Chapter 6: A Woman Like That

“Grandpa”

(On her phone screen)

She stepped into the corridor.

"Congratulations," Joseph said. "I'm sorry I couldn't stay."

"It's fine, is everything okay?"

The pause. The specific one.

"I received an invitation," he said. "From Zayed Al Mansoor.”

"He wants to arrange a meeting. Between you and his grandson. A young man named Raiyan Al Mansoor."

He said it like it was harmless information. Not a decision that had already been made for her.

She said, "Grandpa, if it's about marriage, I am not interested."

"He is my friend’s grandson. We've met a few times at business events. He wants to see you, the family connections—nothing more." A pause. "I've looked into the grandson independently. I like him —he is a young handsome man, no scandal, built his own tech company, and multiplied the family wealth on his own terms. Late twenties. Based in London. By everything I've felt, he could be a good fit for you."

She pressed her back against the wall.

"The choice is entirely yours," Joseph said. "Walk away and nothing changes."

She thought about Zayed Al Mansoor's name, in her mother's files. She had heard this name before, somewhere.

"I'll think about it," she said.

She ended the call.

She stood in the corridor.

Then she took out her phone.

Typed his name.

Raiyan Al Mansoor.

The results loaded. Forbes profile.

She scrolled to the photograph.

And stopped.

She didn’t know why she paused. She only knew she did.

Dark hair. Sharp jaw. Thin lips. Deep-set eyes that looked at the camera the way he'd looked at her in the terminal — like he was trying to figure her out.

The Man from Heathrow.

A year. It had been a year and she still remembered him.

The grandson of none other than Zayed Al Mansoor.

The worst part was how easily her mind held onto him.

That shouldn’t have meant anything.

She went back inside.

"Bro, everything okay?" Mei said.

"Fine," Zoya said.

Mei looked at her for a second longer than usual.

Zoya almost smiled back. She didn’t.

Just that slight pause she had when she noticed something shift, even if she didn’t have the details yet.

Then she leaned back in her chair like nothing had happened and said, casually—

“Babe, if something is off just blink twice. We’ll disappear. I have zero savings but I do have audacity and escape-plan energy.”

“I know, babe.” Zoya said softly.

Mei made a face like sincerity, offended her and threw a fry at Kenji.

The room dissolved back into noise.

Kenji complaining. Lina correcting him. Eric laughing quietly. Mei starting wars for entertainment.

Home, in the strange shape it had chosen.

Present day.

Zoya opened her eyes.

The room was quiet again. No laughter. No chaos. No one reaching across the table to drag her back into herself.

Just silence.

Funny, she thought.

She had survived Raiyan Al Mansoor.

It was the version of herself she lost with him that never came back.

———————

Next morning,

"Ma'am." Her junior associate appeared in the doorway. "Mr. Zayed Al Mansoor is here. He wants to see you."

She didn't look up from the file.

"Tell him, five minutes."

She made him wait ten.

Not because she needed ten minutes. Because ten minutes was the specific message she wanted to send before she walked into a room with this man.

On her way out she stopped at her associate's desk. "Log this," she said quietly. "Time, parties present, everything said. I want a record."

He nodded and moved immediately.

Then she walked into the conference room and closed the door.

Zayed Al Mansoor.

Just two years ago, he had been the head of the family she believed she was a part of.

He was standing at the window when she came in.

He turned.

Something moved in his face when he saw her. Recognition. And underneath it — recalibration. The adjustment of a man who had expected one version of her and found something else entirely standing in the doorway.

She let him look.

Then she sat.

She did not offer coffee. Did not offer warmth. Did not acknowledge with a single word or gesture that they had ever shared a table, a name, a family.

"Mr. Mansoor." Level. Precise. The name deliberate — not Grandpa, not anything that had existed before this room. "You have ten minutes."

Something flickered in his eyes.

He sat.

"I'll be direct," he said.

"Please."

"Drop the case Zoya." He placed both hands flat on the table. The gesture of a reasonable man making a reasonable offer. "The affected communities receive full compensation — above what any court would award. We fund an independent environmental remediation programme across every affected region. No admission of liability.

Everyone walks away with what they actually need."

She looked at him.

"No," she said.

The word landed like something dropped from a height.

He blinked. Just once.

"Zoya,"

"No," she said again. Same voice. Same face. Nothing moved in her. "The communities I represent don't want a number. They want accountability. They want the truth attached to the settlement so it cannot be buried in an NDA and forgotten in five years." She looked at him directly. "I intend to give them that."

He shifted. Barely.

"The timeline," he said. "A case of this scale. Years of litigation. The cost to your firm—"

"Is my firm's concern."

"The personal toll—"

"Also mine."

"You have a daughter," he said. Softer now. "A career you've built. There are easier roads than this one."

"Is that a threat, Mr. Mansoor?"

"Advice."

"I don't need your advice."

He looked at her for a long moment.

Then he played the card she had also anticipated.

"Your mother," he said. "Sophia was a woman of principle. She also understood the cost of idealism.”

