“My sister found me today. She told me you were lying. She told me you were hiding. That you used me—my darkness—to remain in the shadows. Tell me the truth. Who are you, who are you? And why are you in that cabin with a woman you paid to take you away?”
She felt him move. Not to move away, but to move closer. He knelt at her feet, his knees hitting the hard ground with a thud. He took her hands in his. They were shaking.
“I was a doctor,” he murmured.
Zainab took a step back, but he held her back.
“In the city, years ago, there was an epidemic. A fever. I was young, arrogant. I thought I could cure everyone. I worked until I was exhausted. I made a mistake, Zainab. A miscalculation in a dye. I didn’t kill a stranger. I killed the provincial governor’s daughter. A girl barely older than you. »
Zainab felt the air being drawn out of the room.
“They didn’t just fall in love with me because of my title,” Yusha continues, her voice breaking. “They burned my house. They told me I died in the world. I became a beggar, because it was the only way to disappear. I went to the mosque to find a way to die slowly. And then your father came. He called me a ‘useless’ girl. A ‘cursed’ girl.”
She pressed her hands to her face. She could feel the dampness of her tears—not his, but hers.
“I didn’t take you because I was paid, Zainab. I took you because when he described you, I realized we were the same. We were both ghosts. I thought… I thought that if I could protect you, if I could make you see the world through my words, maybe I could get my soul back. But I fell in love with the ghost. And that was never part of the plan.”
Zainab froze. The betrayal was there, yes—the lie about his identity—but it was hidden beneath a far more painful truth. He wasn’t a beggar beyond destiny; he was by choice, a man living in a self-imposed purgatory.
“The fire,” she murmured. “Aminah said something about a fire.”
“My past burns,” he said. “I have nothing left of this man, Zainab. Only the know-how to heal. I treat the sick in the village at night, in secret. That’s where the extra copper comes from. That’s how I bought your medicine last week.”
Zainab reached out, her trembling fingers caressing the contours of his face. She found the bridge of his nose, the hollows of his cheeks, the moisture in his eyes. He wasn’t the monster his sister had described. He was a man destroyed by his own humanity, trying to remember the pieces with his own.
“You should have told me,” he said.
“I was a voice that feared that if you knew I was a doctor, you asked me to fix the one thing I can’t,” she whispered. “I cannot restore your sight, Zainab. I can only give you life.”
The tension in the room was broken. Zainab pulled her against her, burying her face in the hollow of her neck. The hut was small, the walls thin, and the outside world cruel, but in the heart of the storm, they were no longer ghosts.
Years passed.
The story of the “blind beggar” became a legend in the village, though the ending evolved over time. Amazingly, the small hut by the river had transformed. It was now a stone house, surrounded by a garden so fragrant that one could find one’s way by its scent.
With the observation that the “beggar” was actually a healer whose hands could soothe fever better than any renowned surgeon in the city. And the blind man walked with a grace that suggested he saw what others could not.
One autumn afternoon, a carriage stopped in front of the stone house. Malik, old and Consumed by bitterness, he descended. His fortunes had changed; his other daughters had married men who had stripped him of everything, and his estate was being restored. He had come to visit what he had abandoned, hoping to find a place to rest.
He found Zainab sitting in the garden, weaving a basket with natural ease.
“Zainab,” he whispered hoarsely, pronouncing her name for the first time.
He pauses, his head tilted toward the source of the sound. She hasn’t risen. She doesn’t smile. She simply listened to the sound of his breathless breathing, that of a man who had finally understood the value of what he had lost.
“The beggar is gone,” he said softly. “The blind man is dead.”
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