Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

if her generosity has at last made sense, as if he now understands the value of his role in delivering her to this place.

Dinner is waiting. Lamb and dolmas and cucumbers. Naan bread in a stack in the center of the table. Soraya appears, welcoming with a hug and cheek pinching and a long gaze as if trying to understand the situation through Olivia’s eyes. Then she retreats back to her room, happy to give them privacy.

On the table, there are only two plates. “Either your aunt’s made herself scarce or you didn’t really think I was coming and this is her dinner.”

“No, no. She ate. That’s for you. If you did not come, it would still be there, waiting. As would I.”

Outside, the city lights blaze in the dark, the mosque lit up. “Can we eat there?”

“On the balcony?”

She smiles and grabs her plate and slides open the door. For a moment, she stands at the railing, remembering when she was here before, how she’d thought it was the last time, and how that supposed certainty had turned out to be wrong—and the very fact of that is an unleashing of hope because suddenly the promise that the world will surprise is a good thing.

She sits cross-legged, with her plate in her lap, and Delan stands at the door with wineglasses in hand and the bottle under his arm as he watches her. Then he sets them down, and when he’s back with his plate, he takes the spot before her. “It’s not real. You here.”

“And I leave again tomorrow.”

He nods, as if he’d understood that from the message but hoped it not to be true, then leans back against the side railing and studies her. His hair is longer, wilder, though he’s kept his beard trimmed. Skin slightly darker. The shirt he has on is new—short sleeves, white polyester, and a flared collar. She reaches out to touch it.

He looks down at her hand and places his on top. “I dream of you.”

“And I dream of you.”

“So. Why?”

“After dinner. Please.”

His face changes, sharpens with alarm. “Something happened? To who, to you?”

She lets him know that everyone is fine. That she’s fixing up the garden and Rebecca got him a lime tree and that Mason misses him so much, he could barely talk about it. And work. She fills him in on the contest, how it looks like a formality, but that Peter Darrow thinks she has talent and she thinks he will help her, no matter what, and that at some point she has a feeling she’ll end up in his department. Then she admits to Delan that she’d taken a photo of him, in their kitchen, and that it’s one of the images she submitted.

“Of me?” he asks, confused.

The newspaper. The day in the kitchen when he’d cried into the cold light. She explains and says she can get it back if he’d like, that she’d not thought about it until it was too late. That she’d not thought of any of the photos that way until it was too late.

“Liv, I’m happy. And my parents would be happy. Use it. Use everything. Show it to people and be proud. Hang them on walls and put them in the paper and affect people, any way and as much as you can.”

One worry dislodged.

He tells her of his family, his father who found a falcon with an injured wing and his mother who still wears black and will for the next year. Then he looks as if he’s trying to convince himself of something. “There are reasons I can’t come home.”

“Yet. You mean yet.”

“I need to talk to you about this. Soran is one. I still don’t know why. And the other is paperwork and bureaucracy—”

“Soran is why I’m here.”

A dart of darkness in his eyes.

Quietly, as if volume might soften the content of her words, she tells him about the photos. He looks sick, even with the memory, but then alarmed as she tells him that she kept taking pictures, as if with each word a bullet was fired and once again she was crouched by a rock, exposed.

When she’s done, he’s angry. “What they could have done to you.”

“I know. But there’s more. I need my purse.” She finds it in the living room, the envelope inside. When she returns, he’s watching the city.

“I don’t want to see.”

She stands in the threshold of the door. “I cut everything out. Everything except for one person.”

With that, he turns to her. And in this, her standing while he looks up at her, afraid, she sees him not only as he once must have been, young and scared and at someone’s mercy, but as he still is. Brave and open. He reaches for the photo, and though she has her loupe in her hand should he need it, he takes one glance at the image and covers his eyes with his hand. His shoulders begin to shake. Beside him, she kneels and wraps her arms around him, feeling a vibration within him as meaning takes hold.

The night passes quickly with them on the couch, trying to stay awake. She’ll sleep on the planes and he’ll spend another day in Baghdad before heading back. And the photo of Ferhad, he decided, will go to Aras. Aras who visited after she’d left and vowed to make things right. Aras who would know what to do.

Delan sits facing forward, while she’s turned toward him, her legs across his lap. He’s still processing the information, the betrayal. “This has been in motion for a while,” he says. “Even before we got here, there were rumors someone in my family had turned.”

“You think Ferhad started the rumors? Or were they about him?”

“No. If someone even suspected Ferhad was working with the government, he would’ve been stopped. The second we know about a traitor, it’s done. This was gossip. Vague gossip, just mentioning my family, planting it for later.” A pause. “At the picnic, Ferhad