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"My ideas are slightly different from his. I want my company to focus on the best of Qazhar. Its traditions. Its past. What it should try to hold onto."
She looked suddenly tense. "And you don't think someone like me would fit into that?"
"That's not what I meant," he replied abruptly. "I just meant that he and I have different objectives in life."
She was silent for a while, and he wondered if he'd insulted her with what he'd said.
He watched her eating, taking a curious pleasure from seeing the way she held her food, the way she ate it slowly, methodically.
She seemed lost in thought for a while. Then she turned to him. "Tell me about your family," she said.
"What about them?"
"How many of you are there?"
"I have two brothers and one sister. And lots of cousins," he added with a grin. "My parents are still happy and healthy and living out in the palace to the west of the city."
She laughed.
"What?" he asked.
"The way you said that, it sounded funny."
He looked quizzically at her, seeking more.
"The palace," she explained. "You made it sound so matter-of-fact. So casual."
"It's where I grew up. It's what I am accustomed to."
"I know. It just sounded so strange to me that living in a palace would be no big deal. I'd have given anything to grow up like that."
She'd created the opening for him, so he moved quickly into it, asking: "Where did you grow up?"
She narrowed her eyes at him and paused. He wondered if he'd been too hasty in asking her for more.
But then she shrugged. "Where did I grow up?" She looked up at the sky. "Let me see. There was that foster home when I was ten. There there was that other foster family when I was a teenager."
She glanced at him with a mocking look on her face. "That didn't work out too well."
He kept his features blank and impassive, wanting her to continue.
"And then there were my times with friends, sleeping on other people's sofas." She squinted at him. "Sofa surfing. You've heard of that, right?"
He frowned at her.
"I didn't think so," she added quickly. "I don't imagine much sofa surfing goes on in Qazhar. Especially at your level of wealth."
She stopped talking suddenly, perhaps aware that she had said too much, too quickly. He didn't know what to say, at first.
Of course, he'd read some of the things about her, about the hardship she'd endured. That had been part of her success story, of course.
But, somehow listening to her telling him all about it, here in his private domain, it all sounded so brutal, so harsh
So unfair.
Surely she hadn't done anything to deserve that much hardship. He was suddenly filled with a renewed admiration for just how far she had come.
He could only imagine how hard it must have been for her. The loneliness. Probably also the cruelty of others towards an orphaned child trying to make the best of a terrible misfortune.
