The gravel answers me the way it always has, obedient, granular, counting out a life in small, controllable sounds. Left, right. Left, right. The rhythm is so familiar it almost convinces me I chose it. As a boy, that cadence meant my father was nearby, that I was being watched and therefore safe; tonight it means the opposite, because every sound announces where I am, and every lantern seems placed to make sure I can’t pretend I’m invisible.
The light falls in clean shapes across the path, rectangles that don’t flicker the way candlelight should. Even the romance here has been disciplined. Orange blossom drifts over from the grove and lands against the starch of my shirt like a soft accusation: you wanted sweetness, didn’t you, but only the kind that doesn’t stain. Somewhere beyond the cypress line a setar sings, bright and yearning, and my throat tightens as if the music knows what I haven’t said out loud.
I tell myself I’m walking toward a ceremony. Toward duty. Toward the necessary. But my body keeps doing what it does when it wants an escape: my eyes map the garden’s geometry, the water channels like quiet boundaries, the rose arbor as a blind spot, the service corridor behind the pavilion where staff disappear and no one asks why. I count openings the way other men count blessings.
My hand goes to my pocket before I can stop it, fingertips finding the small charm I’ve carried since university, ridiculous, private, mine. A knotted thread, a prayer folded too many times. Superstition as a loophole: if I touch it, maybe fate becomes negotiable, maybe I can bargain for a different ending without admitting I’m bargaining at all.
Ahead, laughter rises, practiced, expensive, and my practiced smile tries to assemble itself in response. It forms like a reflex, not a feeling. The garden is beautiful in the way a stage is beautiful: everything arranged to make one man say yes on cue. I keep walking anyway, because stopping would be its own kind of scene, and scenes are the one thing they have trained me to fear more than unhappiness.
I stop beneath the shadow of a pomegranate tree and fuss with my cuffs like I’m still a boy being inspected before a school recital. Button, smooth, button: an absurd little ritual, but my fingers know it the way they know a prayer. The fabric is perfect, of course. It’s always perfect. That’s the point. Still, I pinch at an invisible thread, because if there’s even a hint of disorder, it will find its way to the surface at the exact moment everyone is looking.
A windowpane catches me as I pass: dark glass, not a mirror, which makes the reflection feel stolen. My own face hovers there: the practiced smile at rest, the eyes that never fully agree with it. I tilt my chin, check the line of my collar, the fall of my hair, the way my shoulders hold the weight of a name.
One crease at my wrist refuses to lie flat. My stomach tightens as if the cloth is speaking. Superstition isn’t logic; it’s vocabulary. A crease means hesitation. Hesitation means punishment. I press my thumb into it anyway, trying to iron fate with skin.
At each junction my feet hesitate a fraction, not from indecision but from inventory. The estate is a diagram I learned before I learned affection: the rose arbor where couples pretend to get lost, the service corridor where staff actually vanish; the courtyard that invites applause, the pavilion that permits vows and forbids breath. To everyone else these paths are ornamental but to me they are gates. This turn means you may be seen; that arch means you will be corrected. Even the lanterns feel like punctuation, telling me where a sentence can end and where it must continue. I keep mapping because mapping is the only way I know to ask for mercy without speaking.
A silver tray glides past my ribs, sweets trembling with each step; a shoulder pivots to block, not quite touching, but making a wall out of etiquette. A laugh spikes, too loud, too bright, then collapses into a murmur when an elder’s gaze lands. I watch the micro-movements the way I watched adults at family dinners: who gets guided closer, who gets praised into place, who is gently, efficiently kept away.
Near the mirrored pavilion the air changes, cooler, sharper, as if the glass is holding its breath. I slow, not enough to look like hesitation, just enough to count: two guards by the lattice, one at the curtain seam, attendants arranged like flower stands, decorative until you try to pass. My smile clicks into place on schedule; my eyes keep asking how many exits can become walls.
I angle myself into the knot of elders the way a man steps into deep water. Their cologne and rosewater braid in the air, sweet on top of something metallic, and for a heartbeat I’m a boy again at the edge of a dining room, waiting to be granted a chair.
“Mehrzad jān,” one of them says, and the endearment is a lid placed gently over a pot that’s already boiling. Another voice follows, smooth as silk over stone: a question about the timing, about the guests, about whether I’ve spoken to the minister’s nephew yet. They do not ask if I’m well. They ask if I’m ready. Ready as in aligned, ready as in owned.
I let the questions land. That is the trick: receive first, like prayer, like insult, like instruction. I keep my chin angled in the respectful degree I’ve practiced in mirrors, my smile warmed just enough to pass for gratitude instead of defense. Low voice, formal words, the careful confidence they like because it reassures them that the heir is intact, that the suit fits the man.
“Yes, of course,” I say, and it means nothing and everything. I mention the expansion deal with the exact enthusiasm that can be quoted later without sounding eager. I praise my mother’s hospitality before anyone can imply it. I laugh softly at a joke that isn’t funny because it isn’t a joke. It’s a reminder that I have been watched since I had milk teeth.
Their eyes move over me like appraisers’ hands: cuffs, posture, composure. I feel the charm in my pocket press against my thigh, a foolish little pulse. In a pause between questions, I catch myself wanting to touch it, to bargain with something unseen for a single honest sentence.
Instead I nod at the right moments, name the right people, pretend my own life is a schedule I’m pleased to keep. Somewhere behind the curtain, the pavilion waits like a mouth. Here, among the elders, I learn again how gravity works: it isn’t force, it’s permission. And they have always been the ones granting it.
Each handshake is a transaction disguised as warmth. I let my palm meet theirs with the right pressure (firm enough to suggest competence, not so firm it reads as defiance) and I pay attention to what they take in return. A thumb that drags over my knuckles like it’s checking for softness. A grip that lingers a beat past politeness, staking a claim. A quick clasp that says, You’re temporary. A damp hand that says, I’m afraid of tonight too.
I give away small coins of deference: a lowered gaze for an elder, a half-step back to let a patron feel taller. Then, when someone tries to close the distance too quickly I hold my ground with a stillness that looks like respect. No words. Just the refusal to be steered.
Names do the real work. Some say “Mehrzad” like a blessing, soft as rosewater, expecting me to bloom on command. Others shape it like a warning, sharp at the end, a reminder that a man can be corrected in public with nothing more than a syllable.
I smile anyway, because a smile is the only weapon here that doesn’t draw blood.
Nahid drifts to my side with the ease of someone who belongs to every frame, their perfume crisp as cold air. Their mouth tilts. Not quite a smile, more like a blade offered handle-first.
“So,” they say, eyes flicking to the pavilion, “have you memorized your lines, or are we improvising tonight?”
It’s a joke the way a lit match is a joke in a room full of silk. I give the laugh that’s expected. Then I answer with something harmless, a practiced little puff of charm that lands and dissolves.
“Improvisation is for poets,” I say lightly. “I’m just here to make sure the lights don’t fall on anyone important.”
No follow-up. No opening. Nothing tender to hook.
A waiter brushes past with a tray balanced like a small altar, pistachios and sugar catching the lanternlight. “Bebakhshid,” he murmurs, already bracing for the kind of apology that costs a job. I turn my shoulder, give him a corridor with my body, and answer in the low, gentle register I keep for people who can’t afford entitlement. “It’s all right. Slow down. You’re doing fine.”
I switch faces the way I switch languages. Without pausing to notice the cost. Dutiful son, effortless host, obedient fiancé, competent heir; each one slides over the last until I can’t tell where my mouth learned to smile and where it learned to hide. The danger is the motion itself, the flicker. So I still my features, seal the edges, pretend there’s no seam to find.
My fingers find the charm in my inner pocket the way they find a pulse in a stranger’s wrist. Too intimate, too practiced, pretending it’s only caution. The little piece of metal is smooth where I’ve worried it for years, a worn crescent of belief I’d laugh at if it weren’t mine. I rub my thumb along its edge until it heats, until I can almost pretend the warmth is an answer and not just friction.
It was given to me the way instructions are given in my family: wrapped in affection, tied with a warning. A prayer murmured over my hair, my mother’s hand lingering at the back of my neck, her voice soft with the kind of love that asks for obedience as payment. Keep it close, she’d said. Not because it will save you: because it will remind you to act like you can be saved.
Tonight it feels heavier than it is. Or maybe my chest is tighter than I’m admitting, and anything small becomes an anchor. I press it once, hard, against myself. A private bruise. A tiny rebellion nobody can police because nobody can see it.
Across the terrace, laughter rises and falls like silk being shaken out. Somewhere an elder clears his throat, and the sound lands in me as if it’s my name. I should be moving. I should be circulating, offering my face like a plated dessert. Instead I stand just long enough for the charm to do what it always does: split my mind into two versions of me: the one who performs and the one who watches the performance and wants to step offstage.
I murmur the first line of an old prayer without fully forming the words. Not out of piety. Out of habit. Out of superstition that feels like romance with fate: if I say it right, maybe the next moment will be mine.
My hand leaves my pocket before anyone can notice the pause, and my smile returns to its assigned place.
I count my steps to the melody drifting from the courtyard, letting the violin’s slow rise and fall pretend it’s the reason I’m moving at all. One: my heel lands exactly between the stones. Two. The lanternlight catches the cufflink my uncle insisted on, as if shine can substitute for conviction. Three: someone laughs behind me, and my shoulders want to tighten like I’ve been called.
If I keep pace with the music, I can call this courtesy. I can call it hosting. Not what it is: delay dressed up as elegance.
The garden offers me a hundred routes and no exits. Cypress shadows slice the walkway into neat, obedient segments; the water channels murmur like advice I didn’t ask for. I nod to a couple I don’t know well enough to hate, accept a compliment I won’t remember, let my smile lift just enough to look alive. My body does the math while my mind negotiates with time. How many beats until the next demand, how many measures until someone corners me with a microphone and a future.
The musicians lean into a romantic phrase, and I almost believe they’re playing for me. Almost.
Between one greeting and the next, I steal the smallest mercy I’m allowed: a breath no one can invoice or announce. It slides in careful, like I’m afraid even air will report back to the elders. My lips shape the beginning of an old prayer without giving it voice. Not piety: never that clean. Habit. Muscle memory from childhood nights when the adults spoke over my head in soft certainties and I learned the only argument that couldn’t be interrupted was the one you kept inside your mouth.
I don’t even ask for miracles. I ask for a misstep in the script. For a pause I can fill with my own decision. For the outcome to flinch.
I make a bargain with whatever listens to men like me. Men who are praised for composure and punished for desire. Not a grand prayer. A small, shameful contract: let the right second arrive like a crack in glass; let one door remain unlatched; let me keep one thing untouched by family hands. If I can’t claim the future, then give me the next choice.
The charm lies quiet under my palm, obedient at last, and I take that silence for a sign because I have nothing else I’m allowed to trust. I smooth my jacket (buttons aligned, cuffs precise) like I can fasten my wanting inside the lining. Then I step out from my own hesitation, shoulders squared, pace measured. It passes for certainty. It is only hope, held in so tightly it doesn’t show.
The evening’s rituals settle over me like a well-cut coat: warm at the shoulders, cinched too tight at the throat. Everything fits because it was tailored to. The garden, the lights, the way my name travels ahead of me on other people’s tongues like a warning and an invitation. Even my breathing wants to fall into the same old pattern: inhale when the elders look pleased, exhale when no one is watching, swallow anything sharp.
I can feel the ceremony waiting, not as an event but as a gravity. The mirrored pavilion at the end of the walkway glints between cypress trunks, a promise dressed up as reflection. I know what will happen there the way I know the order of dishes at a business dinner. What comes first, what is meant to look effortless, what is served only to keep someone from noticing what’s missing.
A waiter passes with silver trays, and the pistachios shine as if someone polished them one by one. The scent of orange blossoms drifts over the terrace, sweet enough to be almost violent, sweet enough to make you forgive a lot if you let it. My mother would say it’s auspicious. My uncle would say it’s branding. Both would smile as if they mean the same thing.
I adjust my cuffs because my hands need something harmless to control. The fabric sits obediently against my wrists; my pulse does not. Somewhere near the courtyard, a cluster of men are already arranging their faces into approval, practicing the look they’ll wear when I say the words they want. I can see the moment in their posture, the slight forward tilt, the anticipatory stillness, as if my future is a toast they’ve lifted and are waiting to drink.
For a second I imagine undoing this coat. Unbuttoning, slipping free, walking into the dark parts of the garden where the lanterns don’t reach and the rules get lost. The fantasy is so clean it scares me. It has edges. It has air.
Then a voice calls my name with affection that carries instruction, and the collar tightens again. I let it. I step into the shape they’ve made for me, because stepping out would require an exit, and I’ve been trained all my life to mistake a beautiful room for a choice.
Familiar cues guide my body without asking. An inherited choreography that starts at my jaw and ends in my fingertips. I nod at the exact angle that says respect but not submission, as if there’s a difference anyone here would honor. My hand finds another hand, warm and perfumed, and I time the squeeze to land between friendliness and authority. I hold eye contact long enough to look sincere, short enough to look busy. The pauses are worse: those small, polished silences where gratitude is expected to bloom on command. I let it bloom. I say the phrases that taste like rosewater and obligation. I listen as people congratulate me for things that haven’t happened yet, as if their certainty can drag the future into place.
The garden keeps offering me prompts. A laugh where I’m meant to smile. A compliment where I’m meant to deflect. A blessing where I’m meant to bow my head, accept it like a ledger entry. My face performs, my spine straightens, my stomach knots: because even my manners know the script better than I know my own desire.
Each custom offers me a kind of shelter. The blessings, the rosewater, the way an elder’s hand pauses on my shoulder as if pressure can pass for affection. These are familiar roofs over my head. Under them, I know how to stand. I know where to put my hands. I know what not to say.
And in the same motion that steadies me, the ritual draws its line in white chalk: this far, no further. Here is the love you’re allowed, polite, legible, family-approved. Here is the desire you’re meant to misname as duty. I accept sweets I don’t want, I repeat gratitude like a password, and I feel the boundary tighten with every “mobārak,” every meaningful glance that dares me to be grateful for my own cage.
I keep my smile anchored, not because I feel it, but because it speaks this room’s language better than I ever have. It smooths the air, reassures the elders, tells the anxious cousins that nothing is wrong. Up close it feels like something my father once wore and hung back in the closet. An heirloom of teeth and calm, pressed into my face as proof.
Under the varnish of my ease, I count the blessings as if they’re knots: each “mobārak” looped around my wrist, each elder’s kiss to my forehead a gentle hand guiding my chin back into position. They mean well. That’s what makes it cruel. Affection that still insists. Reverence that still holds. Even the sweetest prayer has a pull to it, hard to shrug off without tearing something.
When the musicians lean into something that used to make my chest ache in a simpler way, bow on string, a melody that insists on devotion, I keep my smile exactly where it belongs. A practiced placement. A seal. If I let it slip, even for a second, they’ll read the crack like tea leaves and decide what it means for me.
So I do what I’ve always done when a room becomes too sure of me: I start counting doors.
The rose arbor first. Its shadowed arch is a soft bruise against the lantern light, roses climbing as if they’re trying to hide the bones of the trellis. Couples drift through it with the slow confidence of people who believe they’re anonymous. If I went there, I could pretend I’m only looking for air. I could put my hand on the wood and feel whether it’s damp from evening mist, whether the garden is real enough to hold me.
Then the orange grove. Less formal, more forgiving. There’s a gap between lanterns near the terrace where the light stutters and the faces blur into silhouettes. The scent is so thick it feels like it has weight, like you could carry it out with you, proof you were here. If I slipped into that darkness, the music would still reach me, but softened, and maybe my own thoughts would stop sounding like a verdict.
And behind everything, the one place no one romanticizes, the service corridor. A narrow vein running behind the mirrored pavilion, where staff move with their eyes down, their bodies angled away from attention. That corridor has always been my secret superstition: the belief that if I step into a space where I’m not being watched, I might become someone else for a moment. Not heir. Not groom. Just a man in a well-cut suit with an unsteady pulse.
I let my gaze travel, casual as admiration, and memorize the distance between myself and each exit like a prayer. My fingers brush the small charm in my pocket (ridiculous, childish) and I hold onto it anyway, as if a piece of metal can give me permission to choose.
I start borrowing the music the way I used to borrow my mother’s steadiness. In for four, out for four. The bow drags a little longer, and I let my ribs obey it. When laughter rises from a knot of cousins near the fountain, I use it like camouflage, folding myself a fraction smaller inside my suit.
Half a step back. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to feel the air change against my neck, to make space between my body and the congratulations that keep landing on me like hands. I angle my shoulder toward the reflecting pool as if I’m admiring the candles, as if the shimmer is what holds my attention and not the fact that I’m measuring lines of sight.
Aunties’ eyes slide over me, then past, satisfied by the outline of a dutiful man. An elder speaks, and I nod on instinct, but my pulse is elsewhere. Listening for the snag, the hook of someone noticing my drift. I test a second adjustment, a slight turn that points my feet toward the pavilion’s edge.
No one calls my name. For a breath, that silence feels like a door unlatching.
A server glides past with a silver tray held level as a promise, and my eyes betray me: following that small, sanctioned escape the way a starving man watches someone carry bread. His movement is simple, almost anonymous. No one demands vows from him. No one asks him what he will announce, whom he will bind himself to, what future he is selling with a smile. Work gives him a passport through rooms that trap me. He can angle into the service corridor without it meaning anything, can murmur a word to another staff member without a circle of elders translating it into intention.
For a breath I envy being unimportant. I envy the permission to be elsewhere.
My fingers close around the charm, worn smooth by anxious rubs, and I press it hard enough to leave its shape in my skin. A ridiculous liturgy, metal, breath, bargain, like if I do it right the world will grant me a small, clean silence. The idea of an unobserved corner hits like thirst: sharp, bodily, humiliating in its need.
I catch myself doing it again. Charting the garden like a map out of my own life: where the lantern light thins, where a hedge could hide a confession, where a corridor could swallow me whole. I smooth my cuff as if fabric can discipline impulse, lift my chin, and let my expression settle into its familiar grace. Beneath it, the need to speak plainly keeps pressing, persistent as a pulse.
I rehearse myself the way I used to rehearse greetings before the visiting uncles arrived. Those men who smelled like cologne and authority, who would pinch my cheek as if testing ripeness. Back then I learned that love, in this family, is a kind of choreography: shoulders back, chin lifted, eyes steady but not challenging, smile offered like a polished dish. Speak only after you’ve been spoken to. Laugh at the right volume. Ask after health, then business, in that order, as if the first is not a prelude to the second.
Now the room is larger, the stakes disguised as romance, but my body remembers the same drills. I adjust the set of my suit jacket without looking down. I spread my weight evenly on both feet so no one can see which direction I’d rather go. I soften my gaze into what they call warmth. Capable son. Reliable heir. The man who doesn’t fumble when the room turns toward him like a spotlight pretending to be candlelight.
I test my voice in my throat without making sound. Measured. Calm. Grateful. The words they want from me line up obediently: blessings, honor, future, expansion. Each one a brick in a wall I’m supposed to call a home. I can already feel the moment when an elder’s hand will land on my shoulder, too familiar, too possessive, and steer me toward the mirrored pavilion as if my body is a document that needs signing.
And the worst part is that I can do it. That’s the muscle I built young: the ability to look like choice while surrendering it. I can nod with conviction I don’t feel. I can promise with a smile that won’t betray how my stomach tightens at the word forever.
I catch my reflection in a pane of glass (my own face arranged into acceptability) and for a second I hate how convincing it is. Then I hold the expression anyway, because letting it drop would be an announcement all its own.
