The crowd had gathered at a respectful distance. They watched the Mad Woman of the Silk District approach the body.
Layla knelt in the dirt. She did not care about the mud ruining her dress. She did not care about the eyes of the city.
She looked at him.
He was old. He was broken. He was a ruin of a man. But she knew him. She knew the curve of his brow. She knew the shape of his hands, even now, curled in death.
She reached out and touched his face. It was cold.
"You are late," she whispered, her voice breaking for the first time. "You promised two nights, Khalid. It has been three thousand."
She saw the scrap of cloth clutched near his hand. She pried it gently from the root where the wind was trying to steal it.
She read the red, jagged scrawl.
I told you I was a traveler without a map. But you were the destination all along. I waited for the rain, but I died of thirst.
A sound tore from her throat—a raw, guttural keen that silenced the birds in the trees. It was the sound of a heart ripping in half. She pressed the bloody cloth to her lips. She rocked back and forth, holding his cold hand to her cheek.
She did not let them take him to the pauper's grave. She did not let them take him to the Bedouin lands.
She paid the bribe with the deed to her house.
She buried him in the garden of the Al-Zahra estate, beneath the jasmine that had grown wild in his absence.
The funeral was small. Just Layla and Amira.
For the ceremony, Layla opened the chest she had kept sealed for a decade. She took out the bolt of blue silk—the one she had bought the day they met. The moths had eaten holes in it. The edges were yellowed.
She draped it over herself. It was a shroud of sky, tattered and ruined, just like their love.
She stood over the fresh earth. She did not pray to God. She spoke to the dirt.
"Sleep now, traveler," she whispered. "The journey is done. You are home."
She lived for another twenty years in that garden. She never married. She never spoke to the Pasha again. The people of Damascus said she was mad, for she would spend her evenings sitting by the grave, reading aloud from a blank book, reciting poems that no one else could hear.
And on the nights when the rain finally came to Damascus, washing the dust from the white stones, the neighbors swore they could hear two voices in the garden—one reading the verse, and one answering in the silence.
THE END
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ABM