Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know - Samira Ahmed Page 0,100

and wipes the dust off my eyes, then my cheeks, then moves to my lips.

He leans in ever so slightly. I suck in my breath and pull away from him. I can’t let myself get distracted again. Not now, when the truth feels so close. We look into each other’s eyes, but neither of us says anything.

I brush off my clothes. “I should try and rinse off some of this dust.”

Alexandre nods and leads me to a bathroom. Quiet the whole way.

Alexandre washes up first, then leaves me alone to go search for cleaning supplies. I rinse my face and hands. There’s even soot inside my ears. I take off my clothes and do my best to shake out all the dust before putting them back on. I run my fingers through my hair and tie it up in a ponytail, then find a lip gloss at the bottom of my bag and swipe it across my lips. When I’m presentable again, I walk back to the salon, realizing that we’ve been utterly dumb. Alexandre has already replaced the panel and is cleaning up the dust with some hand towels and a small spray bottle. He looks up as I enter the room. He opens his mouth to speak, but I beat him to it.

“It makes no sense that we did this, does it?”

He shakes his head. “No. It’s like I didn’t even listen to myself when I was telling you the King of Morocco recently refurbished this room. That’s probably when they boarded up the fireplace.”

“All this soot and excitement for nothing.” I sigh.

Alexandre walks over to me, grinning, but he keeps a bit of distance between us. “Let’s finish cleaning up and eat something. I brought some food with me. There’s another place I’m dying for you to see. If my grand-père Dumas said he hid something, then I believe him, and I feel like he’s trusting me to find it.”

Leila

The rose-red thread of dawn appears on the horizon. Each wave carries me farther from my Giaour. This is to be our fate, then. One written for us without our consent. Our future, stolen.

Destiny is cruel. That it should so long favor Pasha, yet allow my love and me merely a fragile hope of freedom, only to rip it from us so violently . . . how will I ever know peace in this lifetime? I can only think that this world was not meant for us. For our story on this earth has ended.

Old lessons come to mind. And the painfully true words of the Persian poet: The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.

I may curse fate, but fate neither hears me nor cares.

I whisper my final goodbye to my land and my heart: My love, may our separation be brief. May our paths join again at water’s edge. May God keep you always in His care.

Khayyam

After a quick picnic lunch of baguette, cheese, and fruit in a lovely sunken garden right below the Chateau, where we sat on the edge of a defunct fountain, Alexandre and I walk through the property. The air is fresh and clean, and with these beautiful old trees and gently rolling hills, it’s easy to see why Dumas chose this place as his escape.

Alexandre seems surprisingly nonchalant for someone who is about to dig up old family secrets and bring them into the light. It reminds me that even though I’ve spent all this time with him the last couple weeks, there’s still a lot we don’t know about each other. His manipulative uncle pushed us together, but we do share a common interest and more than that, too. We also have an idea of what we hope to find, but we have no idea what we actually will find and what the implications could be. I’m anxious, and I’m not even related to Dumas—I can’t imagine how I would feel if the roles were reversed.

But then again, if there ever were any family treasures—at least on my mom’s side in India—they were probably destroyed during Partition, when over a million people were killed and thousands of homes wrecked in the violent upheaval. Thanks to arbitrary borders devised by a cowardly British bureaucrat, entire family histories and