She had eyes like an open window. He saw in them that she did not like this photograph being taken, and that she was not afraid of her defiance. She looked like a girl who had worked in orchards all her life, though why he thought this he could not tell. She was not smiling, but her lips were not pouting. They, like her brow, were relaxed. She looked not so much impatient as unconvinced—of what, that her life was about to begin? That anyone her father chose would matter? She seemed to be saying to Aziz, You may think I will be your wife, but I will do so only for the world to see. Inside I will be a brown nut, and it is that nut you will have to woo to open, because I can very well keep it shut from you for lifetimes.

Chapter 21

21

For the first time in her life, Heather was thinner. It was something that just happened, no effort. Mourad said one day, “Your clothes don’t fit you.” She was wearing a pair of blue jeans. The roll of her that had lifted over the top of them was gone, and she could stick both her hands under the waistband down to the tops of her thighs. The shirt where the buttons were straining as long as she could remember was so loose she felt cold.

She couldn’t sit around leafing through magazines. She couldn’t stand watching television. She didn’t want to go to lunch with her friends at work because she didn’t want to talk about anything, so she ate at her desk, and eating usually turned out to be a Coke. She went in early so she could be hard at work, deaf to chitchat, when everyone else arrived. After a while, she even started staying late, though Mourad wasn’t wild about that development. She looked for ways to make things run more smoothly. She anticipated what her boss wanted. Sometimes, she made his travel arrangements so thoughtfully that he teased her about being a mind reader.

Then one day a bigger guy at the law firm than her boss went to her boss and said he needed Heather to be his executive assistant. It was more pay. The guy had a corner office, and she even had her own office outside his. The main thing was she didn’t have to see or talk to any of the other secretaries anymore.

So when Mourad said her clothes didn’t fit, she went shopping. Mourad came along. He didn’t even bother to say what he had been saying for months now: That’s what couples do. They went to a mall in the suburbs.