A superstition flares in me the way a childhood reflex flares. My thumb finds the charm in my pocket and worries its edge until my skin warms around it, until metal becomes something almost alive. I don’t even know what I think it is anymore: protection, permission, a quiet bribery of the universe. When I was small, my mother would kiss my forehead before difficult dinners and murmur a prayer like she was tucking it under my collar, where no one could confiscate it. I learned early that faith was safest when it was hidden, folded into the lining like extra stitching.
Now I mouth the same words without sound, careful that my lips don’t move, careful that my eyes don’t soften in a way that invites questions. God, fate, whatever listens: let there be a crack in this night. Let duty ask less of me. Let the people I love survive what I’m about to refuse. I hate myself for bargaining. I hate how my body believes in bargains anyway.
I study faces the way I was taught to study balance sheets: not for beauty, not even for truth, but for pressure points. Who smiles too quickly, as if to seal something before it can leak. Who laughs a beat late, waiting to see if an elder approves the joke. Who keeps their hands folded, immaculate, like they’re hiding ink on their fingertips. Or guilt. I clock the small economies of the room: favors being paid in glances, debts being called in with a tilt of a chin. And always, always, the eyes that return to me as if I’m a line item that might suddenly go missing.
I tell myself this is maturity. Due diligence. Leadership.
But my pulse doesn’t feel mature. It feels hunted.
Marriage and business arrive in the same envelope, heavy paper, embossed crest, the same hands guiding mine to the right line. Tonight is just another negotiation dressed in jasmine: alliances praised as romance, vows spoken like terms, a future initialed into place. If I keep my voice steady, if I hit the beats they expect, maybe cadence can masquerade as consent. Maybe endurance can be mistaken for devotion.
The thought is bitter as crushed aspirin on my tongue, and I swallow it like I’ve been trained to swallow everything else. One more hour. A handful of smiles. A few sentences placed like offerings. Later I can tell myself it was my decision, my composure, my consent. The way they rename silence into respect, and call the ache gratitude.
The elder lifts a glass mid-melody, and the violin line thins, obliging him, as if the whole garden has practiced this pause. Lantern light catches in the cut crystal, fractures into tiny cold stars that skitter over his knuckles. He stands with the ease of someone who has never had to ask for silence; it arrives for him the way servants arrive, already knowing what to carry.
I recognize the choreography before the words: the slight pivot of shoulders, the ring of relatives closing half a step tighter, the polite anticipation tightening mouths into ready smiles. My own hands go still around my drink. Somewhere behind me, laughter dies down like a curtain lowering, and in that hush I can hear the fountain’s patient insistence, water doing what it does without being commanded.
His gaze finds me across the reflecting pool and holds. Not a look of tenderness (tenderness would be private, unarmed) but a look that inventories. Suit. Posture. The practiced curve of my mouth. The fact that I am standing exactly where I’m meant to stand, beside the people I’m meant to belong to. My stomach gives a small, superstitious turn, the way it does when I feel an omen arriving dressed as a compliment.
He begins by speaking of blessings, of spring, of old families and new partnerships. Words that sound like rosewater until you notice how they cling. Each phrase is cushioned in warmth, yet each one nudges me forward, like a hand at my back guiding me toward a stage I didn’t choose. I feel the attention of the guests like heat at the nape of my neck, and I can’t tell whether it’s admiration or appetite.
The musicians hover, bows suspended, waiting to be released. He raises the glass slightly higher, letting the moment swell to the size of a verdict. My pulse thuds, loud enough to feel indecent. I try to summon gratitude, to arrange my face into the correct expression, but something in me hesitates: an instinctive flinch before a public promise I haven’t made.
His smile widens, inviting everyone to lean in, to witness. And I understand, too late, that the toast isn’t for me. It’s for the story they’ve decided I will live.
He says it (future) and the syllables glide out of him with that easy, paternal warmth men use when they want something without asking. The word lands on my shoulders like a sash. Too light to bruise, heavy enough to change the way I stand. His smile widens at the end of it, as if he’s just handed me a gift, as if all I have to do is bow my head and let everyone admire how well it fits.
Applause blooms on cue, polite at first, then confident, the sound of approval becoming a net. Faces turn toward me with the satisfied hunger of people who like their stories neat: beginning, middle, inheritance. I feel my own smile answer them (automatic, trained) while something inside me goes quiet and watchful, counting exits, counting witnesses.
Future. Not a compliment. A schedule. A summons dressed in crystal and music.
Across the water, the elder’s gaze holds mine for a beat too long, fondness performing itself while the edge underneath makes its demand. I taste rosewater on the air and, behind it, the metallic tang of certainty.
I feel it happen before I can decide what I feel about it. The way a room can agree on your shape and then refuse to see you differently. The word has already traveled, settled into laps and lifted brows, been filed away inside people who will swear later they always knew. It’s like ink drying on a document I never read: irreversible not because I signed, but because they all watched the pen move. I stand inside their approval the way you stand inside a tailored jacket: everything fits, and yet I can’t breathe. Somewhere in me, a small, irrational part starts bargaining with omens: don’t look down, don’t shift your weight, don’t let them see the seam. Because once they narrate you out loud, you become evidence.
My smile stays in place the way a ring stays on a finger, polished, inherited, a little too tight. But inside it, something recoils. Not from the eyes on me; I was trained for eyes. From the certainty in their voices, the way they speak my name like a title already issued, my hesitation reduced to a boy’s lateness in a timetable they’ve been keeping for me.
His gaze lingers a fraction too long, and in that extra beat the warmth curdles into instruction. Be grateful. Be steady. Don’t make us regret investing you with meaning. I feel the warning tucked inside the blessing like a pin in silk, small, hidden, meant to keep everything in place. The toast is honeyed, but it sticks. I understand: this is applause with a clasp.
The chuckle that ripples through the terrace lands wrong, too polished, too rehearsed, and I feel it settle on me like dust that won’t brush off. It isn’t the spontaneous laughter of people surprised into joy. It’s the sound of a room agreeing to be pleased, a collective exhale that says: good, he understands his part.
I tilt my glass as if to sip, as if the motion is mine, but even my small gestures feel pre-approved. A cousin’s laugh rises half a second late, then an aunt’s, then a small chorus of men who laugh with their throats but not their eyes. The noise lifts, rounds itself into something warm enough to pass for affection, and in that warmth there’s a warning: don’t make this awkward. Don’t ask us to explain what we’ve just implied.
I catch fragments as they drift, “mashallah,” “so grown,” “finally”, words that pretend to bless while they tally. An uncle’s gaze flicks over me like he’s checking the stitching on a suit he paid for. Someone claps my shoulder too hard, the way you test a horse’s steadiness, and my smile holds because it has been holding for years. My jaw aches from the maintenance of it.
My chest does that stupid, superstitious tightening, as if the wrong laugh can change the trajectory of a life. I want to look for a corner of the garden where the air belongs to no one, where a thought can form without being overheard. Instead, I stay where I’m visible, where the lantern light performs on my cufflinks and makes them look like certainty.
I tell myself it’s nothing, just a toast, just an elder enjoying his own authority, but I can feel the shift beginning, soft as fabric sliding: an invisible hand rearranging the evening so that every path curves back to me. And the worst part is how easily my body cooperates, how naturally I stand as if I asked for this attention, as if I’m not already counting how many steps it would take to vanish behind the orange trees without anyone calling my name.
The conversations don’t stop; they just pivot. It’s not dramatic (no one announces it) yet I feel the torque in the air, the way a flock changes direction without a signal I can see. A laugh that was aimed at someone else is suddenly offered to me for approval. A story pauses mid-sentence until my face does the correct thing. Bodies angle, one degree at a time, like compasses finding north.
I’m supposed to be flattered. I’ve been trained to read it as honor, as belonging. But it’s choreography, and I’m the mark on the floor everyone keeps returning to. Circles widen by half-steps, leaving a clean space beside me that looks accidental and feels engineered. Even the servers, passing with trays of pistachios and crystal glasses, adjust their routes so the symmetry of the terrace holds (candelabra nudged, jasmine garlands straightened) until inevitability is achieved.
In the reflecting pool, lanterns tremble on the surface and make a second garden, perfect and unreachable. I watch people glance at that reflection and then at me, as if confirming the picture matches the plan. I keep my smile quiet, careful not to crack the frame.
My cousin comes toward me with that old grin, our private language of raised brows and stupid nicknames hovering on his lips, and for a second my body loosens, expecting relief. Then he catches the elder’s eyes over my shoulder, and I watch something in him recalibrate. The grin stays, but it hardens into display.
“Mehrzad Rūshan,” he says, full name, careful vowels, voice lifted just enough to be shared. Not to me: around me. Like he’s pinning a label to my lapel so strangers don’t have to wonder what I’m for.
He extends my hand outward, offering it as proof. A few heads turn at the sound of it. My cousin’s eyes flick back to mine, apologetic for a breath, then smooth again: obedient to the room’s new grammar.
An uncle drifts in as if by accident, as if the current of conversation carried him here, and his palm settles on my shoulder with practiced weight. It’s a touch I’ve known since childhood, affection disguised as guidance, but tonight it lands like ownership. He keeps it there a beat too long, thumb pressing a small circle through the fabric, anchoring me to the terrace while his voice murmurs approvals I didn’t ask to earn.
Offers arrive dressed as kindness. Soft hands at my elbow, voices pitched like advice. Come, stand here. You should meet so-and-so. They’re eager to hear you. Each suggestion is a small correction, a gentle herding. I let myself be shifted, and with every half-step I realize the night is placing me the way it placed the rugs and roses: for sightlines, for use.
I keep the smile where it belongs, high enough to pass, low enough not to look hungry, while the elder’s hand lands on my shoulder as if he’s been granted a right to it. The weight is familiar in the way old furniture is familiar: polished by generations, never questioned, always there. His palm is warm, rings cool against the cloth, and the touch pretends to be affectionate while it measures me.
He doesn’t squeeze. He doesn’t need to. The message is in the stillness, in the casual certainty of contact. Stay. Stand. Be seen.
I feel my body register it before my mind can dress it up. My jaw tightens. The blink I owe him comes a second late. A pulse kicks in my throat and I angle my chin the way I’ve practiced in mirrors: open, grateful, steady. The lantern light catches the edge of my cufflink and makes it look like confidence. It isn’t.
He guides me half a step forward, barely a movement, the kind of correction you make to a picture frame that’s already straight. Yet the room responds as if we’ve shifted the axis of the garden. The nearest cluster rearranges itself, bodies rotating with that smooth social instinct that looks like ease and feels like obedience. Faces turn. Smiles bloom. Attention clicks into place like a latch.
For a moment I’m aware of my hands more than anything. What they do when they’re empty, how they hover, how quickly a careless gesture becomes a story. I fold one around the stem of my glass to give it a purpose. The other hangs at my side, too controlled to be natural. I can feel eyes tracking it anyway, waiting to see if I will reach for something I’m not supposed to.
The elder’s thumb makes a small, slow circle through my jacket, a private motion that turns my skin hot under the fabric. It says: You’re doing well. Keep doing well. It says: This is what you’re for. And I stand where he places me, framed between jasmine and candlelight, like a decorative certainty, while something in me counts exits the way a superstitious man counts prayers.
The elder doesn’t raise his voice, not really. He doesn’t have to; the garden is trained to make room for men like him. He tips his head, eyes bright with something that could be pride if it weren’t so calculating, and says that it’s rare to see promise wear a suit so well. That the bloodline has always known how to carry its weight. That tonight, under these lights, our future looks… secure.
The words land like rosewater on a bruise: fragrant, stinging. A soft laugh ripples out, not joy exactly, more like recognition. People nod quickly, eager to be counted among those who understand. Someone repeats future under their breath as if tasting it, as if it’s sweet.
His hand stays on me while he speaks, and the contact turns each syllable into instruction. He praises my “discipline,” my “steady judgment,” the way you praise a door for staying shut. Then, with the gentlest curve of a smile, he adds that responsibility is a blessing: if it’s accepted in time.
The warning is tucked inside the compliment, a blade hidden in velvet.
My jaw tightens before I can bribe it into grace. It’s a small betrayal. Nothing anyone could accuse outright, but in a room like this, nothing is ever just small. I blink, slow enough to feel the weight of my lashes, and in that heartbeat I see myself the way they do: a suit, a surname, a sequence of decisions lined up like polished silver. I smooth my expression back into place as if I’m pressing down a crease in expensive fabric, as if composure is a kind of tailoring.
The air subtly changes. Conversations don’t stop; they angle. Warmth becomes assessment, the lazy generosity of smiles sharpening into inventory. What I am worth, what I will cost, how soon I can be used.
I lift my glass when the cue arrives (someone’s joke, someone’s toast) and for a second I’m sure I’m doing it right. Then the motion goes hollow, like my arm is being operated by the room. Eyes pin my fingers, the polite bend of my wrist, the steadiness they’ve decided I owe them. I lower it slowly, placing it down like evidence I can’t afford to mishandle.
From that moment I begin to choreograph myself. I count my steps the way I count omens: three paces, pause, turn. Shoulders squared, spine obedient, hands given jobs so they don’t betray me. Even my laugh gets a timestamp, released only when someone else opens the gate. I can feel it: one loosened button, one too-honest glance, and the room will write my story in ink that won’t wash out.
I test the old pattern first, the one that has kept me employed in my own life: a courteous nod, a soft thank-you shaped like silk, the practiced warmth that usually smooths a room before it can snag. I let my eyes crinkle at the corners. I let my mouth do the small, harmless curve that says I’m listening, I’m grateful, I’m not a threat. I even tilt my head the way my mother taught me: respect without submission, just enough to honor age.
It lands wrong.
The effect is immediate, almost chemical. Faces brighten too quickly, as if a switch has been flipped behind their teeth. Shoulders relax in relief that isn’t for me. The elder’s friends exchange a glance that pretends to be casual and isn’t; I see it travel between them like a sealed envelope passed under a table. Someone laughs, too warmly, too soon, at something I didn’t say. A woman I barely know reaches out and touches my sleeve, a quick proprietary brush, as if to claim proximity while the claim is worth something.
Politeness, I realize, is not kindness here. It’s a signature.
My thank-you doesn’t read as manners. It reads as acceptance. It reads as the moment the hesitant heir stops hesitating. Their eyes don’t just look at me; they land on me, counting, collecting, attaching meanings like tags to merchandise. I can almost hear the phrases being assembled: He understands. He’s finally ready. He’s come around. The room is so eager to interpret that it makes my sincerity feel like a forged document.
I try to pull back without causing a ripple: one step to the side, a sip of my drink, a brief glance toward the orange grove as if I’m checking on a detail. But even that becomes a story. The sip is composure. The glance is strategy. The silence is restraint, which they praise because restraint is what they require.
The old pattern doesn’t soothe them; it feeds them. And the more gracious I am, the more certain they become that I’ve agreed to whatever they’ve already decided I am.
I try a different kind of surrender: I let the praise slide over me and don’t flinch. I let the misreadings stand because correcting them would mean a scene, and scenes are how you lose in rooms like this. I nod when they tell me I’m “settled,” I smile when they mention the expansion as if it’s already signed, I accept a second toast like a man who hasn’t been cornered into it. I even let someone joke about heirs as if children are just another line item on a balance sheet.
For a few breaths it feels easier: like easing into warm water instead of fighting the current.
Then the ease thickens.
Their relief isn’t tenderness; it’s confirmation. My silence becomes an endorsement stamped in invisible ink. Someone’s hand lingers on my shoulder a beat too long, and I understand the touch isn’t comfort, it’s inventory. Across the courtyard, an elder catches another elder’s eye and gives the smallest satisfied nod, as if a lock has clicked into place.
My calm is recorded as consent. My compliance, as readiness.
And suddenly I’m not Mehrzad being polite, I’m the announcement they’ve been rehearsing.
I try the only escape I know that isn’t an exit: humility. I tilt my head, soften my voice, make the praise smaller by handing it back to the people who actually did the work, teams, timelines, luck, God, anything that isn’t my name. It should be disarming. It should be safe.
Instead, faces tip toward me with that patient, indulgent look reserved for men who are pretending not to want power. Their smiles don’t warm; they settle, as if they’ve recognized a familiar opening move. An elder chuckles like he’s heard this line in boardrooms, not at weddings. My thank-you becomes a rehearsed script. My lowered eyes, my attempt to keep my feelings from leaking, reads to them as calculation.
Even my modesty is translated into leverage, and suddenly I’m bargaining in a language I never agreed to speak.
I fold into silence for half a breath, as if quiet could be a doorway only I can fit through, a thin strip of agency. But the room rushes to occupy it. My pause becomes “weight.” My swallowed answer becomes “discipline.” Restraint, here, is never just restraint. It’s a headline. They build leadership out of my refusal to speak, and hand it back like a crown.
It hits me with the kind of cold clarity that doesn’t argue: there is no unobserved version of me in this garden. No private Mehrzad tucked behind my ribs, safe from footnotes. Whatever I do gets taken, named, shelved. Smile: agreement; hesitation: tactic; breath: portent. Even stillness isn’t neutral. Doing nothing is simply another announcement they can quote.
I reach for levity the way I reach for my cufflinks when my hands need something to do: an automatic correction, a small shine to distract from whatever is fraying underneath. I lift my glass a fraction, letting the lantern light catch it, and I say, light as I can make it, that the estate has done us all a favor: under these lanterns everyone looks gentler than they really are. Even the cypresses look forgiving.
In my head, I hear it the way it’s meant to sound, wry, self-deprecating, human. A brief opening in the velvet rope. The kind of joke that lets people be merely bodies in pretty clothes for a moment, not alliances and last names.
The laughter comes, but it doesn’t move through the group like wind. It arrives in separate, careful units, as if each person has been instructed when to exhale. Polite. Correct. The sound of approval rather than surprise. My words fall into the space between us with that soft, expensive finality: like a coin placed on a velvet tray, accepted without being examined.
A man with a wine-dark tie smiles too quickly and too long, eyes not on my face but slightly beyond it, as if he’s looking at the version of me that belongs in a portrait. Someone’s hand taps the air in a gesture that could mean well said or good boy; I can’t tell, and that uncertainty is its own humiliation. A woman’s laugh rises a half second after everyone else’s, delayed like a signal traveling through a wall.
I feel the joke turn, midair, into something useful for them. A proof of composure. Evidence that I can be charming without losing control. The kind of charm that doesn’t threaten the seating chart.
I swallow, tasting citrus and something bitter, and try to pretend I’m not watching their faces for the exact moment amusement becomes assessment. My smile holds because it has to, but inside it, something pinches: the quiet fear that even my attempt at ordinary has been filed away as strategy.
Someone answers my joke the way you correct a child’s mispronunciation, fond, almost proud. “You’ve always had presence,” an auntie says, drawing the word out like it’s a charm she’s rubbing smooth between her fingers. Before I can shrug it off, a man beside her, one of the ones who never wastes a sentence, adds, “That’s why the elders trust you.”
Trust. As if my humor has been submitted as evidence and stamped admissible.
They don’t mean it unkindly. That’s the poison: the softness. The way they smile as they assign me a shape. My glass is still half raised, caught in a posture that now looks like a salute. Someone leans in, lowering their voice as if offering intimacy, and says something about my “steady hand,” as if I’ve ever been allowed to be unsteady. Another murmurs, “Future,” the way you say weather, inevitable and impersonal.
The wedding drifts to the edges of the conversation like décor. Every phrase they offer is a silk loop tossed lightly, confidently, because they know I’ve been trained to put my own head through. Responsibility. Legacy. Duty. Each word lands with a gentle click, and holds.
