could say goodbye properly. A lifetime of friendship didn’t have to end like this.
‘A last kiss?’ she said lightly, sounding like some vacuous socialite he’d just met at a cocktail party.
His mouth hardened. He looked...appalled. As if she had just suggested holding an all-night rave on someone’s grave.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said grimly, before turning to slam his way out of her apartment—leaving only a terrible echoing emptiness behind.
THE APARTMENT FELT bare without him.
Her life felt bare without him.
Sara felt as if she’d woken up on a different planet.
It reminded her of when she’d arrived at her boarding school in England, at the impressionable age of twelve. It had been a bitter September day, and the contrast to the hot desert country she’d left behind couldn’t have been more different. She remembered shivering as the leaves began to be ripped from the trees by the wind, and she’d had to get used to the unspeakably stodgy food and cold, dark mornings. And even though she had known that here in England lay the future she had wanted—it had still felt like being on an alien planet for a while.
But that was nothing to the way she felt now that Suleiman had gone.
Hadn’t she thought—prayed—that he hadn’t meant it? That he would have cooled off by morning. That he would come back and they could make up. She could say sorry, as he had done. They could learn from their mistakes, and work out what they both wanted from their lives and walk forward into the future together.
He didn’t come back.
She watched the clock. She checked her phone. She waited in.
And even though her pride tried to stop her—eventually she dialled his number. She was clutching a golden pen she’d found on the floor of the second bedroom—the only reminder that Suleiman had ever used the room as an office. He had loved this pen and would miss it, she convinced herself, even though she knew he had a dozen other pens he could use.
But he didn’t pick up. The phone rang through to a brisk-sounding male assistant, who told her that Suleiman was travelling. In as casual a tone as she could manage, she found herself asking where—only to suffer the humiliation of the assistant telling her that security issues meant that he would rather not say.
Where was he travelling to? Sara wondered—as she put the phone down with a trembling hand. Had he gone back to Paris? Was he lying in that penthouse suite with another blonde climbing all over him wearing kinky boots and tiny knickers?
With a shaking hand she put the gold pen down carefully on the desk and then she forced herself to dress and went into the office.
But for the first time in her life, she couldn’t concentrate on work.
Alice asked her several questions, which she had to repeat because Sara wasn’t paying attention. Then she spilt her coffee over a drawing she’d been working on and completely ruined it. The days seemed to rush past her in a dark stream of heartache. Her thoughts wouldn’t focus. She couldn’t seem to allocate her time into anything resembling order. Everything seemed a mess.
At the end of the week, Gabe called her into the office and asked her to sit down and she could see from his face that he wasn’t happy.
‘What’s wrong?’ he questioned bluntly.
‘Nothing’s wrong.’
‘Sara,’ he said. ‘If you can’t do your job properly, then you really shouldn’t come to work.’
She swallowed. ‘That bad, huh?’
He shrugged. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Miserably, she shook her head. Gabe was a good boss in many ways but she knew what they said about him—steely by name and steely by nature. ‘Not really.’
‘Look, take a week off,’ he said. ‘And for God’s sake, sort it out.’
She nodded, thinking that men really were very different from women. It was all so black and white to them. What if it couldn’t be sorted out? What if Suleiman had gone from her life for good?
She left the building and walked out into the fresh air, where a gust of wind seemed to blow right through her. She hugged her sheepskin coat closer and began to walk, thinking about the things Suleiman had said to her.
Thoughts she’d been trying to block out were now given free rein as she examined them. Had she run away from her old life and tried to deny it? Pretended that part of her didn’t exist?
Yes, she had.
Had she behaved thoughtlessly, neglecting the only family she had? Rushing away from the wedding celebrations and not even bothering to get on a plane to go and see her new niece?
She closed her eyes.
Yes, again.
She’d thought of herself as so independent and mature, and yet the first thing she had done was to lift up the phone to Suleiman. What had she been planning to say to him? Start whining that she missed him and wanted him to come back to make her feel better?
That wasn’t independence, was it? That was more like co-dependence. And you couldn’t rely on somebody else to make you feel better about yourself.
She needed to face up to the stuff she’d locked away for so long. She’d been so busy playing the part of Sara Williams who had integrated so well into English life and making sure she fitted in that she had forgotten the other Sara.
The desert princess. The sister. The auntie.
And that other Sara was just as important.
A lump came into her throat as she lifted her hand to hail a cab and during the drive to her apartment she started making plans to try to put it right.
She managed to get a flight out to Dhi’ban later that evening. It meant she would have a two-hour stopover in Qurhah, but she could cope with that. Oddly enough, she wasn’t tempted to ask her brother to send a plane to Qurhah to collect her—and she would sooner walk bare-footed across the desert than ask Suleiman to come to her aid.
She spent the intervening hours shopping and packing and then she dressed as conservatively and as unobtrusively as possible, because she didn’t want anyone getting wind of her spontaneous visit.
The journey was long and tiring and she blinked with surprise when eventually she arrived at Dhi’ban’s main airport, because she hardly recognised it. The terminal buildings had been extended and were now gleaming and modern. There were loads of shops selling cosmetics and beautiful Dhi’banese jewellery and clothes. And there...
She looked up to see a portrait of her brother, the King, and she thought how stern he looked. Sterner than she’d ever seen him, wearing the crown that her father had worn.
Inevitably, she was recognised
