The mint tea is too sweet.
Rania notices this the way she notices most things at her cousin Dina’s pre-wedding dinner — quietly, without complaint, filing it away somewhere behind her eyes.
The rooftop bar is beautiful. Of course it is. Dina would not have chosen anything less. Lanterns string between iron posts, casting everything in amber. Below, the medina hums and breathes, a city that has never once needed anyone’s approval. The smell of cumin and orange blossom drifts up from the souks. Somewhere far below, a call to prayer fades into the warm night air.
Rania wraps both hands around her glass and watches her family rearrange themselves the way families do at these things — her aunt Fatma claiming the best chair, her uncle Hassan already deep in a story no one asked for.
And then there is Ambrosio Padilla.
He is standing near the railing, talking to Dina’s fiancé, and he is the last person Rania expected to see in Marrakech. Or anywhere, really. He is the last person she wanted to see.
They worked together for eight months on a literature review project at the university in Madrid. Eight months of disagreeing about methodology, about tone, about whether footnotes should be integrated or banished to the end of the document. Eight months of emails that started professionally and ended, by the final week, with a sharpness they both pretended was just exhaustion.
She had been glad when the project ended.
She is fairly certain he had been glad too.
He spots her across the rooftop. Something shifts in his expression — surprise first, then something she can’t quite name before he smooths it away and nods once, politely.
She nods back.
This is fine. This is manageable. The rooftop is not small, and Rania is very good at managing.
Except that Dina immediately appears at her elbow.
“You know Ambrosio?” Dina’s eyes are wide and delighted in the way that means she is already constructing something.
“From work,” Rania says carefully. “He and I were on the same research team.”
“He’s Marcos’s oldest friend.” Dina squeezes her arm. “Sit together at dinner. You already have something to talk about.”
This is how Rania ends up beside him at the long table draped in white linen, with lantern light falling soft between them and nowhere to look but at each other or down at the bread.
For a while, they choose the bread.
Then Ambrosio says, “You hate the seating arrangement.”
“I don’t hate it.”
“Your jaw does.”
She looks at him. He is looking at the medina below, not at her, and there is something almost like amusement at the corner of his mouth.
“I’m surprised you’re here,” she says, which is true and neutral enough.
“Marcos is like a brother to me.” He reaches for his glass. “I’m surprised you’re here too.”
“Dina is my cousin.”
“Small world.”
“Very,” she agrees, and they both look away again.
Across the table, her uncle Hassan is now telling the same story louder. Dina’s mother is laughing too hard at something Marcos said. The night is warm and full of people who love each other, and Rania feels oddly untethered in the middle of it.
She and Ambrosio fall into careful conversation. The project, briefly. Madrid, briefly. Whether Marrakech in July is punishing or magnificent — they agree, cautiously, that it is both.
He asks if she’s still writing.
The question catches her off guard.
“I didn’t know you knew I wrote,” she says.
He sets his glass down. “You left a draft in the shared folder once. By accident, I think. It wasn’t labeled like the other files.” He pauses. “I closed it immediately.”
She stares at him.
The draft. She remembers it — a half-finished essay, more confession than argument, written during one of the worst weeks of that project. She had uploaded it to the wrong folder without realizing. Had spent two days convinced no one had seen it before quietly deleting it and never thinking about it again.
Except apparently someone had seen it.
“You read it,” she says.
“I closed it,” he repeats. Then, quieter: “After the first paragraph.”
The lanterns sway slightly. Below, the medina exhales.
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