I pivot, like a dancer saving a misstep. I point my chin toward the musicians: how the kamancheh sounds like it’s drawing a throat open, how even the pauses feel like intention. I breathe in the orange blossoms and let my voice soften around them, praise the calligraphy on the name cards, the way the ink curves like it’s remembering water. I try to make beauty communal, a place we can all stand without titles.
They receive it with nods that are almost tender. Then, seamlessly, they use my compliments as handles. Yes, it reflects the family so well. This kind of elegance opens doors abroad. Tonight sends a message. Each sentence delivered gently, affectionately (hands at my collar, tightening, tightening) until the air tastes less like citrus and more like obligation.
I try again, firmer, the practiced smile finally cracking into something like a request. “Let’s not talk work tonight.” The air tightens. A small, collective pause, so brief it could pass as manners, then the soothing chorus: of course, Mehrzad jān, tonight is for joy, we understand. But their eyes don’t soften. They keep weighing me, approvals ticking into place, questions looping back: disciplined birds that will not land anywhere but my promises.
I start cataloging the pattern the way I catalog contracts: the laugh that arrives a heartbeat late, the fingers that settle on my elbow with proprietary gentleness, the introductions that land like invoices, this is so-and-so, remember what they can do for you. Each time I reach for my own voice, they hear a rehearsal. The room keeps tuning me, patient and expert, until even my inhale feels scheduled.
The mirrored pavilion makes liars of faces. It breaks everyone into bright shards: an eye here, a smile there, a hand reaching in from nowhere to adjust a cuff that isn’t theirs to touch. I watch myself in it, too, multiplied into a dozen Mehrzads, each one composed at a slightly different angle, each one wearing the same practiced curve of mouth that people mistake for ease.
Compliments move through this place the way money does when no one wants to admit they’re paying. You can hear the soft transfer: Mashallah, what a handsome groom, and then, without a breath between, your father would be proud of how you carry the family. An uncle murmurs, “Congratulations,” and his eyes flick past my shoulder toward the elders’ circle, as if waiting for the rate to be approved. A woman I barely know presses her palm to her chest, voice honeyed and I can see the question behind it: For you, or for us?
They speak as if I’m not standing right here, as if I’m an idea in a suit. Every praise has a hook buried in it. So disciplined. Meaning: you won’t embarrass us. So diplomatic. Meaning: you will swallow what you feel. So generous with your attention. Meaning: you will keep giving it away.
Somewhere behind me, a laugh rises, then folds into another laugh, then another, like a row of doors being shut gently, firmly. I feel the event tightening around its own story. The candles along the sofreh tremble in the draft and the mirrored tiles throw the flame back at itself until the light looks anxious.
I try to locate something simple, my own pulse, the smell of jasmine, the roughness of the rug under my shoes, anything that belongs to no one else. But even the air feels negotiated. Even the word congratulations arrives with fine print, as if I’m supposed to sign it with my smile and initial the margins with my gratitude.
In the reflections, I catch an elder’s gaze on me (fond, appraising) and I understand with a clarity that makes my throat go dry: this isn’t celebration. It’s a ledger being balanced in public, and my life is the column they keep correcting.
A hand settles on my shoulder, warm, possessive, too familiar for someone who only ever calls me by my full name. The elder leans in like he’s about to offer a blessing meant just for me, and for half a second my body believes it. Then his thumb presses once, a small anchoring, and he turns his voice outward.
“Look at him,” he says, smiling at the ring of guests instead of at my face. “Our future: so steady, so responsible.”
The words float above my head like a banner being hoisted. Our. Not his. Not Mehrzad’s. The laugh that follows is polite, synchronized, the kind that never risks becoming real. It’s the laugh you give a child who has recited the correct poem. Approval as choreography.
I feel the pressure of the palm through the cloth of my suit, a reminder to remain where I’ve been placed. My mouth finds the curve it has been drilled into, and my eyes do the right thing. Inside, something flinches. Not at the praise. At the ownership wrapped around it.
Faces pivot toward me in a choreography so polished it might as well have been rehearsed in the service corridor with the linens. The sequence is always the same: eyes first, then the approving tilt of a chin, then the small smile that says we’re pleased you’re still being manageable. Every nod feels like an invoice slid across a table. No amount listed, just the certainty of what I owe. Praise comes wrapped in blessing-language, but it lands like instruction: so mature, so devoted, such a good son. I answer with the smile I was trained into, the one that keeps the peace by refusing to tell the truth. I can feel it tighten at the corners, a seam threatening to split, as if even my face is tired of being useful.
Near the sofreh, I lean close to someone I thought could hold a sentence without spending it. I let out one small truth, I’m not ready, and watch it leave my mouth like a bird that forgets how to return. By the time it reaches the next ear, it’s been laundered into “humility,” recited with affection, weaponed with pride. Even my hesitation is useful. Even softness becomes currency.
I catch myself in the polished silver, my face hovering beside trays of sweets, beside names inked in deliberate curves, and the shock is how finished I look. As if the night has already written me, crossed out the parts that hesitate, underlined the parts that comply. The music swells again and hands appear, light on my back, steering me with affection toward the next waiting circle.
At the terrace’s edge, the lantern light thins into shadow and the garden’s perfume turns sharp, like crushed citrus under a heel. I’m guided there the way an expensive object is guided. By the elbow, with an airy laugh, with the soft insistence that implies consent has already been obtained. The semicircle closes around me: elders with prayer beads hidden in cuffs, “friends” with the kind of smiles that have never been wasted on anyone without a return.
Salāms bloom and die in the space of a breath. Hands squeeze mine with calibrated pressure. Cheeks brush mine without warmth. I catch the quick inventory they take, my watch, my posture, the absence of my fiancée at my side, and the smallest pause when they reach my ring hand, as if it’s an exhibit that should have arrived earlier.
Someone blesses my parents, then, without inhaling, blesses the deal we’re meant to announce, as if both belong to the same liturgy. They speak in the passive voice the way men speak when they want to sound like fate: “It is decided.” “It is expected.” “It will be better for everyone.” Every sentence comes with an invisible footnote about debt.
A late arrival stirs the group; eyes dart toward the gate and return to me as if I’m responsible for the time. I feel, absurdly, superstitious. Counting these glances the way my grandmother counted sneezes, looking for an omen that says I’m still allowed to choose. The garden music drifts from the courtyard, romantic and distant, like a memory someone else is having.
I keep my practiced smile in place, the one that turns rooms toward me, and listen the way I negotiate: tracking who defers to whom, who interrupts, who won’t meet my eyes. Their compliments land like weights on my shoulders: “So steady.” “So suitable.” “So ready.” Ready for what, exactly, when my own chest won’t stop tightening at the word?
When one of them pats my arm, paternal, proprietary, I realize with a cold clarity that I’m not being welcomed. I’m being claimed.
It starts with God, as it always does here: soft invocations, a murmured salavāt that makes even ambition sound pure. They praise my father’s “wisdom,” my mother’s “grace,” my own “steadiness,” and the words settle on me like a suit tailored by strangers: expensive, suffocating, meant to be worn without complaint.
Then the introductions begin, and I understand why no one needed to say the word business. A man with a salt-and-pepper beard is eased forward, palm open, smile wide. “He’s very connected at customs,” someone says, as if describing a private gate in a wall. Another, younger, too polished, is named with a careful vagueness, “on the ministry side”, and the circle hums with approval at the implication, not the fact.
Each handshake is a little contract I’m expected to sign with my skin. They say “you’ll find him helpful,” “you two should speak,” “we’ve told him you’re the future,” and my stomach tightens at the casual certainty. I am being circulated like currency. Tested for authenticity, passed along, spent.
They mention the donation the way my aunts mention health. Something you receive and must protect with reverence. A foundation’s name is recited, syllable by syllable, like a prayer that can’t be mispronounced: the kind of institution that sounds benevolent until you hear who sits on its board. Someone laughs softly and says, “Not for publicity, of course,” and immediately three heads turn toward the photographer as if on cue, as if modesty is a signal sent down a line.
I watch the mechanics: the pause before applause, the practiced shrug of “we did nothing,” the careful placement of gratitude where it can sprout into duty. Even the compliments feel like invoices. You don’t thank them; you accept, and in accepting you agree to be the kind of man who can be counted on.
One of the elders, silver hair, prayer bead looped around a finger like a punctuation mark, calls me mard-e sabet, steady, and his praise has teeth. He asks, softly, when the expansion becomes public, how soon the “new partners” will be welcomed, whether I feel “ready” to commit for the long term. His smile widens, satisfied, as if each answer tightens a knot I’m already wearing.
The circle closes another inch, and it hits me: tonight isn’t a wedding, it’s an affidavit. Proof-of-stability for men who would never lower their voices enough to ask what I want. Approval is measured in centimeters. Who stands close, who is photographed near, who can claim they “spoke” to me. Each handshake slides something invisible into my sleeve: a clause, a condition, a life quietly amended.
I’m tugged from handshake to handshake, from name to name, as if my arm is a ribbon being threaded through a series of knots. Each introduction comes with a résumé disguised as affection, son of, on the board of, close to, handles things quietly, and I’m expected to receive people the way you receive gifts you didn’t ask for: with gratitude that doesn’t show teeth.
But in the blur of familiar faces, polished hairlines, inherited confidence, perfumes that cost more than my first car, I start to register the ones who don’t match the palette.
A young man stands a little apart, cuffs smudged as if he forgot, or refused, to treat his own body like a display case. There’s a faint, sharp edge to him, turpentine, maybe, or the ghost of it, cutting through the garden’s orange blossom sweetness. He holds himself like someone used to waiting in hallways, used to being told where he’s allowed to stand. People look past him and then back at me, as if the air between us is dangerous.
Near the pavilion, a woman moves with the clipped precision of a soldier. Her eyes don’t linger on jewelry; they flick to doorways, to servers, to the angle of a tray, to the seconds between song changes. She’s counting. Timing, proximity, exits. Her mouth tightens whenever someone laughs too loudly, as if noise itself is a spill she’ll have to clean.
And then there’s the academic. There’s no other word for it; she wears observation like a coat. Her gaze doesn’t settle on faces for long. It lands on conversations, on clusters, on who leans in and who steps back. She watches the room the way I watch ledgers, for discrepancies that could become leverage. When she looks at me, it isn’t with longing or reverence; it’s with the cool, measuring attention of someone deciding whether my smile is evidence.
None of them carry the easy entitlement of my circle. They aren’t here by bloodline or marriage prospect. They’re here because someone with power decided they were useful. And because usefulness, tonight, is another kind of invitation you can’t refuse.
He doesn’t do the small bow of the head my cousins have trained into every newcomer. He just looks at me, straight, unbuffered, and it’s so unfamiliar my first instinct is to search for the hidden hook. There isn’t one. His eyes are tired in a way that has nothing to do with late-night parties, and there’s paint ground into the creases of his cuffs like he forgot his own body was supposed to be polite.
“Salām,” he says, as if the word is enough. Not Aghā-ye anything. Not my surname spoken like a key.
Up close, I catch that sharp ghost on him, turpentine, paper, the metallic hint of coins handled too often. He tips his chin toward the water channels, the cypress rows meeting the paths at exact angles. “It’s… precise,” he adds, choosing the word the way you choose a stone to step on. “Like someone measured beauty instead of guessing.”
A compliment to the garden, not to the family. It should be nothing, and it lands like contraband anyway: relief, and risk, and the reckless urge to answer honestly. My practiced smile falters, just a fraction, because for a second I can’t remember which version of me is required.
Parvaneh threads through the garden’s slow-moving elegance like a blade through silk: no apology, no hesitation, only inevitability. A tray tilts; before the crystal glasses can decide to shatter, her hand is already under the wobble, wrist firm, eyes on the server’s face. Two fingers flick: back corridor. A tilt of her chin: replace it. The staff obey the way lungs obey breath.
She doesn’t look at me the way my aunts do. Concern as performance, pity as leverage. Her gaze skims my posture, the tightness at my jaw, the way my hands keep finding each other as if to prove they’re still mine. It’s the look of someone who’s watched brides faint, grooms bolt, fathers explode. Not judgment. Inventory.
And in that quick accounting, I feel seen. Less like an heir, more like a man about to crack on schedule.
Soraya hovers at the rim of a donor cluster, not smiling so much as listening. When the conversation thins, she pivots toward me and asks, quietly, what the expansion “buys” besides jobs and headlines, and who, exactly, is meant to be indebted. It isn’t flirtation. It’s an experiment, and I’m the variable.
With them, I’m not a polished headline in a tailored suit. I’m the slight drag in my breath before a lie, the way my eyes dart toward the pavilion like it might lock behind me, the seconds I take too long to answer. They don’t offer rehearsed admiration or the sweet, sharp reminder of debt. Their attention makes my skin feel thin: terrifyingly human.
Kian drifts toward the reflecting pool the way someone approaches a painting they’re not sure they’re allowed to touch, slow, angled, eyes taking the temperature of the air. The sponsors and foreign guests have formed a bright knot near the water, their laughter polished to the same shine as their watches. Their hands keep meeting and parting, a choreography of deals disguised as celebration.
He offers his greeting softly, half a beat behind the rhythm of the group, as if he’s listening for the right place to step in and the music keeps shifting the floor under him. “Hello. Salām,” he says, and for a second it’s almost charming, almost human, the way he tries to bridge worlds with two syllables.
Someone extends a hand. Kian takes it with paint-stained fingers he’s tried, and failed, to scrub clean. He introduces himself, then reaches for a name, one of the European donors, I think, and his accent catches on it. Not a dramatic stumble. Just a small snag, a consonant that refuses to become what it’s supposed to be.
The pause that follows is microscopic, but in this garden it swells. It sits on the surface of the pool like oil, catching lantern light. A few smiles remain on faces like masks held in place by habit, but eyes flick, quick, assessing, down to his cuffs, his shoes, the cheap strap of his bag. One man repeats his own name back, exaggeratedly clear, as if Kian has a hearing problem and not a class problem.
Kian nods too many times, overcorrecting. I can see the calculation happen behind his eyes: If I laugh, will it make it easier? If I speak less, will it be safer? He tries again, this time with a compliment about the garden’s geometry, about the way the water channels guide you without touching you. It’s thoughtful. It’s also the wrong kind of thoughtful, unprofitable, unplaceable.
Across the courtyard, I feel my own body tighten in sympathy, as if his misstep is a thread tied to my wrist. It shouldn’t matter. It does. Here, a single misplaced syllable becomes a verdict, and everyone pretends it’s just music filling the gap.
Nahid steps in before the silence can become a story. They do it the way the wealthy do everything. Their smile is small, curated for public consumption, but their eyes are a blade.
“It’s Doctor,” Nahid says lightly, touching the donor’s elbow, then turning to Kian as if they’re offering him a gift. “And for tonight, you’ll want to say tabrīk (congratulations) rather than the more… casual greetings.”
Kian’s shoulders lift a fraction, a reflex like someone bracing for a slap that comes disguised as perfume. He repeats the word, careful, too careful. Nahid tilts their head, approving, then adjusts his stance with a gesture that isn’t quite a touch: two fingers hovering near his forearm, indicating where his hand should rest, how long the handshake should last, where his gaze should land without challenging anyone important.
I recognize the technique. Etiquette as a rescue line, yes, but also a leash. And the worst part is how cleanly it works: the room exhales, satisfied that the world is back in its proper shape.
A man with a venture fund smile, too white, too sure, throws out a joke about “old-world traditions” like it’s a coin he expects everyone to catch and polish. The circle responds on cue, laughter rising in a tidy wave, expensive and identical. It’s not amusement; it’s proof of membership.
Kian hesitates, eyes flicking to my face as if searching for the hidden punchline. He gives a small, honest exhale that isn’t quite a laugh. The wave breaks.
For a second, the investor’s grin stays in place while something behind it recalibrates. His gaze slides over Kian’s cuffs, the cheap strap of his bag, the stubborn quiet of his mouth. Interesting, it had said, minutes ago. Now it says, without words: problem.
The laughter thins into air. Conversation reroutes around him like water around a stone.
Parvaneh appears like a seamstress closing a rip before anyone can see skin. She slides between bodies, palm up, smiling at donors while her other hand (low, invisible) guides Kian backward. “The installation needs you,” she says, crisp enough to sound like authority, kind enough to sound like praise. Behind her, a junior server absorbs the donor’s irritation, bowing, apologizing for air, for timing, for existing.
From the terrace, I watch the rules settle over the guests like lacquer. Ease passes for virtue here; the right laugh, the right handshake, the right silence becomes evidence of deserving. Discomfort is framed as a flaw in the person, never the room. And dignity, God, dignity is so editable. One wrong note, and it’s rewritten into “behavior.”
The first adjustment arrives wrapped in tenderness, the way a pill arrives in honey.
A family attendant I’ve known since childhood leans in as if sharing a blessing. “For your peace, āghā,” he murmurs, eyes soft, voice lower than the music. “It’s only tonight. Too many strangers. Too many phones.”
For your peace. As if peace is something they can hang from a hook and drape over my shoulders like a cloak.
I nod because nodding is what keeps the air smooth. I let my practiced smile do its job, the one that says grateful, obedient, worthy. Inside, something tightens: an old superstition, maybe, that naming peace is an invitation for it to leave.
I turn toward the service corridor out of habit. It’s the narrow vein behind the mirrored pavilion, the place where the garden stops performing and becomes plumbing and concrete, where the staff speak in real voices and the scent of orange blossoms gives way to detergent and steam. I’ve used it all evening like a lung: step away, breathe, come back polished.
But tonight the corridor has a new shape.
Two security men stand there. Not the usual discreet pair at the gate, but broader, newly placed, looking past me as if their job is to look through me. One shifts just enough to block the opening without appearing to move. The attendant’s hand hovers at my elbow, guiding without touching.
“Just for a little while,” he says, still gentle. “Guests are wandering. We can’t risk… confusion.”
Confusion. Such an elegant word for escape.
I glance at the men. They don’t meet my eyes. They don’t have to. The rule has already been agreed upon somewhere above my head, in a room where my absence was a convenience.
Around us, people continue to smile, to circulate, to trade compliments like currency. Someone nearby laughs as if nothing has changed, as if love has always looked like a closed door.
And the strangest part is how easily everyone accepts it. How quickly kindness becomes a lock, and how natural it feels to be the one expected to thank them for turning the key.
A timetable appears where conversation should be.
Parvaneh’s clipboard materializes in front of me like a shield, its paper edges sharp, its columns of times and names more convincing than any person. I can read my own evening laid out in clean ink. There are revisions in the margins, fresh and hurried, a different handwriting threading through hers like a second set of instructions.
I lean in, lowering my voice, as if the garden itself might overhear. “Five minutes,” I say. Not an argument. A plea dressed up as a request. “Just… alone.”
Parvaneh’s eyes soften first. That’s the cruelty of it. She looks like she understands. Then her mouth does the professional thing: a small apologetic line. “Not now, jān,” she answers, the endearment used the way a nurse uses it before tightening a tourniquet. “They’ve moved everything up. If you disappear, they’ll panic.”
“They” is an entire architecture.
She turns the page, as if turning it makes it true, and my five minutes vanish under the weight of a new cue. Sympathy, neatly stapled to finality.
I catch my name the way you catch a glass slipping: too late, already mid-fall. A cluster of elders stands with an international partner near the reflecting pool, their faces turned into courteous masks by lantern light. “So composed,” one of them says, not to me but about me, as if I’m a portfolio company. “He doesn’t rattle. He understands responsibility.”
