That day, I sat at the side of the road by the lapping edge of the lake and bid farewell to the life I’d entrusted to those two bodies: one soft and strong, the other small. My past is full of people left behind, buried bodies. I’d never wept before. I had forgotten how life could be. I had settled down, fallen into that love of mine, and hadn’t run when the running was good. Now life’s hammer had come down right where I stood and had moved me on despite myself.

So I moved on. But Adam and Irene are still with me, the silent, invisible audience that accompanies me everywhere I go. They watch me wordlessly, perhaps waiting for me to shed a tear at last. Where I live now there’s this bakery that looks just like the place where Irene used to work. I’ll buy a few pastries from the women there and imagine that they are her coworkers, that they are sizing me up. I’ll sit down to eat, trying to look unhappier than I actually am. It’s the thought of that ice creeping back over my face that alarms me. That it will hide the emotions I want to convey.

It was the lack of expression that first attracted her to me. The combination of a scowl and dark skin had been too much for her to resist, she’d whisper. From the moment she left her village for the city where we met, she had been working. Tirelessly and lovelessly. The day I first ordered food from her, then pointedly ordered more, she made up her mind that she would respond to my advances; she would take that step, she told herself; she wouldn’t be a cog in a machine anymore.

And that, Seif, as you know yourself by now, was her mistake.

More importantly, though, it was my mistake, because I already knew that when a man stops moving he puts himself in the hands of fate. Life’s wave will snatch you and drag you out to sea, and when it’s done with you, when it’s washed you up, a bundle on a beach, every bone in your body will be broken. But then again, who could have resisted? Blue-eyed in a foreign bakery.