Captive of Kadar

A muscle in his jaw popped. ‘Yes.’

Realistically, it was the most she could have wished for and more than she’d expected as the days had gone by. Still, somehow, it didn’t seem anywhere near enough. ‘So what took you so long?’ She didn’t care that she sounded grumpy. He would have realised he’d made a huge error the first moment he’d checked with the staff at the Pavilion of the Moon.

‘Can we talk about this inside?’

She looked at him standing on her doorstep, tall and imposing and more starkly handsome even than she dreamed about at night in her narrow single bed. Gone were the cashmere coat and the long-sleeved silky knits that hugged his form. He was dressed for summer here, in a short-sleeved polo that skimmed his chest and flat abs, and cool chinos. With dark hair pushed back and with just a shadow of stubble on his chin, he looked cool and urbane, the flash black car with driver waiting for him in the driveway a dead giveaway that this man did not belong in this world. She could imagine curtains up and down the street twitching, and figured letting him inside was the lesser of two evils. After all, he was bringing her back her bracelet.

She pulled the door open and let him pass, felt her skin prickle with his nearness, and almost instantly regretted letting him inside. The door between them had felt solid and real whereas now there was just the quivering air and nothing to hold on to but her own trembling arms.

For the little lounge room, perfectly adequate in size to hold her parents and her brother, suddenly seemed too small, the ceiling too low, the space shrunken around him.

She watched him uneasily from behind as he surveyed the contents of the room, his gaze taking in the photographs and tiny crystal animals her mum collected lined up on the mantelpiece over the gas heater. Photos of her and her brother in their school uniforms from way back when. A photo of the family on the beach together one Christmas holiday long ago and her parents’ wedding picture. Plus a photo of Amber at her graduation a couple of years back wearing her robe and black mortar board, proudly displaying her new degree, her wrist proudly wearing her ancestor’s bracelet. Between them all was scattered a veritable zoo of crystal animals that sparkled as they caught the light.

All of it so normal to her. So humble. And it occurred to her that their worlds were so far apart, he must be wondering what he’d struck.

She swallowed as he picked up the photo of her smiling so brightly in her graduation robe, the bracelet that had been the subject of so much emotion and misunderstanding, and the silence in the room stretched to breaking point.

‘So—my bracelet?’

He stilled and put the photo down, running his hand through his hair as he turned, his eyes looking almost tortured as he retrieved a satin pouch from his pocket and withdrew her bracelet. He’d had it polished, she realised as she took it, the gold and the stones gleaming as if it were new.

Hello, old friend, she thought as her fingers curled around it, because she’d imagined it lost for all time. ‘So you checked with the Pavilion of the Moon, then?’

Why was she so calm? Why didn’t she yell at him, scream at him, demand the apology she so richly deserved? The bracelet clearly meant the world to her. He’d known that even before he’d seen her graduation picture. So why didn’t she rail against his injustice?

As it was, it was all he could do not to drag her into his arms where he wanted her to be. With her tousled hair and in a silken knee-length robe that slipped apart at the neck to reveal a hint of lace beneath, she looked as if she was ready to tumble into bed, and how he longed to. But there were smudges too, under her eyes, he’d put those smudges there, and he had no right to tumble her anywhere after what he had done. No right at all.

‘I did check,’ he said, ‘but not before I already knew the truth.’

‘How?’ She clutched the bracelet to her chest, as she had that day in Istanbul when he’d caught her with it and she’d told him it was hers and pleaded with him to believe her, and that picture of him and the knowledge that he’d done that to her wrenched his gut Now he could see what it meant to her and what it must have cost her when he’d ripped it away, and he felt even more of a bastard than he had before.

And he wished he could have said that he’d never really believed she could have stolen it—that the moment she’d gone he’d realised what a fool he’d been. But that wasn’t how it had happened at all, and he hated himself for it.

‘Mehmet,’ he said. ‘Who told me a story of a young woman who had been found lost and alone and who had become the Sultan’s favourite right there in the Pavilion of the Moon.’