Chapter 1 - the last thing l remember
The rain hit the windshield like it had somewhere urgent to be.
I remember thinking that — how strange it was that rain could feel impatient — right before the world tilted sideways and stopped making sense.
"You're quiet," Hina said from the passenger seat, glancing at me over the rim of her phone. My cousin had a talent for narrating silence like it was a crime scene. "You've been quiet since we left the lawyer's office."
"I'm thinking."
"About the house?"
I didn't answer. The house was all I'd been thinking about for three weeks — since the letter arrived with a debt collector's stamp and my grandfather's signature attached to a loan I'd never known existed. Dada had been dead for five years. Apparently his debts weren't as patient as he'd been.
"You know," Hina said, "you could just let the bank take it. Nobody would blame you."
"It's the only thing I have left of him."
She didn't push. She knew better than most that when it came to my grandfather, there wasn't a version of me that would let go easily. He'd raised me on stories he never finished — about a promise made under a neem tree, about a debt of a different kind that had nothing to do with money, about a friend whose name he'd say and then stop himself, like he'd caught himself confessing something.
"One day it will matter who my friends were," he used to say. "Not to you. But to someone."
I never understood what he meant. I still don't, not really — not even now, with everything I know.
The light ahead turned amber. I remember easing my foot toward the brake. I remember the headlights in the side mirror, too bright, too close, swinging in at an angle that didn't belong to our lane.
I remember Hina's voice saying my name like a question.
And then nothing arrived the way it should have — no screech, no scream stretched out in slow motion the way it happens in films. Just a sound like the world folding in on itself, and then silence so complete it felt like being underwater.
Somewhere far away, machines were beeping. Somewhere far away, someone was saying my name — Noor, Noor, can you hear me — but it sounded like it was being spoken through a wall three rooms over, and I couldn't find the door.
I didn't feel like I was dying. I felt like I was arriving somewhere.
The dark didn't stay dark for long. It peeled back slowly, the way your eyes adjust to a room after the lights go out, until I realized I wasn't lying down anymore. I was sitting upright, in a chair I didn't recognize, in a room too grand to be a hospital — high ceilings, marble underfoot, the kind of quiet that didn't come from a place being empty, but from a place where people had learned to move without being heard.
A man stood near the window with his back to me, dressed like the room belonged to him, which — I would learn — it did.
"You've been asleep a long time," he said, without turning around. His voice was unhurried, low, the voice of someone who never needed to raise it to be obeyed. "Longer than your family expected you would be."
"Where am I?" My own voice came out cracked, unfamiliar, like I hadn't used it in longer than I remembered.
"You're home," he said. "Or as close to it as your grandfather's debts allow."
He turned then, and something in his face stopped the question in my throat before I could ask it — not because he was a stranger, but because some part of me, some old and buried part I didn't have a name for yet, looked at him and thought:
I know you. I've always known you. I just don't know from where.
"My name is Zaviyar Rehmani," he said, watching me with an attention that felt like it had been waiting years to be spent. "And you, Noor — you have no idea how long I've been expecting you."
