“Tair, it’s all over! Alan held on like a real man!”
“All in his father! Yes, son?”
I freeze, holding tight to my three-year-old daughter, burning from the fever. We’ve just arrived by ambulance at the children’s hospital.
“Tair!” I call to my husband.
“Sabina?” He opens his eyes, bewildered. “What happened to Nafisa?”
“Dad…” my daughter sobs and reaches for him.
“Pa-pa!” calls a one-year-old baby in the arms of an impressive woman. That very one, just a moment ago, Tair was looking at with such tenderness and warmth I’d never seen from him.
Tair and I were arranged together, and we were almost insistently “advised” to get to know each other: same nationality, same faith. I loved him—despite his difficult temperament and his constant distance. But one day I witnessed how attentive and gentle he can be… not with me, but with his other family.