The partner chuckles, the sound easy and foreign, and it skims over words like donations, boards, partnership, joining houses: as if marriage is simply the final line item that makes the rest tax-deductible. They toast my “readiness” the way you toast a contract before signing.
Compliments keep arriving (graceful, gold-wrapped) and each one tightens, clause by clause, around my throat.
Farimah’s eyes snag on a program card in someone’s manicured hand. One of hers, except it isn’t. The border is wrong, the line breaks too obedient, a new section wedged in like an extra vow. She takes it, thumbs the paper flat as if she can press the lie back into silence. Then she looks up and holds my gaze a fraction too long. Edited. Not for beauty. For leverage.
The logic sharpens into something I can’t unsee: stability is the reward for being legible, and tradition is summoned only when it can seal a door without making a sound. Every “for your comfort” arrives with a timetable, every “we’re protecting you” with a body placed in my path. My hesitation isn’t ingratitude. It’s the last proof I have that I’m still choosing: however badly.
I slip away the only way I’m ever allowed to slip away. By moving as if I’m still on schedule, as if my feet are obeying someone else’s list. I take a turn that looks accidental, smile at a cousin I don’t hear, accept a nod like a receipt, and then the rose arbor takes me in.
Its lattice throws shadows like calligraphy across the gravel. The air here is cooler, wet with the garden’s channels and the bruised sweetness of blossoms that have been handled too much. The musicians are still playing, of course, but the sound arrives filtered through leaves and distance, the way you hear a celebration from the wrong room, softened, unconvincing, like it belongs to someone else’s night.
For a moment there are no elders, no hands closing around my elbow, no praise that doubles as instruction. Lantern light trembles on the roses and makes each thorn look intentional. I let my shoulders drop a fraction and feel, with an almost superstitious guilt, how good it is to be unseen. As if the garden has a seam, a hidden pocket where the social machine can’t reach.
Then I notice him.
He’s near the arbor’s far post, half in shadow, half in that honeyed light: too plain for this world, which is precisely why my attention catches. Paint smudges the cuff of his jacket like an honest confession. He holds a small bag close to his body, not possessive: careful. The kind of careful you learn when you’ve carried medicine, when you’ve measured time in doses and breath.
Kian. The name arrives with its own sting, quick as a memory I haven’t earned.
He looks up, and there’s no practiced ease in it, no polite delay while he calculates my value. His eyes do not ask permission from the air around us. They simply meet mine, steady, exhausted, and unafraid of being wrong.
I realize, with a sudden clarity that makes me almost dizzy, that if anyone sees me here it will become a story. But Kian doesn’t call me “āghā.” He doesn’t lower his voice like he’s speaking to a building.
He just watches me as if I’m real.
He doesn’t move like the others do. Like they’re always aware of how they’re being framed. Kian shifts his weight against the arbor post, and the lantern light catches the paint at his cuff, a careless streak that would be scandalous on a tailored sleeve and somehow looks like proof of life on his. The small bag hangs from his hand with the carefulness of someone who’s learned the difference between holding and keeping safe. His fingers are tense around the strap, not from nerves. More like habit, the kind you get when what you carry matters even if nobody notices.
He tips his head, a question already decided behind his eyes.
“Are you okay?”
No āghā, no rehearsed softness, no smile that asks for a favor in advance. Just four words, plain enough to be almost rude in this place.
I feel it hit: harder than any toast, any praise, any velvet threat. My body reacts before my mind can edit. A laugh tries to come out and fails halfway, turning into a breath.
For a second I want to answer like a person.
For a second, I almost do.
“I’m, ” The word fine is already at the tip of my tongue, obedient, polished, safe.
But something raw gets there first.
“I can’t breathe in there,” I hear myself say, too fast, too true, as if the arbor has loosened a knot I didn’t know was holding my voice. My throat tightens the moment the sentence exists. Instinct slams down like a lid. I swallow, rearrange my face, reach for a joke, a lighter version of myself. Anything that won’t be quoted back to me later.
The pause stretches.
Kian doesn’t rescue me from it. He doesn’t offer a compliment to make me feel powerful, doesn’t tilt the moment into a bargain. He just stays, eyes steady, as if stopping is allowed, as if silence isn’t failure but a kind of answer.
Something small slips between us, unintended as a dropped stitch. His gaze catching mine, my mouth forgetting how to arrange itself. The garden, all lanterns and symmetry, suddenly reads as scenery; even the roses feel hired. In Kian’s face there’s a shared, wordless recognition of it. The thrill that flares isn’t only desire. It’s the illicit relief of not having to prove I’m sure.
I feel the risk in my ribs like a second pulse. In this garden, tenderness is evidence, collected, interpreted, traded. One unguarded look and it becomes a rumor with a purpose, a lever someone can pull when they want me to move. And still I don’t step back. Because being seen without being steered feels like finding a door in a wall I was raised to believe was solid.
Through the arbor, the reception terrace is framed like a painting I’m meant to stand in. Lanterns hang in obedient rows. Men in tailored suits tilt their glasses the way you tilt a deal toward yes. I catch a slice of conversation carried on the damp air, English edged with French vowels, the easy multilingual confidence of people who are never the ones being translated.
One of our international partners, someone whose name my uncle says with a faint bow in his voice, laughs, loud and unembarrassed, as if the whole estate is a showroom and he’s already decided what he’ll buy. His hand cuts the air in a smooth arc, and the group around him moves with it, orbiting. They are smiling with their teeth, performing intimacy the way we perform tradition.
“Stability,” he says, like he’s tasting the word. “Legacy. It’s rare to see it protected so… beautifully.”
Beautifully. As if the mirrored pavilion, the jasmine, the women’s gold bracelets catching light are proof of solvency. As if my mother’s careful posture is an asset class. As if my engagement ring is a line item that happens to sparkle.
They nod: my cousins, a banker I’ve met twice, a visiting consultant whose tie costs more than the average salary of the staff moving silently behind them. They talk about “continuity” and “succession” in the same breath they talk about roses and poetry, and the language slips between romance and governance so seamlessly I can’t find the seam again. I know those words; I’ve sat in boardrooms where they meant layoffs. Here, they mean marriage.
My stomach tightens with a sharp, humiliating clarity. Tonight isn’t only being witnessed. It’s being demonstrated. A live model of what this world rewards: certainty delivered in silk, hesitation punished in whispers.
From here, the laughter sounds too smooth, too rehearsed to be joy. It’s a signal, we approve, we will invest, we will bless. And somewhere inside that approval is the expectation that I will stand up when prompted, smile when pulled into frame, and let my life be used as proof that the machine still runs.
The toast comes dressed in velvet words and harmless laughter, but it carries weight like a document. A raised glass, a pause for the musicians to soften, and suddenly philanthropy is spoken the way my grandmother used to speak prayers, slow, reverent, inevitable. A “generous contribution” to the university, a “shared vision” for cultural preservation, named aloud like vows meant to bind more than two people. The speaker smiles toward me as if I’m the groom and the guarantor.
Around the terrace, heads turn in practiced unison. Applause blooms on cue. Too immediate, too evenly distributed. I hear it differently now, not as approval but as confirmation: payment received, alliance witnessed. Even the laughter lands like punctuation.
They bless the partnership the way they bless a marriage, and my engagement becomes the ribbon tied around it, pretty enough to distract from the knot. My ring catches lantern light and flashes like a seal pressed into wax.
I understand, with a cold steadiness, that the ceremony isn’t only tradition.
It’s a signature they intend to take from my mouth in public.
Between speeches, I start tracking the orbit as if it’s a market I can read. Elders drift close, not touching me, just close enough that I feel their breath of approval (or warning) on my ear. They steer talk toward “future” and “responsibility” the way you steer a skittish horse, with softness that still counts as force. When someone asks me something real, how I feel, what I want, a cousin appears like a practiced interruption, laughing too loudly, inserting a detail about the garden, the deal, the weather, anything that turns me back into décor.
And then there’s always a new face at the exact second my attention strays: a partner’s representative, a cultural attaché, a donor with a polished accent. Introduced like coincidence, timed like a cue. Each handshake is a tether, each smile a narrow corridor. Celebration, tonight, isn’t spontaneous. It’s staged to keep me walking.
A pause tries to bloom in me: my fingers lingering on the stem of my glass, my attention slipping toward the terrace’s darker edge where the music thins and people become silhouettes instead of witnesses. It doesn’t get to live. A hand finds my elbow, light as etiquette, and a low voice threads through my ear: not now. The smile that follows is soft, almost kind, and it still feels like a correction. Even my hesitation is monitored, logged, managed. My so-called indecision treated like a risk someone else is paid to contain.
In the thick of orange blossom and warm glasslight, the ask finally shows its true size. They don’t want a groom or a spokesperson; they want a version of me that photographs cleanly: certainty stitched into my suit, obedience threaded through my smile. And the moment I name it, my reluctance shifts. It isn’t cowardice. It’s my body’s siren, warning me what it will cost to go quiet.
I slow down on purpose, like I’m stepping off a moving walkway everyone else is still riding. My breath first. Four counts in, hold, and out until my ribs unclench. Then my cadence. Then the smile, pared back to something that doesn’t ask the room for permission.
Compliments come at me in embroidered phrases. Your suit, impeccable. Your poise, inherited. Your mother must be proud. Usually I would meet each one with an easy laugh, a warm hand at an elbow, a charming deflection that turns praise into a shared joke and keeps the machinery running.
Tonight I try something else.
I nod once. I let the words land and sit there, unredeemed by my performance. A few people blink as if I’ve misheard them. One aunt tilts her head, searching for the second beat where I usually soften everything with humility. I don’t give it. I’m not rude, I’m careful, but I refuse to gild their script with extra lines.
It’s strange, how quickly silence becomes a kind of confession. In the mirrored walls of the pavilion, my face multiplies into versions of myself: the obedient heir, the grateful fiancé, the man who knows how to charm donors into signing. I keep my hands still at my sides and watch which reflection looks most like a hostage.
Across the courtyard the musicians draw their bows like they’re sawing through air. Orange blossom drifts in thick, sweet waves, and beneath it there’s the metallic bite of fountain water and the faint sting of rosewater someone has already uncorked. Everything is so beautiful it feels like a warning.
A businessman with a salt-and-pepper beard leans in, speaking softly about “the expansion” as if it’s a prayer we’re saying together. I meet his eyes, let the pause stretch just long enough to register as choice. His smile tightens, then resets. Calculating.
So this is what happens when I stop propping up the room: it doesn’t collapse. It recalibrates around my silence, measuring what it can take from me without my help. And in that measurement, I feel, bright and terrifying, how much I’ve been giving away for free.
Someone (an uncle’s friend with a too-white smile) slides beside me as if we’re sharing a confidence. His cologne fights the orange blossoms and loses. “The wedding,” he says, voice lowered, “and everything it means.”
Everything. The word is a net.
I feel the old reflex rise: laugh, soften, promise. Give them something glittering they can carry back to the elders like proof I’m properly grateful. I don’t. I let the question hang between us, a lantern held too still. One beat. Two. Long enough that his expression has to move through irritation and land, grudgingly, on patience.
In the pause I notice the tilt of his body toward the pavilion, like he’s already leaning into the announcement he expects from my mouth. I count my breaths the way I count risks.
“It’s a beautiful night,” I say finally.
Neutral. True. Useless to their machinery.
His eyes narrow, searching for the second sentence: the vow to the alliance, the tribute to tradition, the gratitude. When it doesn’t arrive, his smile becomes a mask he has to keep adjusting, like it doesn’t fit as well as mine used to.
My cousin Arash drifts up with a drink he isn’t tasting, grin sharpened into something that wants to draw blood. He doesn’t ask how I am; he tests the air around me. “So,” he says, too casual, “is it true you tried to call it off? People are saying you. The rumor hangs, waiting for my mouth to bless it.
Instead I turn back, soften my voice without sweetening it. “How’s Nika doing at school?” I ask, specific on purpose. “You moved her to that bilingual program, didn’t you? Does she still hate mornings?”
His expression flickers: caught between offense and the sudden, intimate reality of his child. “She… she’s fine,” he says, wrong-footed.
I nod, like that’s all I needed, and let the silence do the rest.
At the terrace edge, lantern light grazing my cufflinks, I answer praise with less than it asks for. A nod. A quiet thank you. Then I listen and let the gap stay open. People show themselves in those seconds: who leans closer, hungry for my agreement; who flinches, fearing misstep; who panics and pours words into the silence like wine.
I let my smile appear like a candle behind glass, warm, contained, impossible to grab. I agree in textures, not sentences. “Of course,” to nothing in particular. “We’ll see,” as if it’s gracious. I mirror their enthusiasm just enough to feel cooperative, then I ask about the garden, the music, their mother’s health. The conversation drifts, safely, away from my future.
The elder catches me at the lip of the reflecting pool as if he’s been waiting for the moment my orbit brings me close enough to hook. His suit is an old cut, impeccable in that way only men with nothing left to prove can afford; his ring flashes when he gestures, a small sun over the water.
“Mehrzad-jan,” he says, and makes my name sound like a benediction. The music swells behind us, all longing strings, and the fountain keeps its patient, indifferent rhythm. His voice is pitched just above it. A voice meant to be overheard by the right ears.
“These people,” he murmurs, eyes traveling over the terrace as if he’s counting assets, “they did not come only for rosewater and poetry. They came to hear strength confirmed.”
Strength. A word that, in this family, means obedience with good posture.
He steps closer, so my reflection fractures between his shoulder and the shimmer of lanterns. I see myself there, jaw set, smile ready, like a portrait being adjusted on a wall. “Tonight,” he continues, gentle as a hand on the back of your neck, “they will want something they can repeat. An expansion. A signature. A direction.”
The last word lands heavier, because it isn’t about geography. It’s about whether my life continues along the line they’ve drawn, or breaks into something messier that can’t be framed and hung.
I let my gaze drop, as if in respect, but really to buy a breath. The water holds the sky and the pavilion lights, making everything look calmer than it is. I notice, because I can’t stop noticing, how his stance blocks the easiest path away, how his body angles me toward the mirrored pavilion like we’re both being guided by the same invisible hand.
He doesn’t say announce it, because he doesn’t have to. He says, softly, “Your father would have spoken already.”
The comparison is a blade presented in velvet.
My mouth finds the shape it knows: the practiced smile, punctual as prayer. I dip my head, offer a phrase that could pass for agreement, and keep my hands relaxed at my sides so no one can read a flinch into them.
My smile arrives the way it always does, punctual, polished, a small ceremony inside my face. I incline my head as if his words have settled into me like blessing, not barbed wire. “Of course,” I say, soft enough to seem humble, smooth enough to seem certain. The kind of answer men like him can carry away and translate into obedience.
I keep my hands loose at my sides, fingers uncurled, ring catching lantern light when I shift my wrist. No clenched fist. No betrayed tremor. My body is a well-trained liar; it knows what the elders read first.
But I don’t give him the sentence he wants. I let the water speak for me a moment (the fountain’s patient insistence, the brittle glitter of reflections) until the silence starts to press against his pride.
Then I look up with an expression that might pass for gratitude. “When you made your first real expansion,” I ask, careful, admiring, “how did you choose your partner? Was it instinct. Or did you see a risk everyone else pretended not to see?”
I watch the question land. I offer him a doorway where he is the hero, and step, quietly, away from being the proof.
I don’t take the bait; I take the man.
“Your first expansion,” I say, letting my tone turn almost boyish with respect, “the one everyone cites like scripture: how did you choose your partner then?” I don’t say tell me how to obey. I say it like I’m asking for a blessing I’ve earned the right to request. “Was it instinct? Or was there a risk you saw that no one else dared to name?”
His eyes narrow, then soften. Pleased at being remembered correctly. I add, gently, “And the one risk you regretted not taking. What did it cost you later?” A precise question is a velvet rope: it keeps him from stepping into my future.
He inhales, already halfway into the story where he is wise, inevitable, unassailable. I hold my smile like an offering and let him walk through it.
He warms the way men do when you hand them their own mythology. His sentences lengthen, spilling names, dates, the smell of dust in a first office, the hunger that made him brave. I punctuate with soft laughter, with reverent pauses that make him feel listened to, not managed. When his gaze tries to hook back toward tonight, I tilt my head and murmur about legacy: how haste looks almost disrespectful beside it.
I seize his nostalgia like a servant’s errand. “Let me get you rosewater,” I say, all dutiful warmth, and before he can refuse, I’m already moving, three steps, five, down the lantern-lit path as if I’ve been summoned by tradition itself. Behind me, his expectation dangles, unanswered but unbroken. I angle toward the garden’s quieter seams, where air might feel unscripted.
I follow the orange grove as if it’s an idea I can hide inside.
The terrace noise thins in increments. First the bright clink of glasses, then the layered laughter, then the musicians’ strings reduced to a distant ache, like a memory you can’t quite name. Leaves take the sound and chew it up. The lanterns here don’t glare; they fracture through branches, breaking into smaller, kinder pieces of light. The air tastes different too, green, bitter-sweet, honest in a way the pavilion’s perfume isn’t. Orange blossoms insist on themselves, not as decoration but as fact.
I stop at the grove’s edge and realize I’m not alone.
There’s a figure half in shadow, positioned with the kind of accidental precision that feels like intention. Not one of my cousins’ friends, not one of the men who orbit elders and contracts. His suit isn’t right for this circle; his posture isn’t either. He’s standing as if he doesn’t know where to put his body when everything is staged, and he’s decided not to pretend.
The lantern catches the pale smear of paint on his cuff when he shifts. A small bag hangs from his shoulder, the strap worn into softness. He looks up as if he’s been listening to the garden, not the party, and for a sick second my chest tightens with superstition. Like I’ve stumbled into an omen I didn’t ask for.
My instincts do their usual inventory. Who is he with. Who brought him. Who will notice me noticing.
But then my gaze finds his face properly, and something in me loosens without permission.
He doesn’t straighten when he recognizes me. He doesn’t offer the careful, deferential smile people use to keep me harmless. He doesn’t drop his eyes as if looking too long would be a claim.
He simply looks back, steady and tired, as if my presence isn’t a test he has to pass. As if I’m not a role he needs to handle correctly. The gentleness in it is not performed; it’s the kind that comes from someone who has had to keep showing up when nobody applauded. And under that gaze, I feel, absurdly, like a person rather than an announcement waiting to happen.
He catches my glance the way you catch something fragile. Without grabbing, without showing off your careful hands. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t do the little rituals people here do when they want to prove they understand their place: the polite drop of the eyes, the smile that asks permission to exist, the quick scan over my shoulder to see who is watching.
He just looks at me.
There’s exhaustion in it, the kind you don’t get from late parties but from long duties: nights cut into pieces, worry carried like a second spine. His gentleness isn’t decorative. It doesn’t angle for advantage. It’s simply there, steady as the water channels laid down centuries ago: honest, stubborn, quietly refusing to become another performance.
And I feel it like heat under my ribs, unnerving in its simplicity. In this garden, every glance is usually a question, what are you to me, what can I use, what can I expose, but his isn’t a question at all. It’s recognition.
For a moment I forget to be legible. I forget to be acceptable. I am not being measured; I am being seen.
My reflex reaches for charm the way a hand reaches for a railing in the dark. Something easy about the orange blossoms: how the scent is almost too generous, how even the trees here perform for an audience. A small joke, a harmless one, the kind that lets me stay intact behind laughter.
I feel it rise to my tongue.
Then I stop it. Swallow it like a pill I don’t want to need.
Kian’s face doesn’t change; he doesn’t reward me for being clever, doesn’t punish me for failing to be. The steadiness makes my nerves itch, like I’ve been wearing a tight collar all evening and only now notice the bruise.
