Years have fled like frightened birds at the crack of dawn, and so too has the closeness I once believed I had with my son. Hassan—my firstborn, my flesh, my blood—now walks past me like a stranger dressed in his father's cruelty. He calls the Abdul women mother, not out of love, but convenience, and perhaps manipulation. To them, I am nothing but an infidel. A word they toss around so casually, like dust shaken off a robe, yet it clings deep in my chest, heavier than stones.
They forget, or pretend to forget, that while they dress in gold-threaded silk and glide through hallways like queens, it is my money that feeds the very mouths that condemn me. It is I who paid for the cutlery they click so arrogantly against plates. I who purchased the roof that shelters their hypocrisy. But in their eyes, I am just a discarded woman—a footnote in their grand delusion.
What makes betrayal unbearable is not that it comes from strangers, but that it is served from the hands you once held, the lips you once kissed goodnight.
People ask why I agreed to the marriage. Why didn't I walk away? The answer is simple, yet painful: I was a woman in a world where women are heard only when they echo a man's voice. I accepted not for love, not for loyalty, but because from the Abdul mansion, I could still visit St. Andrews. My little sliver of freedom. But freedom, it seems, was taken from me the moment I gave birth to Hassan.
He was supposed to be the one thing I did right in a sea of compromises. But my son turned out to be nothing more than his father's son—an inheritor of betrayal, a product of convenience and cowardice. And it was my money, my sacrifice, that funded his descent. The women he lavished gifts upon—the very women who sneered when I walked past—were pampered by my generosity.
So I did the only thing left for a wounded lioness to do. I cut the flow.
Thirty minutes hadn't passed before the ghost of a husband I once knew stood outside my door. The same man who hadn't visited my room in years, now stood knocking—because the stream had run dry.
"I'm teaching my son a lesson," I said plainly, without raising my voice, for my words had become weapons sharper than steel.
And just like that, the clan began to return from their endless vacations —scattered dust recollecting in the corners of my silence. Their laughter gone, their feasts reduced to modest meals, the mansion dimmed. It was no longer a palace of noise and gluttony. It was a shrine of hunger and unmet expectations.
For people who never worked, they sure knew how to spend. And for believers, they surely knew how to worship wealth more than God. I respected the Muslim way, that they don't raise their hands against their wives—but now I wonder if they never raised their hands because their mouths did the damage instead.
They pretended. Oh, how they pretended. Fine robes with empty pockets, borrowed prestige, and illusioned honor. They were Bourbons with no bread to serve. And the silence that now filled the halls? It was louder than their laughter had ever been.
And when desperation reached its peak, they did what cowards do—they found another target. A businessman, an American, one Mr. Goodchild, caught in their web of false promises and expensive suits. Their aid came with strings, of course—a marriage contract, thinly veiled under the name of business.
This time, the bride was like me—an outsider. An infidel, as they'd called us both.
But unlike me, she was young. Unaware. Unbroken.
They didn't love her. They loved her bank account. Just like they never loved me. Just like they tolerated Hassan only because he was their bridge to my fortune. The wedding happened fast, without sentiment or sincerity—only signatures and conditions.
I sat by the window that day, in silence, watching from behind the glass. I wasn't invited, and I didn't ask to be. Let them have their spectacle.
But as I watched, a bitter truth boiled in my chest—if my son had only chosen me... If Hassan had looked at me not through the eyes of his father, but through the eyes of the boy who once held my hand and cried when thunder struck… maybe he would've been free of their puppetry. Maybe they wouldn't have used him like bait, a pawn in golden robes.
But he didn't.
And they did.
And now, as I sit alone in the same room I once decorated with hope, I whisper not out of sorrow, but realization:
My children, not mine.
Born from me, but owned by others.
And I—
I have finally stopped trying to belong to those who never claimed me in truth.