Tuhfa's scooter sighed as she turned into the lane and killed the engine. The house looked smaller in the dusk, its windows like tired eyes. She pushed open the gate and hurried up the narrow steps, the cool air clinging to her like a second skin she couldn't shrug off. Inside, the house smelled of cardamom and old fabric familiar things that should have comforted her, but tonight they only made her feel how much had shifted.
The room she shared with her sisters was modest: two narrow beds pressed against the walls, a single wardrobe that creaked, and a window that looked out over the courtyard where the cousins had gathered that afternoon. Tania, the oldest, had married and moved out; the three who remained Tooba, Toora, and Tuhfa had rearranged themselves into the small circle of sisters left behind. The house had always been noisy with conversation, with small arguments and shared secrets. It was a room that had held laughter and late-night plans and the quiet companionable breathing of siblings. Tonight, it felt impossibly tight.
Tuhfa moved by habit at first, dropping her bag on the bed and stealing toward her mother's door as if seeking permission to exist. The habit offered nothing. She went to the bathroom instead, locked the door, and let music fill the tiles: a song she had known since childhood, something with slow strings that made crying possible without shame. She let the sound carry her grief. The tears came raw and private, not the kind that would summon her family on the stairs; she wanted them to think she had weathered it on her own.
When the crying eased and she splashed cool water on her face, the house felt like a place she no longer recognized. She turned the music off and stepped into the dim corridor. Tooba and Toora waited in the doorway, silhouettes softened by the low light.
Toora's voice was immediate and tender. "What happened?" she asked, the question more an act of love than curiosity.
Tuhfa looked past them. Her throat was a bruise. "Just leave me alone," she said, and the words came out small brittle, like thin glass.
Tooba hesitated, then closed the distance between them as siblings do, not with interrogation but with the heavy, patient presence of someone who has watched you grow. "We won't force you," she said quietly, though it was clear from the quick worry in her eyes that she wished otherwise. The three of them had shared too many nights and too many secrets for anything less than that to be said.
Tuhfa crawled under the blanket early, pretending that sleep might repair the edges of the day. The ritual of the household carried on around them: the clinking of dishes, a radio murmuring in the next room, a distant prayer. But the usual sisterly chatter the whispered recounting of small humiliations, the jokes and minor competitions did not happen. There was a hollow where it should have been, a space that hummed with things unspoken.
Downstairs, the courtyard had emptied with the easy certainty of people who believe slights are brief. Alina, Anam, Reemal, Laiba their voices tried to stitch the evening into ordinary shape. Zuhraan had announced the end with a casual command, smoothing the performance into something final. "That's enough for today. Everyone can go home." The words were designed to reassure others, and perhaps himself.
They told one another the story they wanted: tomorrow, Tuhfa will laugh it off; tomorrow, she will forgive because of what everyone assumed she felt for Zuhraan. But habit and assumption are poor judges of what a young heart decides when pushed.
Only Ufaq, standing at a small distance with a cup of tea cooling in her hands, watched differently. She was not loud; she had never been the kind to speak to fill a room. Instead she stood with her own private calm, a small smile that was not of amusement but of recognition. When Alina tossed a quick barb "Who are you to tell me this?" Ufaq answered softly, not to provoke but to plant a seed. "I am nobody now, Alina," she said. "But write it down I will be somebody tomorrow."
Her words hung in the air, the way a stone hangs a ripple over a pond. There was something deliberate in her quiet: not pity, not malice, but a patient certainty that some afternoons become the hinge of a life. Ufaq finished her tea, set the cup down with a soft clink, and left for her own house. As she walked away she looked toward the lane where Tuhfa had disappeared. The sight did not trouble her; it sharpened something inside her instead.
Back in the small room, the three sisters lay awake beneath the thin blanket while the night deepened. Toora pretended to sleep first, then Tooba, and finally Tuhfa, though none of them truly rested. In the dark, Tuhfa turned the day over like a stone and found the edges rough. She kept telling herself she had been small in one moment; she had answered once and been ridiculed for it. Yet the memory of Zuhraan's voice, the way his vengeance had been dressed as justice, kept replaying, and with each replay a new determination settled in her.
She did not yet know what form it would take. Anger was not the sharp, immediate thing that breaks a cup it was a slow, steady heat that might forge something new. She thought of Ufaq's quiet promise and the way some silences held more power than speech. She thought of her sisters' faces, kind and helpless, and of Inam's steady presence earlier in the courtyard. The house, she realized, had already been rearranged by a single afternoon.
When sleep finally took her, it was not restful but a thin, watchful kind the sleep of someone who has been jolted awake to a possibility. Outside, the night breathed over the roof tiles. Inside, a new, small plan began to form in Tuhfa's chest: not a scheme of revenge, but a careful, stubborn remaking of herself. She would choose her words more carefully; she would guard her trust; and if the family had laughed her away once, she would not let them do so again.
The quiet of the house felt different now not emptier, but charged. Words had been spoken, insults thrown, and a near-disaster had been averted. Something in the house was changing, and whether that change would be a storm or a slow, unpitying tide depended on what Tuhfa did next.