I step closer anyway. Close enough that etiquette would call it careless, close enough that if anyone turned their head at the wrong moment, they’d have a story.
In that small pocket of quiet, I try a different kind of honesty: one I can later pretend was only a line I liked, a passing melancholy. My voice comes out lower than I intend. “I keep saying the right things,” I admit, tasting the word right like something too sweet, “and it feels like watching someone else speak.” My throat tightens. “Like I’m applauding myself from a distance.”
Kian doesn’t rush to patch the fracture with comfort. He doesn’t say no, you’re fine, doesn’t offer me a ladder back into my own performance. He just stays where he is, letting the silence hold without turning it into a verdict. Under that patient gaze, my lungs finally remember how to move; one clean exhale, stolen and private. Then I square my shoulders, smooth my face into something usable, and let the garden release me back to the noise.
Farimah catches me at the edge of the service corridor the way you catch a sleeve before it slips off a shoulder. This strip of space behind the pavilion is all function: stacked crates, coiled cables, a fan whining against the heat. The party’s music thins here into a vibration in the tiles. People move with purpose, which means they don’t look too closely, which means this is where real decisions happen.
She has ribbon scraps looped over two fingers like bright, useless veins. A clipboard rests against her hip, innocuous as any other tool in the hands of someone who belongs backstage. But when she angles it, the paper beneath the clip flashes a different weight: printing that hasn’t been handled yet, corners too sharp, ink still matte.
Her eyes flick once, only once, toward the nearest attendant lingering by the doorway, earpiece visible, posture too still. Farimah measures the distance between us and him the way she measures negative space on a set: not with fear, with composition. Then she steps in, close enough that anyone watching would assume she’s warning me about my boutonnière.
“I’m not supposed to show you this,” she murmurs, and it isn’t dramatic. It’s tired. It’s angry in a small, contained way.
I take a breath that tastes like dust and rosewater. My hand stays at my side until she shifts the clipboard again and the folded page becomes an invitation, a trap, a confession.
Her ink-stained fingertip grazes the edge of the paper: an artist’s tenderness applied to a weapon. “They changed it,” she says, barely moving her lips. “Last-minute.”
The ribbon scraps whisper as she adjusts her grip, as if the whole wedding is trying to eavesdrop. Behind us, someone laughs too loudly, and the corridor swallows it like it was never there.
My chest tightens with that familiar superstitious prickle: like the garden itself is warning me in a language I don’t want to understand.
I don’t look at the page yet. Not until I’m sure no one is looking at me looking. Not until Farimah’s gaze pins me in place and makes the choice for me: take it, or admit you’re willing to be led.
Without breaking her brisk, indispensable posture, clipboard tight to her hip, chin tilted like she’s counting minutes, Farimah slides a single folded sheet into my palm. Not openly. Not like a gift. Like contraband passed in a crowd. The paper is heavier than it should be, the crease too sharp, the ink too fresh; it smells faintly of toner beneath the garden’s orange-blossom sweetness.
I keep my face neutral, the way I’ve trained myself to keep it when someone offers a deal that could ruin me. My thumb finds the edge and worries it once, a superstitious little touch, as if the fibers can tell me whether this is fate or just someone’s handwriting pretending.
Farimah leans in as if she’s adjusting my cuff. Her ink-stained fingertip taps a line through the fold. New typography. New sequence. And there it is: my name lifted forward, placed before the vows, dressed up as “remarks,” the kind of polite word that means you will stand, you will speak, you will comply.
My practiced smile stays on. Inside, something goes cold and clear. I fold the page smaller, hide it in my jacket like a secret I’m not allowed to admit I have.
Farimah’s mouth barely moves when she speaks; her voice is a thread pulled tight between the music’s sigh and the bright clatter of silver trays. “It’s not just the wedding,” she says, and the words land like a hand on the back of my neck. “They’re staging you.”
Her eyes flick, not to me, but past me: toward the pavilion where the mirror waits to reflect whatever story they choose, toward the candles arranged like witnesses. “They moved your remarks,” she murmurs. “Before the vows. While everyone’s looking at the sofreh. It’s cover.”
Cover for what. My throat turns dry.
“A promise,” she continues, sharper now, contained. “An alliance. A public hook they can repeat tomorrow as if you offered it willingly.” She inhales once, steadies. “If you say it there, you can’t unsay it later.”
I keep my smile in place, bright and obedient, and let my mouth offer something harmless (“Everything on schedule?”) as if I care about timing, as if this is just another detail to approve. For any eyes on us, I’m the grateful groom being managed. Under cover of that emptiness, I crease the sheet again, and again, until it’s a neat, illicit square, then slip it into my inner pocket. My pulse tries to sprint. My posture refuses to break.
I don’t let my eyes seek my mother’s silhouette in the lantern-glow. I won’t summon the fight by naming it, won’t turn a suspicion into a flag someone can rally around. I give Farimah one small nod (receipt, gratitude, I understand) and keep my mouth shut. Silence, for now, is shelter. The first person I warn is the first person I’ll have to defy.
I step out of the corridor and let the garden take me back like a stage light snapping on. The courtyard is all soft geometry and hard watching: cypress shadows laid carefully across stone, the reflecting pool holding the sky like it’s been paid to. Laughter rises and falls in rehearsed crescendos. Names travel faster than people. Somewhere a violin pulls a note long enough to make longing feel respectable.
Nothing inside me is stable, but my body knows the choreography. Shoulders back. Chin level. The smile I’ve worn to funerals and fundraisers and one disastrous New Year’s when my father announced a merger over dessert. I set it in place and walk as if my ribs aren’t full of paper.
The folded program presses against my chest with every breath, a small, insistent weight under silk and tailoring. It’s absurd: how a single sheet can feel like a hand on my throat. I keep my fingers away from my jacket. Touching it would admit it’s there. Admitting it’s there would make it real.
Faces tilt toward me as I pass. I answer each glance with exactly the amount of warmth that keeps people satisfied without inviting them closer. A patron’s wife compliments my tie; I bow my head just enough to make it seem like gratitude, not surrender. Someone jokes about the “future,” and I laugh at the word, a clean sound that buys me three seconds of distance.
Near the fountain basin, floating candles wobble in the water, their flames shivering as if they know. I catch myself counting them (one, two, three) then stop, angry at my own superstition. I’ve always believed in signs when I needed an excuse not to choose.
Across the pool, the mirrored pavilion throws back a hundred versions of the same evening: gold light, obedient guests, a groom with impeccable posture. I meet my own reflection briefly in a pane of glass and almost flinch. He looks composed. He looks ready.
I keep walking anyway, because the trick isn’t being fearless. The trick is letting them think you are, while you look for the smallest crack in the script where a different truth might fit.
A champagne flute appears in my fingers as if it’s always been there, cool and sweating against my palm. I feel the room tighten, the way silk does before it tears: elders leaning in, patrons tilting their heads, everyone hoping my mouth will become a signature. I lift the glass with a steadiness that looks like confidence and is, in truth, just refusal practiced until it passes for grace.
I let my gaze travel, not lingering long enough on any single face to be claimed by it. “Thank you,” I say, and the word is soft, generous, useless to anyone trying to pin me to a future. I praise the garden, the hands that built the evening, the families who “believe in continuity,” the musicians who make nostalgia sound like choice. I name no deal. I name no date. I say nothing that can be quoted without context.
When someone offers me an opening, we’re all so excited for what comes next, I smile and give them a joke polished to a mirror-shine, something about needing permission from the orange blossoms first. Laughter ripples, satisfied. My throat stays uncollared. I drink, and the sweetness buys me one more minute of being unowned.
The patrons come at me in courteous tides, perfume, cufflinks, practiced laughter, and I let them, because letting them is safer than resisting. I thank them for their “faith” in the family, for their “vision” of what we can build, and I mean just enough of it to keep my voice from curdling. Each time someone leans in with an invitation disguised as praise, we’d be honored if you led this, you must be ready to take the next step, I hand them a joke, bright and weightless, like a sugared almond: something about how the garden is the only one allowed to make promises tonight, or how I’m still negotiating with the cypress trees. They laugh, satisfied, hearing intimacy where I’ve offered only air. I give warmth without permission, closeness without consequence.
A sharper question still lands: an uncle’s friend, all teeth and courtesy, asking about timelines, about the next announcement, about whether I’m ready to “step fully into it.” I meet his eyes like I’m not bleeding paper. “Soon,” I say, smooth as a signature, and let a practical detail follow, permits, due diligence, something that sounds like certainty while giving him nothing he can clutch.
Between greetings, I try on honesty the way you test a ring in secret. I let my gaze soften and hold for one breath too many, then break it before anyone can name it. When someone presses, I murmur, “Not tonight,” with a smile sweet enough to pass as teasing. I take one deliberate step back from the circle, claiming space like a quiet rebellion, already mapping the nearest edge where air still belongs to me.
Parvaneh arrives the way relief does. One moment I’m pinned in a semicircle of perfume and polite hunger, and the next there’s a clipboard at my elbow like a shield raised at the last second. Her pen clicks once, a small, decisive sound, and she angles her body so she blocks the cleanest line of sight from the nearest elder without making it look like she’s protecting me.
“Walk-through,” she says at a volume meant to be overheard and dismissed. The words land with the dull authority of logistics: timed, necessary, boring. Exactly the kind of boring that makes powerful people let go because it reminds them someone else is doing the unglamorous work that keeps their story intact.
I watch faces soften in disappointment, no speech, no revelation, then swivel back to their drinks. The circle loosens. I feel the air return to my lungs in cautious increments, like it doesn’t trust me not to waste it.
Parvaneh keeps her eyes on the paper, as if I’m another line item she can’t afford to misplace. But her voice drops, the syllables slipping under the music and the laughter.
“Three minutes,” she murmurs, and there is something almost tender in how ruthless she makes it. “Don’t make me come find you.”
My mouth wants to form gratitude, something dramatic and unhelpful. Instead I give her what this night accepts from me: a small, competent hum, as if I’m the kind of man who obeys schedules. My heart stutters at the idea of disobedience masquerading as compliance.
She turns first, already moving, already assuming I will follow because that assumption is the only kindness she can safely offer. I match her pace. I let my shoulders settle into the shape of a dutiful groom-in-waiting. We pass through a gap between trays of sweets and a cluster of cousins, and no one questions it, because no one wants to look too closely at the machinery behind their illusion.
Parvaneh doesn’t look back. She doesn’t have to. The corridor’s shadowed mouth waits nearby, and for three minutes, it is an exit that won’t be called one.
I give the laugh they expect (light, timed, a little self-mocking) like I’m tossing bread to koi. My chin dips in the obedient nod that says of course, Parvaneh knows best, and the circle relaxes, reassured by the familiar choreography of me being managed.
My left hand, ringless, scandalously bare, slides into my pocket as if I’m searching for something I’ve misplaced. For a second my fingers close around nothing and I still pretend it’s proof: invisible vows, a folded promise, a script I could pull out and read if only the light were kinder. I rub my thumb against my knuckle, where a band will soon sit like a seal, and the superstitious part of me counts the beats of my heart the way my mother counts prayer beads.
I follow Parvaneh two steps. Two. Enough to satisfy watching eyes.
Then the musicians swell, strings rising like an insistence, and I let the sound cover the moment I peel away, smooth as a dancer changing partners. It looks rehearsed. It feels like my first honest decision in hours.
The service corridor swallows me like a held breath. Cooler air, harsher light, the plain smell of detergent threaded with rosewater that’s seeped into everything this family touches. My shoes click wrong here, too honest on the stone, and I almost laugh at how loudly I exist when no one is watching. Waiters slip past in black vests, balancing silver trays as if they’re carrying other people’s sins. They keep their faces politely blank, their eyes trained on the middle distance, offering me the mercy of not recognizing me as anyone important. My pulse kicks hard at that small, illicit fact: for once, no elder’s gaze is weighing my posture, my smile, my future. I inhale like I’ve been underwater all evening.
I take the forbidden detour like it’s a dare I gave myself years ago and only now remembered to answer. Past stacked chairs draped in plastic, past a coil of microphone cable like a sleeping snake, I slip by a half-open door that leaks a slice of side-garden dark. I move fast enough to feel reckless, controlled enough to keep my suit crisp. Practicing freedom in a language this place pretends doesn’t exist.
At the corridor’s end I stop, not because I’m brave, but because there’s nowhere left to pretend I’m being directed. The music reaches me as a rumor now, thinned by stone and distance. My palms slick against my pockets, my practiced smile drops off my face like a mask with tired strings. I don’t run. I don’t go back yet. I just let the dark press in, and I memorize, for one stolen minute, the weight and outline of a decision that is finally mine.
From the corridor’s mouth I catch the pavilion at an angle: mirror tiles hoarding lanternlight like captive stars, multiplying it until the whole structure looks awake, watchful. Every guest who drifts past becomes a small, rehearsed gesture in the glass: a hand lifted to adjust a cuff, a chin tipped for a greeting, laughter that lands exactly where it’s supposed to. Even the musicians’ silhouettes seem arranged, bowed over their instruments as if obedience is a kind of music.
The air here tastes of orange blossom and hot tea, and underneath it the sharp chemical sweetness of fresh polish. I inhale as if I could choose a different throat to breathe through.
Somewhere behind me, a server murmurs “bebakhshid” to no one in particular and slips past with a silver tray. The clink of pistachios against porcelain, the hush of satin moving, the soft insistence of names being traded like currency: everything is softened by wealth, by etiquette, by the garden’s deliberate beauty. It’s all so gentle it feels violent.
I tell myself to step forward. My shoes stay planted on the stone, as if the corridor itself has decided this is as far as I’m allowed to go without becoming something irreversible.
Inside that pavilion is the sofreh. Cloth spread like an altar, mirror and candelabra waiting to reflect two faces into one story. My story. Their story. A narrative already calligraphed in thick black ink, no room for edits. I think of my mother’s hands smoothing my tie earlier, the way she didn’t look at my eyes until the knot was perfect. Sacrifice as tenderness. Tenderness as leverage.
Rumors slide through the terraces faster than water through the channels: Mehrzad hesitates. Mehrzad is ungrateful. Mehrzad thinks he’s above tradition. I can almost hear them tightening around my wrists, silk cords disguised as blessings.
The mirrored tiles catch me again, a fraction of me (jaw set, shoulders squared) like the pavilion has started practicing my future for me. I look at that partial reflection and wait for my real self to argue back.
In the glass, my own figure appears neatly framed, bordered by mirror tiles that cut me into respectable angles: midnight suit swallowing whatever softness I still have, cufflinks aligned like small, obedient coins, hair disciplined into the shape my father prefers. My posture is the worst part. An heirloom I never asked for, shoulders taught to fill doorways, chin set at the degree that reads as confidence instead of plea. Even at this distance I recognize the “ready” face that always arrives before I do, the smile calibrated to reassure elders and unsettle rivals, the eyes trained to look present while keeping the private parts of me behind a locked door.
It’s strange, watching myself from outside, like I’m one of the displays tonight: curated, lit, approved. The reflection doesn’t show the hours I didn’t sleep, the way my stomach keeps tightening as if it can predict the moment I’ll be told to speak. It doesn’t show the small, superstitious thought I keep pressing between my ribs. That if I step into the pavilion, something will close, quietly, forever.
I search the reflection the way a drowning man searches the surface for air: hungry for any evidence that I’m still here. A shadow under the eyes. A loosened thread. A tremor in the jaw that might betray the word no before it’s spoken. But the glass is loyal to everyone except me. It gives back a man finished to a shine, a face trained into calm, into gratitude, into the mild, reassuring expression that makes elders relax and rivals miscalculate. Even my fatigue looks like intention, like a tasteful depth. I’m staged as carefully as the jasmine garlands, positioned to be admired and used, another element in the evening’s design. And the worst part is how convincing it is. How easily I could believe this polished stranger is all I am.
The thought lands with a quiet sting, precise as a pin under a cuff: maybe the role isn’t something I perform at all. Maybe it’s a verdict, passed long ago in rooms where I wasn’t allowed to speak, and my only rebellion has been learning the lines perfectly, timing my smiles, tempering my hungers, so my mother could stand among them without flinching.
I let the smile die in the mirror and watch my mouth remember how to be only mine. The stillness feels indecent. For a heartbeat I can’t decide which sin would damn me more: tearing the script in front of everyone who paid for my obedience, or staying polished and obedient, an heir arranged like décor, speaking only when someone cues the music.
I drift toward the orange grove as if the garden has given me permission to be less visible there, where the lanterns thin out and the music arrives softened, as though the air itself is tired of carrying other people’s expectations. The trees stand close enough to make a corridor of leaves, and for the first time tonight the scent isn’t engineered. No layered rosewater, no polished stone, no expensive perfume fighting for dominance. Just citrus oil bruised into the air where someone brushed a branch, and damp earth holding the day’s heat like a secret.
I breathe in until it hurts, because pain is at least honest.
My feet find the rhythm of the gravel path. I start counting steps, not because I need to know the distance but because numbers are obedient. One, two, three: each one a small fence. I count the way I used to count coins at the bazaar, when my whole world was a handful of metal discs warming my palm and the decision of what they could become. Back then the math meant agency: if I had enough, I could choose; if I didn’t, I could walk away and no one would call it betrayal.
Here, the sums are different. They never tell me the total, only what I owe.
A curl of laughter rises from the terrace behind me and breaks apart on the leaves. I don’t turn. If I turn, I’ll catch someone’s eye and the mask will snap back into place like a hook. I keep walking and keep counting, pretending the path is a ledger and each step is something I can balance. Tradition against desire, my mother’s standing against my own breath, the family’s stability against the part of me that keeps whispering: you are allowed to want.
The whisper is the worst superstition I have. It makes me touch the inside of my wrist like a talisman, as if I can press myself back into my body.
An orange hangs low, its skin mottled and not quite ripe. I brush it with my knuckle and the branch shivers, scattering a faint rain of scent. For a second I imagine tearing it free, tasting the sourness, doing something small and unsanctioned. Then I hear, like a distant cue, my name being practiced somewhere in the crowd: and my steps, traitorous, begin to slow.
Shiraz comes back the way scent does, sudden, unfair, lodged in the throat. I’m there without permission: the market’s shade-striped awnings, the shout of vendors, the bruised sweetness of pomegranates splitting in my hands until my fingers are tacky and red. I remember how simple my body was then. How it leaned forward, hungry and unashamed, how I’d count coins with the careless confidence of a boy who believed numbers could protect him.
The bargain itself was a kind of flirtation. If the price didn’t bend, I could shrug and turn away. Walking away was not a catastrophe; it was a choice. No family name following me like a shadow. No chorus of elders translating my appetite into obligation. No mother’s face held up as collateral.
Here, even my hesitations have an audience, even in my own head. I feel the old thrill, saying no, meaning it, rise in me like heat. And then, just as quickly, it remembers what it costs now.
I try to borrow that boy’s nerve the way you borrow a jacket from a childhood closet. Half believing it will still fit, half terrified it won’t button over the man I’ve become. In my head I rehearse it: a clean, one-syllable refusal. No. Not tonight. Not like this. The words should land like coins on a table, final, undeniable, mine.
But every time I set them down, an invisible hand smooths the edges. No becomes not yet. Not like this becomes let’s discuss privately. My refusal grows manners. It grows consideration. It grows my mother’s name folded carefully inside it like a note I’m not allowed to read aloud.
I can’t find a version that doesn’t apologize for existing.
