Accidentally Killed His Fiancee

LAYLA

I HATED ASKING FOR HELP.

I hated it more than I hated the eviction notice sitting unopened on my father's desk, more than the calls from the bank I'd started screening because I couldn't stomach one more conversation about grace periods that had already run out twice. I hated it enough that I'd spent three days telling myself I wouldn't do it, that there had to be another way, some version of saving Bellini & Associates that didn't require me to swallow my pride and dial a number I'd deleted years ago.

There wasn't. So there I was, standing in my father's cramped office above the drafting studio, staring at a woman I hadn't spoken to in three years, listening to her offer me a lifeline with the same detached ease she might use to order coffee.

"You want me to do what," I said.

Samira Farah didn't so much as blink. She sat in my father's worn leather chair like she'd never once considered that it wasn't hers to sit in, her manicured hands folded neatly in her lap, her expression carrying the particular calm of someone who already knew how this conversation would end.

"Attend Nadia's engagement banquet tomorrow night," she repeated, like the request were reasonable, like she hadn't just asked me to hand over one evening of dignity in exchange for a check with enough zeros to save the firm my father had spent thirty years building. "As her assistant. Nothing more. You'll help manage the guest list, keep things running smoothly behind the scenes, and by morning, this entire arrangement will be nothing but a favor between family."

"I'm an architect," I said. "Not a party planner."

"You're my niece," Samira said, "whose father is three months behind on a loan I happen to know the exact terms of, because your mother, God rest her, made the mistake of telling me everything the last Christmas we all spent together." Her smile didn't reach her eyes. It never had, not once in my entire life, not even at the funeral. "I'm offering you a solution, Layla. I'd think carefully before turning it down."

I hated that she was right. I hated it more than I could say out loud in that office, surrounded by blueprints for buildings we might not get to finish, for a business that had been my father's entire identity since before I was born, since before he'd married my mother and built something he'd hoped, foolishly maybe, would outlast both of them.

"Fine," I said. "One night. I show up, I disappear into the background, and we're square."

"Wonderful." Samira rose smoothly, already smoothing the front of her blazer, already treating the matter as settled the way people who'd never had to beg for anything always did. "Nadia will send over a dress. Try not to embarrass either of us."

"When have I ever embarrassed you," I asked, unable to keep the edge out of my voice.

She paused at the door, glancing back at me with an expression I couldn't quite read, something between pity and calculation, though at the time, I told myself it was simply Samira being Samira. "You haven't," she said. "Yet."

I didn't understand what she meant by that until much later. By then, it was already too late to matter.

✦ ✦ ✦

My father found me twenty minutes after she left, still sitting at his desk, staring at the eviction notice like it might rearrange itself into something less devastating if I looked at it long enough.

"You didn't have to do that," Elias Bellini said quietly, settling into the chair across from me, exhaustion carved into every line of his face in a way that had become permanent over the last two years. "Whatever she offered. Whatever you agreed to."

"Someone had to," I said. "You've been carrying this alone for too long, Baba. Let me help."

"This isn't your debt to carry."

"It's not yours either," I said. "Not really. The market crashed. The Hendricks contract fell through because their own investors backed out, not because of anything you did wrong. You don't deserve to lose everything you built because of circumstances outside your control."

He didn't argue, though I could see he wanted to, the same stubborn pride that had kept this firm alive through two recessions and a divorce still burning somewhere beneath the exhaustion. My father had never been good at accepting help, not from me, not from anyone, and I understood exactly where I'd inherited that particular flaw.

"One night," he said finally. "That's all Samira asked for?"