They were all there in the courtyard, a scatter of voices and bright shawls under the late-afternoon sun cousins who had grown up on the same roofs, friends who slipped in and out like familiar weather. Laughter rolled around them, easy and sharp, folding into the mango trees and the cracked tiles. Tuhfa stood a little apart, one hand curled around the strap of her purse, the other loose at her side. She had learned, over the last few years, how a single look could make a room change its tune.
It was Zuhraan who set them off. He came forward with the slow confidence of someone who had been practicing this moment for a long time; a piano key struck in the right place. His voice carried, low and theatrical.
"Haha — dear," he said, smiling like a man reciting the last line of a joke, "you really thought I'd do you a favour? I'm sorry to disappoint. But that was only a small punishment for your arrogance." He tilted his head, as if remembering with relish. "You heard me then just words. But you answered with a 'no' and that 'no' turned me into the family's joke. So I returned the favour. Just a little thing to teach you what your words did to me."
The courtyard quieted around his words, as if everyone had been waiting for him to explain why it had mattered so much. A few cousins smirked; a couple of them exchanged glances, thrilled by the cruelty of symmetry she had humiliated him once, now he humiliated her back. Anam, Tuhfa's friend, crossed her arms and gave a small approving nod. Alina, always louder, laughed as if the scene belonged to her.
Tuhfa listened. She watched the sound that had been made about her four years ago fold into this moment like a paper boat sliding into a stream. The memory a careless answer, a refusal in the face of pressure had been small then, a thing that could have been hidden between breaths. But someone had turned it into a story, and stories in that family grew teeth.
Anger flared and went cold at the same instant. She felt it as a bright, private thing behind her ribs: not the kind of fury that jumps up and breaks things, but the quieter, more dangerous kind that collects evidence. She wanted, fiercely, to record every insult, to let the jaggedness of this afternoon sit in her like a lesson so she would not be so gullible again. So she would not mistake sisters for allies, cousins for judges.
Anam leaned closer and spoke in that flat, casual way people use when they are about to bait a wound. "Tuhfa, it was only a small punishment compared to what you did to him. We're just helping him get even." Her tone had no softness in it; it was meant to justify, to make the crowd feel righteous.
Tuhfa stared at Anam with something like shock hovering under her face. The words struck her as if from a stranger. For a long moment she could not tell whether to be more hurt by Zuhraan's performance or by Anam's cheerful complicity. Then she did the only thing she had left that felt honest — she picked up her purse, found the keys inside, and walked toward the gate.
No one expected her to leave quietly. They expected a scene: the raised voice, the accusations, the slamming of doors. Alina started toward her, hand outstretched as if to snatch the moment back into the fold. "Tuhfa...Tuhfa Alina!" she cried, running after her. "Why are you acting like this? You brought this on yourself. Your mistake it was disgusting, really but thank God it never happened. Tell us you're sorry."
Tuhfa did not turn. She could hear Alina's words like dry leaves underfoot. She slid onto her scooter in one practiced move, the leather of the seat familiar under her, and started the engine. The world around her buzzed with other people's verdicts. She wanted to cry a plain, raw sound but she did not. Tears would have been proof of the thing they wanted: that she felt small and bounded. So she kept her face blank and let the motor drown out the laughter and the hiss of gossip.
Behind her, Zuhraan's expression had softened for a second, as if he had expected remorse or gratitude. Instead he found a blankness he did not understand. His chest tightened, and for a fleeting moment something like regret or perhaps shame passed over his face. He stepped forward, hands clenched and unsteady. Then, without warning, he moved as if toward something he couldn't take back.
From the edge of the courtyard came the sharp arrival of Inam, Tuhfa's brother. He reached Zuhraan in time, arm wrapping around the other man, steadying him as if holding a rope that might fray. No one spoke of what Zuhraan had nearly done; there is a language for that, and it does not translate into polite sentences. Inam's grip was firm and wordless. The crowd watched, suddenly small and ridiculous in the presence of an emergency no one wanted to name.
"Enough," Inam said, quiet but absolute. There was an authority in him that had nothing to do with family ranks only with the fact that sometimes the only thing you can do for a stranger you love is stop them from stepping off the cliff they think they deserve.
Alina's mouth worked, trying to form another barb, but a woman behind her someone with a voice like a bell struck once said, simply, "Something broken will never be remade the same way." The sentence settled over them like a small snowfall. It had no blame in it, only the sober statement of consequence.
Tuhfa had already gone. The scooter took her through the narrow streets, past shops with peeling paint and the old man who always fed pigeons at dusk. The engine's steady hum kept her company, and with every turn she felt the day compress into something else: a ledger of small cruelties, a list she could hold in her hand. (She told herself she would not call it that word aloud.)
By the time the lane opened onto the main road, the light had slanted gold and tired. She realized with a sudden, cold clarity that public things do not always fade; they darken and leave stains. Her silence had not protected her. Her leaving had not undone what had been said. And whatever had happened in the courtyard the joke, the revenge, the near-disaster that Inam had stopped would ripple in ways she could not yet see.
When she pulled her scarf tighter against the evening breeze, she felt something else too: the soft, stubborn tilt of survival. If words could wound and be used like armour, then she would learn how to keep her own. She would learn how to choose which voices to believe. She would learn, she thought, the hard geography of belonging and betrayal.
Tonight, she promised herself, the memory would live only inside her. But like the broken thing the woman had spoken of, she knew she could never be put back in quite the same place. The rest of the world would have to make do with the new shape of her.