My mouth lifts before I decide it should, the old reflex like a servant rushing to open a door. I feel it settle onto my face, polished, harmless, and I hate how easily it fits. Somewhere inside me, a softer expression flickers and I recognize it the way you recognize a forgotten dialect: with affection, with grief. I can understand unguardedness. I just can’t answer in it anymore.
Even here, the garden can’t help confessing its design: lanterns placed like punctuation, hedges trimmed into polite obedience, every walkway angled to deliver me back to glass and vows. I slow at the bend where the orange grove thins and the estate’s light spills through, gold and accusing. For one breath I stand with leaf-shadow on my suit and spectacle waiting ahead, unsure which version of me will emerge first.
They find me the way perfume finds fabric: quiet at first, then impossible to pretend you don’t smell it.
A cousin steps into the path with the relaxed timing of someone who’s never had to ask permission for space. Two more slide in behind him, and a pair of my father’s “friends” (men who wear their money like they were born in it) complete the shape. Not a wall, not openly. A crescent. A polite enclosure that still changes the air.
“Mehrzad jān,” my cousin says, voice sugared, as if we’re children again and he’s about to slip me an extra piece of nougat. His hand lands on my shoulder, light, proprietary, then withdraws fast enough to pass for affection instead of a test. “We were just saying, you’ve disappeared. Groom can’t hide.”
I let my mouth choose the correct curve. The practiced smile. The one that makes everyone feel like they’re winning and costs me something I can’t invoice.
“I was getting some air,” I say, as if air is a luxury item I can justify.
One of the business friends tilts his head, appraising, the way he appraises quarterly reports. “Always thoughtful,” he murmurs, and the word sounds like a compliment until it doesn’t. Thoughtful. The euphemism they use when they mean slow, when they mean uncertain, when they mean: he can be pushed.
The other laughs softly, as if I’ve told a joke. “It’s good,” he says. “A man should be calm on a night like this. Shows confidence.”
Confidence. The script is always the same: praise first, then pressure dressed as concern.
They drift closer by inches, adjusting their cuffs, smoothing invisible lint, turning the grove into a smaller room with no doors. I can feel the party behind me like a stage light waiting to swing back. I keep my hands loose at my sides, because if I clasp them I’ll look like I’m praying, and if I put them in my pockets I’ll look like I’m hiding something.
My cousin’s eyes flick, quick, to the terrace, to whatever signal he expects. “You know everyone’s excited for your announcement,” he says, lightly, as if it’s already happened. “They’re saying tonight you finally, ” He lets the sentence hang, graciously, giving me the honor of completing it.
Finally. As if my life is a delayed train and they’ve been standing on the platform, tapping their watches, offended by my humanity.
I look past them at a low branch heavy with fruit, and for one irrational second I want to reach up and snap it off just to prove my hands still belong to me. Instead, I keep my smile in place and feel the crescent tighten, waiting for me to step into the center of it and call it my choice.
They talk the way men talk when they don’t want to be accused of pushing. Voices lowered, smiles softened, every sentence wrapped in silk so the blade won’t show until it’s already under the ribs. Someone says my suit is “perfectly tailored,” and I feel the word tailored snag, because that’s exactly the problem: everything about me lately has been cut to someone else’s measurements. Another leans in just enough that I can smell his cologne fighting the orange blossom, and he praises my calm like it’s a skill I chose, not a symptom.
“Ready?” my cousin asks, as if he means ready to dance, ready to toast, ready to be loved. His eyes don’t match the innocence of the word. They flick to my throat, my hands, the places hesitation betrays itself.
“Of course,” I say automatically, and hate the ease of it.
A business friend chuckles. “And you’ll do it properly tonight, yes? No… surprises.” Properly lands heavier than it should. Properly means in public. Properly means with witnesses. Properly means leaving no seam for me to rip open later and crawl out through.
They keep it light, family, tradition, everyone’s waiting, but the waiting is the point. The waiting is the rope they’ve already looped, testing how nicely my neck fits.
Someone laughs, soft, controlled, the kind of laugh that pretends it’s on your side, and says it like a family proverb: “Mehrzad’s famous thoughtfulness.” The word drifts between us, polite as a napkin, and still it stains. A chorus of agreement follows, low and warm, the way men hum around a deal they’ve already closed. I feel the sound settle on my shoulders like a hand reminding me where to stand.
I keep my face arranged. I even let my eyes narrow in the correct way, as if I’m amused at myself. Inside, something flinches. Thoughtful is what they call me when they mean manageable. When they mean: he will swallow it if we praise his throat.
They don’t look cruel. That’s what makes it worse.
As I answer, my attention splinters into its old, ugly talent: reading rooms like balance sheets. A glance traded over my shoulder toward the terrace. A sip that pauses midair, as if someone forgot the role they were playing. The tiniest tilt of a head, translation offered without words, turning my silence into a verdict: weak, spoiled, unreliable.
I try to turn us toward weather, music, the ridiculous abundance of pistachios. Anything that can be smiled at without costing blood. But they keep nudging the talk back, gentle as hands on a steering wheel I’m not holding: marriage as “stability,” legacy as “duty,” the family’s future as if it’s a child I’ve already agreed to name. When someone says commit, it lands like an instruction.
I let myself become the version of me they’ve invested in: the son who knows where to stand, the fiancé who knows when to smile, the future who never startles anyone. My laugh arrives on time, low, easy, practiced, like a valet bringing the right car around without being asked twice. I meet each gaze long enough to make it feel personal, then move on before it can turn into a question.
I touch my cousin’s elbow in a way that reads as intimacy, not steering. It’s a small thing, a gesture that says we’re aligned, that the family is a single organism and I’m a willing limb. His shoulders loosen, pleased with my compliance; he doesn’t notice the cost because my face doesn’t invoice him for it.
There’s an art to being handled without looking handled. I’ve learned it the way you learn to breathe through a needle: keep the body still so the room believes the pain is optional. I angle my posture toward the terrace, toward the lights, toward the people whose attention can be turned like a dial. I say a name, ask after a mother’s health, compliment a watch I don’t care about. Each sentence is a coin tossed into the air to distract them from the lock clicking shut behind my ribs.
When one of the men says something about “timing” and “readiness,” I answer with a nod that suggests agreement while leaving my insides unsaid. I hear my own voice (steady, charming, mildly self-deprecating) and for a moment it almost convinces me too. It’s intoxicating, the way ease can mimic freedom.
But every time I place my hand on someone’s shoulder, I feel the echo of another hand on mine: an invisible correction, a pressure that says, not like that, not now, remember who you are tonight. I lead the conversation forward, and the conversation leads me. Somewhere beyond the citrus and lanterns, the music swells, and I keep time with it like a man dancing on the edge of a vow he hasn’t chosen.
My cousin’s glass lifts first, crystal catching lantern light, turning it into a small, obedient star, and the room follows the motion as if pulled by string. He doesn’t need to clear his throat. Silence arrives for him the way doors open for us here: prearranged.
“To Mehrzad,” he says, and my name becomes a hinge. “To the next chapter. This expansion, this partnership, this…” A pause, calibrated for effect, for the elders’ approving smiles, for the cameras that aren’t supposed to be here. “This beautiful engagement. Two families building something lasting.”
Lasting. The word is a knot he tightens with practiced fingers, looping business around romance until you can’t tell where one ends without cutting. I feel the crowd tilt toward me in unison: the soft, synchronized lean of people who’ve already decided what I’m about to say. Even the musicians seem to hold their breath between notes.
I can read the motives the way I read balance sheets: the investors’ gleam, the aunties’ satisfaction, the men measuring my spine for pliability. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a superstitious part of me counts the beats, waiting for an omen, anything, to interrupt the script.
Every face is smiling. Every smile is a hand.
I open my mouth when I’m supposed to and still my tongue hesitates, as if it’s looking for permission. The first syllable catches. I feel it, a tiny snag, and I hate that I can feel it in front of them.
Certain. Right. Words I’ve used in boardrooms, in interviews, in conversations where conviction is just another product you package and sell. Tonight they come up heavy, wrong-shaped, like coins from a country I’ve never lived in. I try to set them on my teeth and they slip, metallic, unfamiliar.
I can hear my own breath. I can taste the sweetness of pistachio and rosewater like a bribe.
My practiced smile holds. My voice (almost) doesn’t.
The pause is nothing, one stolen breath, one heartbeat out of formation, but it lands loud. I feel it ripple through the terrace like a dropped glass no one hears, only senses. A smile tightens at the edges, turning thin and evaluative; another gaze skitters away, too fast, too guilty. In that sliver, the accounting starts: indecisive, spoiled, ungrateful. Unready to be inevitable.
I push the sentence through anyway, lacquered, complete. Each word placed like a tile over a leak. The room accepts it with a hungry ease, and my own voice turns foreign in my ears, too smooth to be mine. My skin prickles under the applause that hasn’t started yet. The mask isn’t hiding me. It’s selling them the fracture, bright and legible.
From the edge of the reflecting pool, my gaze snags on my mother the way a sleeve catches on a nail you didn’t see, small, sudden, enough to make you stop mid-step.
She’s near the elders, not quite inside their circle and not quite outside it either, occupying that precise, negotiated margin women like her are allowed to stand in: close enough to be displayed, far enough to be blamed. Her chin is lifted the way she lifts it when she’s tired but refuses to look tired, shoulders squared as if posture alone can keep the night from collapsing into gossip. The lantern light turns the fine threads in her shawl into gold, and it makes her look, for a cruel second, like a painting of herself, beautiful, fixed, owned.
I remember her hands when I was a child: the smell of rosewater after she’d rinsed pistachio syrup off her fingers, the brisk, gentle way she’d straighten my collar before guests arrived. She used to say our family was a garden and everyone had their place. I didn’t understand then that gardens are also cages, trimmed and watered and watched, that “place” is another word for control when someone else points to it.
Across the water, the elders’ faces are calm in the way predators are calm. Someone says something, I can’t hear it over the music, and my mother’s smile answers on instinct, practiced, the same kind of smile I wear like armor. A man’s hand touches her elbow in a gesture that’s meant to be respectful, and I feel a hot, irrational urge to swat it away, to rewrite the rules with my own hands. She doesn’t flinch. She never flinches. She absorbs.
The pool between us is a mirror, and in it the candles tremble, doubling, making two worlds out of one: the world where she is safe because I comply, and the world where I am alive because I don’t.
I stand there with my mouth still tasting rosewater and bribe-sweetness, and I understand with a clarity that makes my ribs ache: if I break the script, the first crack won’t show on me. It will show on her.
I read the room the way I read a balance sheet, not for numbers but for pressure points. Who shifts their weight toward my mother like they’re offering support, and who angles their body just enough to block her from the inner circle. Who remembers to kiss her cheek and who pretends they didn’t see her until a second too late. Courtesy here is never free; it’s extended like credit, revocable at the first sign you’ve become a bad investment.
Silence does the threatening when voices don’t have to. An elder pauses mid-sentence, lets a beat hang, and watches whether she fills it. Whether she’ll rush to reassure, to over-explain, to perform gratitude for being tolerated. A woman laughs a little too brightly at something that wasn’t a joke, the sound sharp as cut glass, and my mother’s smile steadies itself with that old, disciplined grace that used to calm me as a child.
Her pride is being appraised, quietly, by people who call it tradition so they don’t have to call it power. And I can see the terms, the hidden interest: comply, and she remains “dignified.” Falter, and she becomes “difficult.”
The trap sharpens until it has edges I can name. If I refuse, if I so much as soften a yes into a maybe, no one will call it my right to choose. They’ll translate it, efficiently, into her deficiency. They’ll say she failed to teach me gratitude, failed to teach me duty, failed to keep her son in line. The story will travel faster than the music: from elder to aunt, from patron to partner, dressed up as concern. And then the punishment will come the way it always comes here. Without shouting, without spectacle. A season of weddings where her name is forgotten. Charity committees that “already filled the seat.” Cheek-kisses that miss by an inch. Doors that close with a courteous softness that still leaves your fingers pinched in the hinge.
Resentment still flares at the thought of my name pressed like a wax seal onto their alliance, my mouth made into proof. For a breath I want to tear the whole thing open, let everyone see the ugliness under the silk. Then my eyes find her hand: fingers tightening around her clutch, knuckles whitening as if she’s already bracing for the room’s verdict. The anger collapses into guilt, heavy as wet fabric, and I swallow it before it can show.
I search the crowd for a tether. Someone who can take one look at my face and understand the cost of it. But even my allies are arranged tonight, spaced and angled like ornaments meant to flatter the estate. Nahid’s cool gaze slides away on purpose; Parvaneh is swallowed by logistics; Farimah is all motion and duty. I catch no one’s eyes. The choreography keeps widening, and it eats the words I haven’t said.
Behind the mirrored pavilion, everything beautiful becomes utilitarian. The service corridor is a thin artery the estate pretends doesn’t exist. Whitewashed walls scuffed by carts, a fluorescent tube buzzing faintly, the scent of rosewater stripped of romance and turned medicinal in the stale air. Somewhere nearby a tray clinks, a whisper of apologies in a worker’s voice, and then the corridor swallows it, the way this family swallows every inconvenient sound.
I stop where the cameras and cousins can’t find me, where the only mirror is the silver edge of a serving platter leaning against the wall. My reflection is warped there like the version of me they want has already been pressed into shape. The music from the courtyard filters through stone, the rhythm steady as a heart I don’t trust. Each beat says proceed, proceed, proceed, as if sound itself can herd me.
A bead of sweat slides down my spine. My suit still sits perfectly on my shoulders; perfection is the one thing I’ve never been allowed to do imperfectly. I loosen my tie a fraction anyway, just to feel like I can change something, anything, without permission.
Footsteps pass, two staff members carrying something heavy, and neither of them looks at me. Their indifference should feel like mercy. Instead it feels like proof that I’m only visible when I’m performing. The moment I step out of the light, I become furniture. An heir tucked into storage until needed.
My phone is useless; even its dark screen feels like an accusation. I press my palm against the cool wall and try to find a thought that isn’t borrowed. I try to summon the shape of my own desire, clean and undeniable, and all I can see is my mother’s lifted chin, the elders’ calm faces, the bride’s poised smile waiting like a signature line.
The corridor narrows ahead, and with it my breath, until the only thing I can hear clearly is that second pulse in the stone. Celebration as countdown.
I try to talk myself down the way I talk a board down from panic: list the stakeholders, name the risks, assign each fear a column. My mother’s years of being the agreeable widow, the polite ornament with sharp elbows hidden under lace. The shareholders who want continuity like a prayer, predictable, profitable, bloodline-stable. The elders whose approval is less blessing than surveillance. The bride’s family, their generosity that always arrives with an invoice tucked beneath it. And the expansion deal. Each point clicks into place with satisfying logic. If I comply, the company doesn’t wobble. If I comply, the alliance holds. If I comply, my mother keeps her seat at tables that pretend they’re not made of knives.
But the argument never reaches my chest. It stays in my head, clean, enumerated, bloodless. I can make the numbers balance and still feel like I’m forging my own signature. The worst part is how easily I can picture myself saying yes, how rehearsed my mouth already is. As if the vow is just another closing statement, and I’m only here to initial.
I reach, instinctively, for something that isn’t a transaction. For Kian’s presence. The way he looks at people like they’re allowed to be messy, the way his honesty arrives without a ribbon tied around it. It’s ridiculous how quickly my body remembers that brief ease of being spoken to without ceremony, without a title stitched into every syllable. And then the superstition I pretend I don’t have climbs up through my ribs like cold water.
This garden is too perfect to be kind. Every walkway is an argument disguised as beauty, every hedge trimmed into obedience. The lanterns don’t guide; they herd. Even the air feels arranged. Orange blossom and rosewater laid over something metallic. I can’t see the exits from here, only entrances, as if leaving was never part of the design.
Autonomy and loyalty keep swapping masks in my mind, trading places so smoothly I start to distrust my own impulse. One voice says be a son, be a shield; another says breathe, run, live. I can’t tell which one I was born with and which one was coached into me at banquets and boardrooms. Even my smile feels overworked, quivering at the edges.
The confusion tightens until it stops feeling like confusion at all and becomes a single, polished blade of clarity: I don’t know how to want anything without first converting it into obligation. If I stand under that mirror and speak the vow they’ve written into my bones, it won’t be mine. It will be my mouth lending warmth to someone else’s design.
Parvaneh cuts across the service corridor with a clipboard tucked to her chest, scanning faces and bottlenecks the way other people scan prayer beads; when her gaze lands on me, it isn’t reverence: it’s triage.
The corridor smells of steam and citrus cleaner, the kind that promises purity while hiding panic. A waiter slips by with a tray of pistachio sweets, a florist kneels to rescue fallen jasmine from someone’s heel, and somewhere beyond the thin wall the musicians lean into a melody that insists everything is inevitable. I’m supposed to be inevitable too.
Parvaneh’s shoes don’t squeak; she has learned how not to announce herself in other people’s lives. She checks the watch on her wrist and then, like it’s a decision she’s allowed to make, she checks my face.
“You look like you’ve been standing up inside your own body for days,” she says under her breath, efficient even in compassion. Her pen taps the clipboard once, twice. “Water?”
I should say no. No, because refusing help is a kind of power in my family; no, because accepting anything makes me feel visible in a way I don’t want. My throat answers for me with a dry swallow.
She pulls a sealed bottle from nowhere, like she’s been carrying it just for the version of me who might crack, and presses it into my palm as if this is part of the ceremony too. My fingers close around it. Cold. Real.
“They’re treating your life like a schedule,” she says, eyes flicking toward the end of the corridor where security stands too straight, too new. “And the schedule is real. It will keep moving whether you’re ready or not.”
I twist the cap. The plastic snaps louder than it should.
Parvaneh lowers her voice further, not gossiping. Protecting. “You asked for a private moment earlier. Someone said no on your behalf.” Her mouth tightens, anger contained like a pinned veil. “That wasn’t my instruction.”
My pulse stutters. “Whose was it?”
She doesn’t give me the comfort of a name. She gives me something rarer. “I can’t stop the machine,” she says. “But I can give you one minute behind the curtain. Maybe two, if the singers stretch the chorus.” A beat. “You can choose your timing, agha-ye Mehrzad. Not theirs.”
She steps into my path like she’s stopping a spill before it reaches silk rugs. “Hassan. Ice from the north kitchen,” she murmurs to a runner without looking away from me, as if she’s naming a storm so it will pass somewhere else. The boy pivots on a heel and vanishes. A problem redirected. A corridor re-routed.
Parvaneh shifts her clipboard up, not as a shield for herself. For me. She angles her shoulder just enough that the nearest lens loses its clean line. The cousin with the permanent smirk at the end of the hall tries to crane around her; she blocks him with the casual cruelty of competence. She doesn’t scold. She simply exists in the exact place I need someone to exist.
For a second the air changes. The music beyond the wall muffles into heartbeat. The citrus cleaner becomes only citrus, not panic.
“You’re not on display in here,” she says, barely moving her lips. Then, softer, like she hates that she has to teach me this at all: “Breathe. Now.”
“They’re treating your life like a schedule,” she says under the noise, and it isn’t accusation so much as diagnosis: like she’s pointing at a fracture before it becomes a break. Her voice stays clipped, practiced, the same voice that tells a bride where to stand and a drunk uncle where not to. But her eyes are rimmed with a fatigue that refuses to lie. She looks at me the way no one in my family does: not as a symbol, not as a bargaining chip, not as a groom-shaped signature on a contract. Just a man with a pulse that can be cornered.
I feel my chest tighten, ridiculous and young. A schedule. As if I’m an arrival time, a photo slot, a vow cue. As if my “yes” is a line item they can check off before dessert.
