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Car to tell ured it out yet But that’s a neord Give ure it out Say—could it be you’re telling ry? It has been a couple of hours since you’ve eaten” Carmen started to undo her shirt only for Mennah to slap her hands on top of Carhed “No ain She’d been hoping to prolong nursing But this was another area where Mennah was in a hurry She’d been refusing to nurse more and more ever since she’d been introduced to solid foods, decreasing Car at all During that ti previously uess why
“I shouldn’t have given you a taste ofSeems you sharepanther who relishes redup at her with such absorption, as if she washerpleasure of constantly talking to her about her father Maybe she should resist giving in to the urge There was no way Mennah understood now, but maybe before Carmen realized, she would And she didn’t want to explain her father’s absence for years Not that she’d ever have enough ti, shaking off a resurgence of the despondency that had suffocated her all through her pregnancy, she walked out of the nursery, headed to their open-plan, sunlit kitchen
She secured Mennah in her high chair, dropped a kiss on top of her glossy head “One bagha bagha co up”
She placed plastic toys in front of Mennah, set the iPod to a slow rock collection and started preparing the dish that had converted her baby to gours and Mennah’s accoather the toys hich Mennah gleefully tested gravity, giving them back to her so she’d restart her experi the mushroom sauce when she noticed it had been a couple of hter’s squeals had dishar
She turned around and her heart overfloith another gush of love Mennah was out like a light on the high chair’s tray
She always did fall asleep without warning But she couldn’t have been hungry after all, if she could fall asleep a the ood, Carmen turned off the music, unbuckled Mennah froing had stopped
The crashing of Farooq’s heart hadn’t
And it wasn’t only his heart that manifested his upheaval Every
He’d been standing there for what felt like a day, listening to the sounds coleeful noises of an infant And the overpoweringthe bell Better still, to break down the door
He’d just stood there, his ear almost to the door to catch every decibel of a slice of life of the tiny fa the door as if it were therate with an emotion so fierce he had no name for it, no experience and no way to deal with it
It had to be rage An unknown level thatpale in comparison It dwarfed what he’d felt when he’d pursued her, bent on erasing the ugliness, theback his Carmen and the perfection they’d shared, only forinto his cousin Tareq’s car It even eclipsed what he’d felt when he’d confronted Tareq and discovered why she’d really left