Chapter Fifteen — — Omar's Verdict

Chapter Fifteen

Omar's Verdict

Omar came to him three days after the fight. Not angry. With the expression of a man who has thought carefully about something and arrived at a conclusion that causes him genuine pain and has decided to say it anyway.

"She is upset," Omar said.

"I know."

"She told me what happened."

"And?"

Omar was quiet for a moment. "I think you should give her space. Real space."

"For how long?"

"I don't know. But Zakariya —" Something crossed his face. "She was fighting for this. At home, with our parents, making the case for you. She was doing that for weeks. And you — you fought with her over something that could have been handled differently."

The sentence arrived with its full weight.

She was fighting for you. At home. With her parents. Making the case.

He had not known this. Or had known it only in the abstract — as a fact about rooms he was not in. Now it arrived as a felt reality: Hana, in her house, making the case for him to the people who needed convincing. Doing the work. Fighting the war.

And then: the fight.

The timing of the fight acquired, in this new light, a quality of genuine cruelty that his original understanding had not contained. He had fought with her in the middle of her fighting for him. He had made her argument harder to make at the moment she was making it.

"I didn't know she was fighting for it," he said.

"You should have," Omar said. Not unkindly. Accurately.

Perhaps the most devastating accountability is the accurate one — the kind that does not exaggerate, does not dramatize, does not add anything to the indictment beyond what the facts contain. It just places the facts in front of you and lets you look. The looking is not punishment. The looking is simply what a person who has done something must do in order to understand what they have done.

"I am still your friend," Omar said. "This has not changed that. But Zakariya — when the space has done what it needs to do, don't wait too long. You know what waiting too long costs."

He left. Zakariya sat with: you should have known.

He sat with it for a long time.