"Stop." Her voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "Don't say her name in this room. Don't reference her as if you knew her. Don't speak about what happened to her as if you have standing." A pause. "Keep this professional."

The warmth in his face stayed. But underneath it something shifted — the specific recalibration of a man who had underestimated what he was sitting across from.

He tried two more approaches.

She answered both before he finished the sentences.

He went quiet.

The room was very quiet.

Outside the conference room glass the office continued — keyboards, footsteps, the ordinary machinery of a working Tuesday. In here everything had gone still.

And then Zayed Al Mansoor did what powerful men did when they ran out of moves.

He stopped being strategic.

He leaned forward.

The warmth left his face entirely.

What replaced it was older. More honest. The specific contempt of a man who had decided the performance was over.

"My grandson," he said, "made the right decision."

She waited.

"He saw what you were. I was wrong about you. What you married him to get. And when he understood it — when the truth became clear — he protected what mattered." His voice dropped.

Certain. Final. "Liyana is where she belongs. With her father. With her family. Not with a woman who walked into that marriage with an agenda."

He stood.

"A woman like that," he said, "was never fit to be her mother."

He straightened his jacket.

He walked out.

The room didn't move.

Zoya sat completely still.

Liyana.

The name didn’t feel like language.

It felt like an impact. It hit her somewhere she hadn't known was still exposed.

Not because of what he said before it.

Because of where she'd heard it before.

Seven months pregnant. London.

A Sunday morning. Raiyan at the kitchen table with his coffee and the newspaper he never actually read, and he had looked up at her and said — quietly, like he'd been thinking about it for a while and had finally decided — “I think Riyana. If it's a girl. Zayn if it's a boy. What do you think?”

She smiled.

She hadn't answered yet. Because she already had an answer — she had been carrying it for weeks.

"But I like Liyana," she said.

Raiyan laughed. "Anything my queen likes."

She was going to surprise him. She was going to say: what if it's girls — two of them — and watch his face do the thing it did when something got past his management.

She never got to.

And when she woke up in a country that wasn't hers and they told her one twin didn't survive —

She had repeated that sentence so many times she had stopped hearing it as something she could question.

she had taken the name Raiyan had wanted and given it to the daughter who remained. The only piece of him she had left to give.

Riyana.

Because Riyana felt closer. The last piece of memory of Raiyan. The last evidence of their love.

And now Zayed had just said Liyana like it was a settled thing.

Both names. In the world. On two children.

Both of them are alive.

Her heart was doing something wrong.

Too fast. Too loud.

Like it had just been told a truth her mind wasn’t allowed to process yet. She pressed both hands flat on the table and breathed and it didn't help the way breathing was supposed to help.

One twin didn't survive. That was what she had been told. Loujain's voice. Calm. Certain. One twin didn't make it. “You have Riyana. Raiyan knows. He doesn't want to see you or the baby.”

One.

That was the structure everything else had been built on.

But Zayed had just said her name.

Liyana.

Alive. With Raiyan.

The room tilted.

The words didn’t land as information; they arrived like an impact after delay, like her mind was only now realising the ground had already shifted.

The door opened.

Faiyaz.

He had been downstairs. He had seen Zayed leave. He came up immediately, he knew something was wrong.

He looked at her face.

His own face changed.

"What did he say?" he said.

She looked at him.

"He said a name," she said. Her voice came out level. She didn't know how. "A name I didn't know."

Faiyaz froze.

She watched him go still.

"Faiyaz."

He looked at the floor.

"Look at me."

He looked at her.

And she saw it.

Not surprise. Not confusion.

Recognition.

The expression of a man who has been dreading a moment for a very long time and has just watched it arrive.

"You knew," she said.

He said nothing.

Which was all she needed.

"How long?"

Faiyaz swallowed. For the first time since she'd known him, he looked like a man with nowhere to stand.

The room felt smaller.

She glanced once at the door Zayed had walked through. Then back at the man who had stood beside her through hospitals, birthdays, school runs, sleepless nights, grief she couldn't name and he couldn't fix.

How much of her life had been built around a lie?

“Tell me everything,” she said, her voice shaking in a way she didn’t bother to hide anymore.

Quiet. Final. The voice she used when mercy had left the room.

"Right now. All of it."

Faiyaz closed his eyes briefly.

Only the truth.

And the damage it was about to do.

She looked at his face.

At the man who had held Riyana at the hospital. Who had driven her to appointments and sat in waiting rooms and shown up in every form that showing up could take.

Who had known.

Who had looked her in the eye across two and a half years of grief and known.

The specific thing that moved through her then was not anger. Not yet. It was something quieter and more dangerous — the specific rearrangement of a woman who is realising that the architecture of her life was built on decisions other people made for her without asking.

And in the pause before he spoke, she understood one thing with terrifying certainty.

Whatever came next was going to break what was left of her life.

“Zoya…” he said, and stopped—like the rest of the sentence would break her beyond repair.