, it changes everything. Because now I’m here and he’s there, and everybody’s worst fears have come true just because I couldn’t bear to tell her ‘no’ one more time.”
“Which is completely reasonable, unlike your employer,” Kate said pointedly.
Alex chuckled, but the sound was strained and unnatural in her ears. Kate gazed at her sympathetically.
“You really felt for the girl,” she observed.
Alex nodded. “She’s amazing,” she said, thinking about Zaiman as well.
Kate squeezed her in a warm embrace, and Alex deflated against her.
“She’ll be okay,” Kate promised her. “I swear, Alex, I don’t know how you do it over and over again. I think the heartache would kill me.”
Alex thought it might, this time.
Getting her heartbreak over Amia off of her chest helped some, but not nearly enough. Kate noticed, and kept prying in between chasing her kids around, but Alex just couldn’t bear to talk about him.
That didn’t stop her from dreaming about him, though. His tender kiss, his deep, emotional eyes, his hands around her waist. She missed the movie nights and the conversations, even the disagreements. She missed watching him play with Amia and the gentle way he taught her things. She missed…oh, she missed everything.
She cried herself to sleep for the first week, and could barely force herself to look for jobs. Her ample savings carried her through, and her stellar references were enough to earn her any job she chose, assuming she left Zaiman’s name off of her resume.
It was easy enough to do so. She hadn’t been there long enough to make a significant dent in her work history. She marked it as a long vacation, and cried over the accuracy of that
statement. She couldn’t imagine a better way to spend a vacation than with Amia and Zaiman and Bassam.
Somehow, in just a few short months, they had become like family to her. The hurt was deep, sucking at her soul like quicksand, and she couldn’t seem to rise to the surface.
One afternoon, when she returned from a walk to clear and refocus her head, Kate immediately pulled her aside.
“Mom and Dad are back from Vegas,” she told her. “I’m having them and Kyle over for dinner. Are you going to be mopey the whole time? Because if Mom’s trying to wrestle your woes out, I’ll never have the chance to tell them my news.”
“Which news?” Alex asked.
“My annual news,” Kate huffed, exasperated. “Just because it’s number five doesn’t mean it’s any less important.”
“Okay, okay, hormonal,” Alex teased. “I’ll be happy, cross my heart.”
But the cross she sketched over her chest didn’t seal the pact, because her heart had taken up a permanent residence in her toes. She did her best to smile at her parents and brother, and to engage in conversation, but it was clear to everyone that she just wasn’t herself.
She managed to hold them off until dessert, when Kate stood to make her announcement.
“We,” she said, smiling across the table at her husband, “have an announcement to make.”
“Your sister’s pregnant,” Alex’s father interjected.
“I am not,” Alex declared, sticking her tongue out at him.
“Dad,” Kate whined, looking as if she would burst into tears at any moment.
“Sorry, darling,” their dad said, winking at Alex.
“Anyway,” Kate continued, irritated. “We are expecting another baby. It’s a girl, and she’s due in October.”
“Yay, a new niece!” Kyle exclaimed. “Alex, when are you gonna get in on that action?”
“Pretty sure the source is spoken for,” Alex said wryly, gesturing at Charlie, who turned bright red.