She doesn’t soften it for me. “Even if you freeze,” she says, “it moves.” Her gaze tilts past my shoulder, toward the hidden mouth of the pavilion. “The procession cue. The elder nod. The musicians swelling right on time.” Each signal is already loaded, rehearsed, waiting to roll over my hesitation like a cart over gravel, quietly, efficiently, until my body becomes agreement.
Then she dips her head closer, voice almost lost under the clatter of trays, and I feel it: how expensive this kindness is for her tonight. “You don’t have to be ready on their timeline,” she says, like she’s handing me a contraband blade. “Just decide when your next step is actually yours.” The words land in my ribs. Not freedom: something smaller, sharper: a choice of moment.
Parvaneh watches me the way she watches a tray of crystal glasses on an uneven path. Anticipating the tilt before it happens. Out there, under lanterns and inherited expectations, I’ve perfected the smile that arrives a second too early, as if I’m paying in advance for the inconvenience of my own existence. But tonight the smile keeps slipping. It falters at the seam every time another hand clasps mine, every time another congratulation lands like a stamp on paper that isn’t mine to sign.
“May it be blessed,” someone says, and my mouth obeys before my mind catches up.
Parvaneh clocks the delay. The micro-pause. The fraction of a heartbeat where my eyes don’t know where to rest. She doesn’t touch my arm: she knows better than that in this world, where touch becomes a story by morning. Instead, she steps in with the brisk authority of someone who is allowed to interrupt gods and uncles alike.
“Excuse me,” she says to nobody important and everybody watching, lifting her clipboard with a crisp angle that makes it look like I’m being requisitioned, not rescued. Her pen scratches once, performative. Logistics. Timings. A problem to be solved, not a man to be comforted.
I try to protest out of habit: out of training. “It’s fine.”
Her eyes flick up, quick as a needle. Not unkind. Final. “No. Two minutes.”
And then she moves, and the current moves with her. She cuts through the reception edge where guests cluster in polite predation, and she positions her body just so: between me and the nearest elder, between me and the cousin who’s been watching for a crack. The clipboard rises again, a simple rectangle of power, blocking sightlines the way a curtain blocks a stagehand. She is not sentimental about it. She is surgical.
“Water,” she murmurs, not asking this time.
The service corridor opens like a mouth behind the pavilion. As soon as we cross the threshold, the music becomes a wall instead of a command. Parvaneh doesn’t look back to see who notices. She already knows. She keeps walking anyway, brisk enough that anyone observing has to assume I’m being pulled into something unavoidable, something necessary.
For the first time all night, my smile is allowed to die without consequence.
At the pavilion’s edge Parvaneh reaches for the curtain like it’s another timeline she can adjust. She tugs it to a half-close, careful, not dramatic, just enough that the mirrored tiles stop throwing my face back into the room. The gap she leaves is deliberate: a slit of visibility that reads as “still present,” not “fleeing.” A compromise even my family’s paranoia can accept.
“Hassan,” she calls again, voice clipped, and the runner appears like a summoned apology. “Go ask if the rosewater is chilled. And tell them we need extra napkins. Now.” Nothing here needs chilling. Nothing here needs napkins. But a body in motion is a body not watching me.
She glances at a server hovering with a tray of tea glasses, then steps in, the way a competent woman steps into chaos and pretends it’s her job. “Switch with me,” she murmurs, hands already taking the tray, her posture turning into staff. The server blinks, relieved to be unimportant somewhere else.
From the outside, it looks like I’m being managed. From the inside, I can finally stop performing.
In the thin pocket of quiet behind the mirrored wall, Parvaneh says nothing at first. She plants herself at the curtain’s seam like a hinge: close enough that anyone peering in would meet her clipboard before they met my face. The garden’s orchestration dulls to a muffled tide: applause, a laugh, the swell of strings meant to carry me forward like a groom-shaped offering. Here, it can’t reach me cleanly.
She sets a glass into my hand. Cool water. No ceremony. Her fingers don’t brush mine; even kindness has boundaries tonight. I swallow and feel how hard my throat has been working to keep me presentable.
Her gaze flicks over me, jaw, shoulders, the betraying tremor at my wrist, as if she’s taking inventory of what the machine has taken. Then, finally, a breath, almost a permission. “Let it catch up,” she murmurs. “You, not them.”
She doesn’t offer rescue or a plan. She offers a pause with terms, like any other part of her schedule: one minute. No announcements. No elders. No apologizing your way back into their good graces. Just standing here, water cooling my palm, listening to my own pulse admit what I’ve been hauling since morning: how my smile has been a bandage, and it’s slipping.
Footsteps scuff closer. Parvaneh’s head tilts, listening, and then she slips through the half-drawn curtain like a thought made practical. Her voice stays low, polite, impossible to argue with. A gentle lie about timing. A small reroute. She buys me seconds the way she fixes flowers: without ceremony, with intention: leaving the feeling, finally, to me.
Parvaneh reappears as if she’s been born from the seam of the curtain: no flourish, no apology, just the efficient return of someone who has decided I am, for exactly one minute, part of her job. The glass in her hand is sweating hard enough to darken her fingers; condensation beads and slides, catching the light from the mirrored tiles like little betrayals. She holds it out the way you hand a document across a desk: practical, urgent, unquestionable.
My palm closes around it and the cold shocks me into my body. I realize, with a flash of humiliation, that I’ve been living from the neck up all evening, smiling, nodding, arranging my face into something that looks like gratitude. Water drips between my fingers, and for once it doesn’t matter if it stains my cuff.
Parvaneh doesn’t step fully into the pocket of quiet. She stays angled, shoulder toward the pavilion entrance, clipboard tucked like a shield, her stance making a clean line between me and any curious gaze that might cut through the gap. The way she positions herself is almost intimate, the way you block wind for someone trying to light a match. Not touch, not softness. Just the simple, fierce act of refusing to let the world see me break.
Her eyes take me in without judgment. Not my suit, not the family crest at my throat: me. The tightness around my mouth. The twitch at my jaw that I’ve been training out since childhood. The way my ringed hand trembles around a glass of water like it’s contraband.
Outside, the music swells and dips, and the laughter lands in bright bursts. A name is called; my name, maybe, or someone else’s, and my spine tries to straighten on reflex.
Parvaneh’s gaze sharpens, a warning. She doesn’t say my name. She doesn’t need to. Her presence is the only permission I’ve been given all night that isn’t a trap.
Then her voice finds the smallest space between notes and uses it. “Don’t wait for permission,” she says under her breath, eyes flicking once toward the corridor where footsteps had been. “In this family it’s always ‘not now’. Until it’s never.”
“Don’t wait for permission,” she murmurs, and it isn’t advice so much as a diagnosis. Her eyes cut toward the service corridor, toward the place where footsteps keep passing like tides. People on errands that are never errands, mouths that deliver messages with smiles attached. She’s listening even as she speaks, tuned to the frequency of trouble.
“In this family,” she goes on, voice low enough that the mirrored tiles can’t gossip, “it’s always ‘not now.’” A beat. Her jaw tightens, like she hates the sentence for being true. “Until it’s never.”
The words land and I feel, absurdly, the shape of every postponed decision I’ve ever made. Not now: when you’re older. Not now: after the deal closes. Not now: after the guests leave. Not now: after you’ve earned the right to want something. Each delay dressed up as patience, each patience quietly becoming surrender.
Parvaneh shifts half a step, blocking the slit of curtain with her shoulder as if my hesitation might leak out and be seen. “Choose your timing,” she adds, softer, almost kinder. “But choose it. Or they’ll choose for you and call it fate.”
I drink too fast, as if speed could make it less real. The water catches, sharp, humiliating, halfway down, and I cough once into my fist, careful, contained, the way I was taught to fail: quietly. My eyes sting, not from the cough but from the sudden, animal need to be looked after. I swallow again, slower, and feel my face reach for its mask on instinct, the familiar lift at the corners of my mouth, the polite gratitude I can perform even while drowning.
Parvaneh’s gaze pins it before it settles. Not unkind. Just exact. She doesn’t move to soothe, doesn’t offer a joke to make it smaller. Her silence is an interruption. A refusal to let me turn this moment into another well-managed lie.
“But don’t do it by detonating,” she says, and the steadiness of her voice is its own kind of mercy. “They love an outburst. It makes you easy.” Her eyes don’t leave mine. “They’ll file it under temperament, under immaturity: like a defect you were born with. And then every door becomes a lock, every favor becomes a leash, and they’ll call it ‘for your own good.’”
The warning hits with the dull authority of experience. Like she’s watched men in suits implode on cue and called it tragedy only after the cameras turned away. Parvaneh’s fingers tap the sweating glass once, twice, a metronome against my pulse, reminding my body it exists. Then she releases it. No rescue, no panic. Just the bruise of her honesty left warming my palm.
Parvaneh steps closer, not into me, not in a way anyone could accuse her of, just close enough that her words can live inside the music without being caught. The band hits a sweet, aching phrase; someone laughs too loudly; the garden answers with the steady trickle of water. In that layered noise, she makes a small pocket where truth can exist without spectacle.
My fingers tighten around the glass until the rim bites. Cold seeps into my skin, an anchor, a receipt that I am still here and not only a suit walking toward an arrangement. The condensation has turned my palm slick. I should wipe it on my trousers. I don’t. Let it mark me.
Parvaneh studies my face the way she studies a schedule. Eyes moving, measuring, noting what’s late and what’s about to collide. Not “are you okay.” Not “how do you feel.” More like: what breaks first, and how much time do we have before it becomes public.
“Don’t insult yourself,” she says, so low it could be mistaken for a breath. “You’re not confused. You’re cornered.”
The sentence lands with a strange relief. Confused is what they call you when they want you to doubt your own senses. Confused is forgivable, childish. Cornered is structural. Cornered means there are hands on the walls even if you can’t see them.
I swallow, and my throat feels too narrow for all the polite words I’m supposed to offer. My practiced smile twitches at the edges, tries to arrive on time like it always has.
Parvaneh’s expression doesn’t change, but her eyes sharpen, a quiet command: don’t perform for me.
My gaze slips past her shoulder through the curtain’s seam. The mirrored pavilion entrance flashes and blinds, movement, dark suits, familiar profiles drifting closer in intervals like they’ve rehearsed it. Elders and uncles and the men who speak in soft certainty, who treat timing like property.
I turn back to Parvaneh, and for a second the glass is all I can hold onto. If I let go of it, I’m afraid I’ll reach for something worse: a scene, an apology, a vow I don’t mean.
Her gaze slides past my shoulder, not distracted. Tracking. The pavilion entrance is a mouth of light, swallowing and spitting out dark suits in tidy rotations. Men who don’t rush because they don’t need to; elders whose patience is just another kind of threat. They drift closer the way tidewater claims a shoreline: rehearsed, inevitable, polite.
Parvaneh watches them the way she watches a schedule when something is about to go wrong.
“You read motives before they finish speaking,” she says, and it feels less like praise than a lever pressed under my ribs. “You always have. You see the bargain hidden in a compliment, the condition stitched into a blessing.”
The glass sweats in my hand. My fingers keep tightening anyway, as if I can hold the moment still by force.
“That’s why they keep you in the light,” she goes on, voice steady, almost bored, like she’s naming the weather. “Smiling. Shaking hands. Being the pretty part of the machine.” Her eyes cut back to mine, sharp and unflinching. “Because if anyone notices you’re capable of turning the room, they’ll realize you could also turn it against them.”
I start to answer the way I always do. Chin dipped, voice lowered into gratitude, the safe humility that makes powerful people feel benevolent. A sentence I’ve used since boyhood rises obediently to my tongue.
Parvaneh stops it with the smallest shake of her head. Not scolding. Not indulgent. Exact.
“No,” she says, and the word is quiet but immovable. “Don’t perform for me.”
Something in her efficiency loosens, like a knot giving way. Her eyes soften without turning sentimental, and that restraint makes it hit harder.
“Your hesitation isn’t weakness,” she continues, as if she’s correcting a misfiled record. “It’s evidence.” She taps the air once, near my sternum, a gesture that doesn’t touch and still feels intimate. “It means there’s still a part of you refusing to become their symbol.”
She reaches for my sleeve, not like a comfort but like a stagehand correcting a detail before the spotlight. Her thumb smooths the cuff, straightens the watch, turns me a fraction so my posture reads calm. “You don’t have to fight them in the middle of the sofreh,” she murmurs, eyes on the fabric. “Choose your timing. Let them mistake obedience for surrender while you decide what you’ll actually do.”
Parvaneh’s practicality snaps back into place like a clip on a headset. She tilts her head toward the pavilion’s edge, where the curtain sags and breaks the room’s sightlines. “If you need one minute,” she murmurs, “take it now: before they start moving you like an object.” Her fingers unclasp from the glass, leaving it in my hand, and in the space she steps aside, the breath I take belongs entirely to me.
Farimah slips in from the creative side of the garden the way smoke finds a crack. Close enough to the pavilion to be useful, far enough to avoid being claimed by it. She moves with that particular backstage efficiency that never looks rushed because it doesn’t have time for panic. Her sleeves are shoved to her elbows; dried ink sits in the creases of her fingers like proof of a life spent making beauty on demand. Even her hairpin looks temporary, like everything tonight is meant to hold only until the photograph is taken.
For a heartbeat I’m absurdly relieved. Not because she’s gentle but because she’s real. She belongs to the part of the night that admits it’s constructed.
Her gaze cuts over me once: the too-straight shoulders, the obedient cuff, the glass sweating in my grip. She doesn’t ask if I’m all right. The question would be decorative, and Farimah doesn’t waste breath on decoration. She decides, immediately, what kind of disaster I am and whether it can be managed quietly.
Behind her, a stagehand carries a coil of ribbon like a leash. Somewhere, someone laughs at exactly the right volume. The music swells and softens in practiced waves, giving the illusion of feeling without the risk of it.
Farimah steps into the thin shadow near the curtain seam, close enough that her voice won’t travel, close enough that if anyone glances this way it will read as logistics, not intimacy. She smells faintly of rosewater and something metallic. Her eyes flick to the pavilion entrance, then back to me, as if tallying exits.
“You’re about to be handed a script,” she says, not unkindly, not kindly either. Accurate. “And they’ll act surprised when you read it.”
My mouth opens on an automatic response, a gracious nothing, and she lifts a hand, ink-stained, as if stopping a light from flaring too bright.
“Don’t,” she murmurs. “Save your politeness for someone who isn’t using it against you.”
She leans in just slightly, and the intimacy of it is almost clinical. Her tone stays practical, but her eyes sharpen with something like anger on my behalf.
“Listen,” she says, low and clean, the way she speaks to stagehands before a cue goes wrong. “Pick one sentence you will not violate tonight. One. Something simple. Something you can hold in your mouth even if they try to put words there for you.”
“Pick one sentence,” Farimah repeats, and there’s a steadiness to it that makes my throat ache: like she’s offering me a rail in a room that keeps tilting. “Not a speech. Not a performance. One sentence you won’t let them bend.”
The garden air is sweet, almost nauseatingly so, and the pavilion light keeps pulsing as bodies pass through it. I can feel the gravity of my name out there, the way it draws people closer under the excuse of blessing me. My grip tightens around the glass again. Condensation slicks my palm; my pulse makes it tremble.
“One sentence,” she says, softer, as if the softness is strategic. “Something true enough that you can say it even when you’re afraid. Something small enough to survive the night.”
My mind tries to offer polite phrases. Dutiful phrases. The kind that sound harmless until they become handcuffs. My tongue knows the shape of them better than it knows confession.
Farimah’s ink-stained fingers lift, hovering near my mouth as if she could physically keep words from spilling. “Hold it there,” she tells me. “Let it bruise if it has to. But don’t swallow it.”
My eyes betray me, skittering (elders like seated judges, the aisle like a throat, the expectation like a hand at the back of my neck) and Farimah catches the movement before it becomes a plea. She doesn’t soften. She doesn’t scold. She simply removes the fog.
“If you’re going to lie,” she says, voice low enough to pass for instruction, “at least be precise about it.”
The words don’t feel moral. They feel mechanical, like tightening a bolt before something collapses.
“Know who you’re lying to: everyone,” she continues, gaze steady on mine, “or only yourself.”
It lands in me with the clean weight of a tool: not comfort, not absolution. A handle. Something to grip when the room tries to make my mouth its property.
She turns counsel into choreography, because bodies obey before hearts do. “If you need air,” she says, gaze already measuring corners, “take it through the service corridor. Don’t ask. Don’t bargain. Walk like you’re supposed to be there: like you’re late to fix something.” Her fingers flick once, a cue. “If someone stops you, you’ll learn what they’ve built around you without saying a word.”
Her eyes keep moving, counting: the nearest attendant’s idle hands, the angle of a guard’s shoulder, the curtain’s lazy sway that hides a body for half a second and then betrays it. “If they block you,” she says again, quieter, like a diagnosis, “that tells you exactly what this is.” Then she’s gone leaving me with one sentence to defend, and one corridor that will either open or confess.
Parvaneh arrives the way failures arrive, silent, inevitable, already reaching for the loose thread before anyone else notices it’s there. One moment the air is all perfume and obligation; the next her shoulder is at my elbow, her presence a small wall built out of competence.
A glass appears in her hand, beaded with sweat. She presses it into my palm with the brisk tenderness of someone who has no time to ask permission for mercy. The cold bites my skin hard enough to pull me back into my body. Water sloshes once, a quiet warning.
She angles herself between me and the pavilion’s open mouth, not in a dramatic way. Just enough to break the clean line of sight from the first row of elders, enough that if anyone looks over they’ll see a coordinator doing her job, not a man being held together.
Her face stays turned toward the curtain seam like she’s watching for a cue, but I feel her attention anyway. It’s in the way she times her breath to the music, in the way her fingers linger half a second too long against my knuckles as if to remind them they can unclench.
“Drink,” she murmurs, and it isn’t an order so much as an anchor.
I lift the glass because it’s easier than lifting my own voice. The water tastes like nothing, which is its own kind of relief: something tonight that doesn’t have an agenda.
Parvaneh doesn’t look at me when she speaks again. If she did, it might become intimacy, and intimacy is exactly what this place punishes.
“They can line up the speeches,” she says softly, eyes on the movement of attendants, on the precise choreography of family members drifting into place. “They can hand you paper. They can put a microphone in your hand.” Her jaw tightens once, the smallest sign of irritation breaking through her professionalism. “But they can’t take the order of your words.”
A beat of music swells, covering us.
“You still own the timing,” she continues, quieter. “No one can steal that from you unless you give it away.”
My pulse bumps against the glass. Outside our thin shield, laughter rises and falls on schedule. Inside it, her sentence sits between my ribs like a key I didn’t know I was allowed to hold.
Farimah slips into the sliver of space Parvaneh has carved, as if she’s been waiting for the exact second mercy becomes possible. Her gaze sweeps once, attendants tightened in a polite ring, the curtain gap that looks generous until you notice how many shoulders can close it, and then lands on me with the blunt steadiness of someone who refuses to let me drift.
“Timing,” she says, and the word is sharp enough to slice through the violins, “is only useful if you don’t spend it obeying.”
Parvaneh’s presence is all quiet logistics, an extra minute stolen from the schedule. Farimah’s is the refusal to let that minute become another kind of performance. She steps closer, close enough that her ink-smudged fingertips brush my wrist when I flinch, like a correction, like a tether.
“Decide now,” she continues, and there’s no softness to hide behind. “Pick the sentence that will never leave your mouth. The one you won’t say even if they hand you a microphone and call it a blessing.”
My throat tightens around all the practiced lines I could offer. She watches my swallow like it’s evidence.
