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“The woman I’ve been raised to consider an aunt fell pregnant with me when she was only seventeen.”
Millie’s brows lifted. “Who was the father?”
Zafar’s expression grew dark. “A piece of scum,” he grunted. “A man much older, who promised her the world and deserted her when she fell pregnant. He refused to speak with her again – no one ever heard from him until…”
But here,Zafar grew silent, thoughtful, and frustration whipped through Millie. She leaned forward. “Until?”
“Until I was ten. He wrote to my uncle – the Sheikh – asking for money in exchange for silence.”
Millie gasped. “The pig!”
“Indeed.” Zafar’s eyes speared Millie and she held her breath for no reason she could think of. “I avoided relationships all my life—as a teenager and in my early twenties I was so careful to keep things casual, no promises, nothing any woman could read into—because I didn’t want to risk being like my father. Then I met you,” he said with a shake of his head. “And it turns out, I was just the same, as I’d feared.”
Millie shook her head on instinct. But the words she’d wanted to offer died in her throat, as Zafar spoke first.
“I was careless with you, Amelia. I told myself that you understood, because you were leaving. I told myself we were coming into our relationship with the same mindset – that the fact you were scheduled to return to England meant you understood the temporary nature of what we were doing. I told myself you understood that I couldn’t give you more. But deep down, I knew what was happening, and I was too selfish to put a stop to it. I hurt you, and I have regretted that every day of my life since you left.”
He reached his hand out, capturing hers, lacing their fingers together. It was on the tip of Millie’s tongue to ask him why he had to end it at all, but pride held her silent. After all, wasn’t it obvious? He’d never loved her. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her, but that wasn’t the same thing as caring about her.
“You did hurt me,” she said with a gentle nod, sweeping her hair over one shoulder, toying with the ends absent-mindedly. “And I hated you for a long time, but eventually, I came to be grateful for the experience of knowing you, and believing myself to love you.” She pulled her hand free, needing to put some space between them. “You taught me a lot about myself, and I think those lessons have stood me in good stead.”
His smile was cynical, laced with self-directed mockery. “It sounds to me as though I taught you men can’t be trusted.”
Her eyes flew wide at the accurate assessment, but she didn’t deny it. She couldn’t. Instead, she changed the subject, turning it away from herself completely. “So how did the Sheikh come to adopt you?”
“To save his sister from disgrace,” he grimaced. “My grandparents were extremely old-fashioned. If they’d known the truth, they’d have had my birth mother exiled.” Millie’s lips parted in shock. “So my uncle hid her away in an apartment in the city, and with his first wife’s grudging approval, contrived to announce their own pregnancy. He was acting out of a need to protect his beloved, younger sister, but given that his wife was struggling with infertility, it was needlessly hurtful to her.”
Sadness softened Millie’s heart. “That must have been hard for her,” she said, gently. “And yet, you were just a baby. Your uncle was trying to protect you – and your mother.”
“Yes,” Zafar nodded, his eyes fixed to hers in a way that made Millie’s heart race. “Their names are on my birth certificate, my mother’s role in my birth erased completely from all history. But as time wore on and my adoptive mother continued to struggle with infertility – suffering miscarriage after miscarriage – it became impossible for her. She couldn’t look at me without thinking of what she’d lost.”
Millie’s stomach squished with grief, imagining what that must have been like for Zafar. “I should have thought she’d love you all the more, given her own difficulties.”
“Human emotions are complex and unpredictable. You are so full of goodness and kindness, I have no doubt that’s how you would act. For her, I was living proof of her own failure – as she perceived it – at every turn.”
“None of that was your fault.”
His jaw tightened and he flicked his eyes away, focussing on the tent door. “Of course it was, but not because of anything I could control. My very existence was devastating to her.”
“Not your existence,” Millie denied emphatically. “Just your place in her home, and only because of her own health issues.”
His features didn’t change, so Millie wondered if he’d heard.
“They began to argue a lot, and eventually, divorced. It was quite a scandal at the time. They were the first royals of Abu Qara to separate.”
Millie knew Zafar too well to misunderstand his interpretation. He felt guilt, for his unwitting role in the demise of that marriage.
“You have no reason to think they’d have stayed together. If she couldn’t have children, they would have needed to explore alternatives anyway, be that adoption or surrogacy. You were simply preemptive of that.”
“That’s a hypothetical. I’m speaking of actualities.”
She furrowed her brow. “You’re speaking of your interpretation of reality,” she chided. “And it’s coloured by the fact you were just a child.”
“I knew none of this then. Only that my mother – as I thought of her – had grown increasingly cold with me.”
Now it was anger that swallowed Millie. “How dare she make you feel like that?”
“She was miserable.”