“Not what you’ll announce,” she adds. “What you’ll refuse.”
They don’t argue. They don’t even agree in the way people agree when they want to comfort you. They stand at different angles to me, Parvaneh with her body doing the work of mercy, Farimah with her mouth doing the work of truth, and I’m suddenly the point their lines meet.
Parvaneh buys me something small and priceless: a minute no one else notices go missing. A pause in the machinery. The permission to breathe without asking.
Farimah draws the border around that breath. Don’t spend it begging, her eyes say. Don’t waste it on a prettier lie.
Their counsel doesn’t open a secret passage. It shuts the fantasy of one. There is only the bright, humiliating choice: speak when summoned, or refuse where everyone can see.
Parvaneh recalibrates the night the way a seamstress hides a stitch. A small rotation of her wrist sends a waiter away before he can hover; a half-step shifts her body, and suddenly there’s a narrow pocket where the music can’t quite reach. Then she stops arranging. She lets the silence sit heavy between my lungs and the lights, her stillness a promise: she won’t carry my lines for me.
Farimah’s face gives me one brief mercy then she pulls it back, mouth tightening into the shape of decision. She retreats into motion, into usefulness, into the role that keeps her safe among these polished predators. And I’m left standing where she was, holding nothing but choice: clean, bright, unforgivable. Whatever happens next will have my name on it.
I let the laughter do its work: loud enough to become a curtain, bright enough to make my smile look like participation instead of escape. Someone calls my name from the terrace and I lift a hand in a gesture that could mean one moment or I heard you or I’m still yours, and then I turn as if I’m simply going to greet another table.
But I don’t.
I pivot into the seams of the estate, where the choreography frays. The lanterns are spaced farther apart here, more practical than pretty, their light thinning into strips along the stucco wall. The perfume of orange blossom and rosewater fades and the air changes character. Damp stone, old irrigation channels, the metallic cool of night creeping up from shaded corners. My shoes, polished for photographs, click too honestly on the flagstones.
I pass a stack of folded chairs, a crate of empty glasses, a coil of extension cable someone has tried to hide behind jasmine garlands like the truth can be softened with flowers. The music reaches me in pieces now, disassembled by walls: a violin phrase, applause, then nothing but my own breathing.
A server appears from a side door, balancing a tray with the careful seriousness of someone carrying more than sweets. He freezes when he sees me, eyes flicking to my hands as if checking for a ring, checking for permission.
“Where’s the new painter?” I ask, and my voice sounds too quiet, too direct: like a confession that accidentally became a question.
He blinks. “The… the one they brought for the display?”
“Yes.”
His gaze skates past my shoulder, down the corridor, to the place where staff slip in and out without being noticed. “Back there,” he says, lowering his chin. “Near the service corridor. By the rose arbor.”
I nod as if this is a normal request from a normal man on a normal night. Then I follow the direction like a dare I’ve already accepted, like a thread tugging me out of the staged light and into whatever waits in the dark.
The absence hits first, before I even register what I’m doing with my feet. No uncle’s hand hovering near my shoulder like a claim. No cousin materializing with a joke and a gentle shove back toward the cameras. No attendant murmuring, Agha, this way, as if my body is an asset that can’t be left unattended.
Just me, my pulse loud in my ears, my breath scraping a little too high in my throat, and the strange, illicit relief of moving without permission.
It’s ridiculous, the way freedom can feel like theft.
I keep expecting a voice to slice through the dimness, my name used as a leash. I listen for the soft warning of expensive shoes behind me, for the hush of fabric, for the click of a ring against a glass as someone signals security. But there’s only the utilitarian quiet of the estate’s edges: doors that don’t want to be seen, shadows that belong to work, not celebration.
My jacket sits perfectly on my shoulders; my insides don’t. I touch the inside of my wrist, a private superstition, count to three, don’t look back, and let the fear sharpen into something like courage.
At the mouth of a side passage, I almost collide with a server, young, sweating at the temples, tray held level like a vow. The silver rattles softly: tea glasses, sugared almonds, something that smells like cardamom and obligation. He pauses because he has to; I can feel the instinct in him to make space for my name, my suit, my family’s gravity.
I don’t give him time to decide what I am.
“Where’s the new painter?” I ask, light, quick, as if I’m asking where they’ve put the extra chairs. As if my throat isn’t tightening around the word new like it means not mine and not planned and please. My practiced smile flashes, too sharp. I hate how much I need the answer to sound like logistics instead of longing.
The server’s hands tighten on the tray, knuckles paling around the silver edge. For a second he studies me like he’s trying to decide which version of me is standing here: the groom, the shareholder, the rumor. His gaze darts past my shoulder, checks for witnesses, finds only dim corridor and shadow. Then, too softly to be useful to anyone else, he tips his chin. “Back ways,” he murmurs. “Rose arbor. Behind the pavilion.”
I go without looking back, because if I do I’ll see the leash before it snaps. The gravel gives under my soles, a soft, ugly sound against the polish of my shoes: evidence. I cross the invisible border where spectacle ends and labor begins, where nobody curates my face. Each step is a small trespass, and I don’t apologize for any of them. I just keep going.
The service corridor breathes on me like a confession, warm, damp air trapped between stucco and stacked deliveries, sharp with detergent and something citrus that pretends it isn’t bleach. Light here isn’t lantern-gold; it’s the flat spill of a work bulb, merciless on skin, on sweat, on the truth of how tired everyone is.
I see him before I let myself say his name in my head.
Kian stands half-folded into the margin of the passage, tucked beside wooden crates stamped with vendor logos and a tower of empty glass racks. He’s trying to be small in a place that isn’t meant for anyone to linger. Sketchbook under his arm, held tight like it can stop a blow. The cuff of his shirt is smeared with paint that doesn’t match tonight’s palette: too honest, too alive. There’s a small bag slung at his side, utilitarian, out of place among satin and pearls.
He looks up as if he felt me, not heard me. Our eyes lock, and for a fraction of a second the estate loosens its grip. The music and laughter beyond the wall turn into a muffled suggestion, something that can’t reach in here unless someone carries it.
His expression is open in a way that stings. No practiced smile. No calculation. Just the raw question: Are you okay? as if I’m allowed to be a person who can be un-okay.
My throat tightens with the ridiculousness of it: how quickly my body recognizes refuge, how my chest tries to expand around it like it’s safe to breathe. I take a step, then another, and I can’t tell if I’m walking toward him or away from everything else.
Kian’s gaze flicks once, instinctively, down the corridor: checking for witnesses the way an outsider learns to. Then back to me. He doesn’t bow. He doesn’t offer congratulations. He just stands there, sketchbook braced against his ribs as if it’s the only thing keeping him upright.
I want to say something normal. They told me you were here. Thank you for coming. How is your family? The words line up like polite soldiers and refuse to march.
Instead I hear myself whisper, too close to pleading to be dignified, “Come with me.”
I close the distance like I’m afraid the corridor will change its mind and swallow him back into the machinery of the night. Too quick for dignity. Too quick for the version of me that’s supposed to glide, not lunge.
My fingers find his wrist, warm under paint-dusted skin, tendon shifting when he inhales, and the contact lands with a shock that feels almost loud. It isn’t a grip that hurts, but it is a decision. I don’t look down at it. If I look, I’ll see how blatant it is, how un-ceremonial, how mine.
“Kian,” I breathe, as if his name can make this make sense.
He blinks, startled, sketchbook tightening against his ribs like a shield. For a beat I expect him to pull away, to remember the rules he doesn’t know and retreat anyway. Instead his gaze lifts to mine, steadying on my face with that awful, gentle sincerity. Like he’s been bracing for impact and I’m the first honest thing that’s happened to him tonight.
A footstep echoes somewhere, a cart wheel squeaks, and my superstitions flare: seen, seen, seen.
I pivot, guiding him out of the open passage, toward the darker throat of the garden edge. He follows without resistance, stumbling once, then matching my pace: as if he’s been waiting for permission he’d never ask for.
Under the rose arbor, the air is sweeter, orange blossom and damp soil, and the lantern spill thins into a gentler light that somehow judges more. Petals cling to the trellis above us, pale as witnesses. I let his wrist go as if I’ve remembered myself, as if release could make this harmless, but my fingers don’t know how to finish the sentence. They hover, stupidly honest, and then find the edge of his sleeve again, brushing fabric and the faint grit of dried paint.
It’s not a hold, not yet. It’s worse: a pause that says I chose this.
Somewhere beyond the leaves, laughter spikes, then fades. Here, my pulse is loud enough to be counted.
Kian’s breath drifts across my mouth in the narrow pocket of shadow, warm and unsure, and he studies me with the blunt attention of someone who’s never learned the art of pretending not to care. His eyes don’t flatter; they inventory, tiredness, restraint, longing. I lean closer anyway, like I can make the whole estate shrink to this hush, until even the space between us feels like a choice.
A pause splinters us. Footsteps worry the gravel outside the arbor. Through the leaves, an attendant passes, eyes sliding over my hand near Kian’s sleeve, over the angle of our bodies, measuring. Not scandal yet, but material. I don’t retreat fast enough. Whatever this is, it’s already been witnessed into fact.
I keep my shoulders squared out of habit, as if the chandeliers are still above me and not just roses and thin lantern light. My spine remembers posture the way my tongue remembers the right names. If I stand correctly, if I breathe shallowly enough, no one can accuse me of cracking.
But my voice betrays me the moment I try to speak. It comes out low and wrong, uneven, like it’s stepping around something broken in my throat.
“Do you know what it feels like,” I murmur, and then hate myself for how much it sounds like a question I’m not allowed to ask, “to spend a week being congratulated for a decision you didn’t make?”
Kian’s attention doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t interrupt with a joke or a soft lie. He just waits, and the waiting is its own kind of permission.
Every toast flashes through me: crystal glasses lifted, elders smiling with their eyes only, my mother’s hand on my forearm as if she can anchor me to my own face. Blessings spoken like seals pressed into wax. The musicians swelling at the right beats. Each “mubārak” landing like a signature I never wrote.
“It’s all… paperwork,” I confess, the word tasting obscene in a garden built for poetry. “Even the tenderness is transactional. They look at me like I’m already stamped and filed.”
My gaze drops to his hands, paint under the nails, honesty lodged where polish should be, and the contrast makes something in my chest twist, sharp with envy.
“I keep smiling,” I say, forcing the practiced curve for a second just to show him how ugly it feels from the inside. “I keep nodding. And everyone thinks that’s consent. Like my body standing there is the same as my soul agreeing.”
The estate presses at the edges of the arbor and I hear, faintly, my own breath shaking. “I’m terrified,” I admit. “Not of the ceremony. Of what comes after. Of waking up and realizing I let them write my life in my handwriting.”
I swallow again, like the truth is a pit I can keep filling until it stops echoing. It never stops.
“It’s not just fear,” I say, and my voice comes out too thin, too human. “It’s… years of it. Resentment, but dressed in a suit. Duty that everyone claps for. I’ve been trained to call it gratitude.” I drag in a breath that tastes like roses and metal. “They tell me I’m lucky. They tell me I’m chosen. And I nod like that’s the same thing as wanting.”
My hands twitch at my sides, searching for something to hold that isn’t him, that isn’t my own throat. “Sometimes I hate myself for how good I am at it,” I confess. “At making it look effortless. At making them comfortable.”
The superstition I keep tucked behind my teeth presses forward, childish and relentless. “I keep thinking tonight is an omen,” I murmur, barely louder than the leaves shifting overhead. “Like if I smile through the right moment, if I say the right words, the universe will punish me for lying. Or, worse, reward me, and trap me with what I pretended to want.”
Kian blinks, as if I’ve asked him to solve an equation he refuses on principle. No softening. No reverence for my surname. He just tilts his head, the lantern light catching the smudge of paint on his cuff, and says, quietly, like it’s the only honest answer he owns, “Then don’t.”
Two words. No plan, no bargain, no disclaimer. The world I come from always has footnotes. His doesn’t.
Something in me, trained to negotiate my way out of every corner, reaches for leverage and finds only air. My certainty, my polished, inherited certainty, splinters. I realize with a kind of horror that I’ve been waiting for permission in a voice that doesn’t profit from my obedience.
“I don’t want to be congratulated for being useful,” I say, the confession slipping out before I can dress it up. “I want, God, I want to be chosen as me. Not as a surname, not as a signature, not as the next chair at a table I didn’t build.” My throat tightens. “And I’ve been borrowing your steadiness like it’s free. Like shelter doesn’t demand anything from the one who gives it.”
The truth makes space between us evaporate. I hear myself say the last line like a vow I’m not supposed to practice, and my body betrays me. One step in, my shoulder angling toward his warmth. Kian stays. No polite recoil, no careful distance. His stillness feels like agreement. From the garden’s edge, any pair of eyes could turn it into a version of us that punishes.
The melody from the courtyard unspools into something thinner, a thread pulled too tight, and then it holds: one sustained note the musicians keep alive like they’re afraid of the silence behind it. In that brief suspension, the garden sharpens. Water in the channels clicks against stone. A tray clinks somewhere. A laugh starts and dies as if someone remembered where they are.
I should know better than to speak when the air is listening.
My voice is meant to be trained for speeches, for promises you can applaud without believing. Here it comes out stripped of its tailoring: too urgent, too real, the kind of tone that makes people glance up instinctively because it sounds like someone reaching for the edge of a cliff.
“I can’t, ” I start, and hate myself for the crack in it. I lower it further, as if volume is the only sin. “I can’t keep doing what they call my life.”
Kian doesn’t do the thing people here do: soften it into something pretty, something survivable. He answers like we’re alone in a cheap studio with bad light, not under roses braided into an arch that cost more than a year of someone’s salary.
“Then stop,” he says. Plain. Unornamented.
Two syllables that don’t ask who will be offended. Two syllables that don’t calculate my mother’s face when she hears. They land, and the held note from the musicians wavers, the tiniest bend in pitch, as if even the strings flinched.
The hush makes my words travel: down the arbor, past the lanterns, toward the terrace where my name is already being arranged in people’s mouths. I feel it in my skin first: the subtle reorientation of attention, like a curtain twitching in a house you didn’t know was occupied.
A staff member at the service corridor entrance pauses mid-step, eyes flicking toward us before sliding away with practiced neutrality. Another shifts a silver tray to the other arm, the movement too deliberate to be accidental. And somewhere just beyond the roses, a heel stops on gravel: one small, controlled sound that says: I heard enough.
I swallow, and the taste is orange blossom and fear. Kian’s face stays open, stubbornly human, while the silence between notes turns our closeness into a headline someone else is already drafting.
From the edge of the rose arbor, Nahid’s gaze pins us like a specimen under glass. No blink, no fidget, just that aristocratic stillness that pretends it’s calm when it’s really control. They don’t step closer. They don’t offer rescue or reprimand. They simply angle their head, a fraction, as if adjusting the frame around a painting they’ve decided is counterfeit.
In the lantern light their expression is immaculate, almost bored, but I know that look; I’ve watched it land on people at dinners and turn their names into something thin and brittle by dessert. Their eyes move once, Kian’s paint-smeared cuff, my shoulder turned toward him, the space that is not space between us, and I feel my pulse answer like a confession.
My first instinct is to perform. To widen the distance, to laugh, to make it harmless and therefore forgivable. I hate that instinct so much it burns.
Nahid’s mouth doesn’t change. The judgment does. It settles, soft and heavy, into the air: an inventory taken, an account opened, interest already accruing.
Behind us, a waiter in a cream jacket stalls mid-glide, tray hovering as if the weight of it has suddenly changed. The silver trembles once. So small it could be blamed on the music, on nerves, on nothing at all. His eyes don’t rise; they drop with the studied humility of someone who’s learned that looking is an offense in certain rooms. But I feel the moment he takes us in anyway, through the angle of his shoulder, through the too-careful stillness of his mouth.
Then he pivots, too smooth, too practiced, into the service corridor, and his pace quickens as if he’s late to a task that just appeared. Purpose tightens his spine. The corridor swallows him, but the message doesn’t vanish with him; it travels, carried on etiquette and whispers like a sealed note passed hand to hand.
I’m the one who breaks first. I step back into the lantern spill and do the old ritual, straighten my cuffs, smooth my jacket front, as if steadiness is a thing you can button into place. My shoes find the path toward the terraces. Around me, talk thins like a held breath, then returns too quickly, too bright. The warmth is rehearsed now, and it doesn’t reach.
By the time I rejoin the lantern-lit terraces, the crowd has edited itself around me. Not dramatically: worse: in precise, deniable inches. A shoulder turns just enough to become a barricade. A kiss on the cheek arrives one heartbeat late, as if permission had to be requested. Even the air feels allocated. A small, deliberate gap opens where a cousin should have been, and I understand: Kian has already been filed under relevant.
A narrow checkpoint has appeared where there used to be nothing but a gap between hedges and a lantern hook: two men in dark suits standing too squarely, a velvet rope looped like an afterthought. It’s the kind of addition that pretends it has always been there. That’s how power moves in my family: quietly, then permanently.
Kian reaches it and slows, as if he can feel the garden’s mood change under his shoes. He doesn’t have the practiced glide of the guests around him; he walks like someone used to doors that open because they need him, not because they want to show him off. One of the men lifts a hand.
“Name?” he asks, courteous enough to be deniable.
Kian gives it. His accent nudges the syllables into the air a fraction differently, and the guard’s gaze flicks, fast, trained, to the cuffs with paint ghosts, to the small bag at his side, to the line of his throat where his pulse betrays him.
“Inviation,” the man says, mispronouncing it as if the word itself is foreign.
Kian produces the card Farimah’s crew had pressed into his palm earlier, cream stock with calligraphy so elegant it should have been armor. The guard takes it between thumb and forefinger and holds it up under the lantern like he’s checking a watermark. He turns it once. Twice. His face stays blank, but the pause lengthens past usefulness into instruction.
Behind Kian, two women in jeweled shawls slow just enough to watch without admitting they’re watching. A man with a glass of something amber stops mid-sip. The rope, the angle of the bodies, the sudden hush in their small orbit: it all creates a stage, and Kian is the only one who didn’t audition.
I find myself moving without deciding to, my jaw tightening with a stupid, proprietary heat. Not because he’s mine, because I am not allowed to have anything so simple, but because they’re doing it on purpose. Because they’ve learned the quickest way to put me back in my place is to make the person beside me feel small.
The guard finally hands the invitation back. “All right,” he says, and waves him through with a nod that comes a beat too late.
Long enough for everyone nearby to file the moment away like evidence.
At the next terrace entrance, a different man in a dark suit steps into Kian’s path like he’s been waiting for the cue. His voice is almost gentle (trained to soothe) while his eyes stay flat, measuring. The garden keeps playing at romance around us: laughter, clinking glasses, the soft throat of a violin. Here, the sound seems to thin.
“Sir,” he says, palm half raised in a courteous stop. “Who are you with tonight?”
It’s a question dressed up as protocol, but it lands like an accusation. With. As if a person alone is automatically a problem. As if belonging is something you borrow from someone richer.
Kian blinks, and I see him doing the quick arithmetic of humiliation. Whether honesty will cost him more than pride. His hand tightens on the strap of his small bag. He glances past the guard to the terrace beyond, where the light is warmer and the faces are colder, and I hate how his shoulders draw in by a millimeter, instinctively making less of himself.
I step forward before he can answer wrong. My name feels like a key I despise needing.
Near the sweets table, two patrons shift like chess pieces (one step, one angle) and suddenly there’s no straight line through. Their bodies make a polite wall while their mouths keep moving behind lifted hands, voices lowered not for privacy but for effect. I catch fragments: an amused breath, a name half-swallowed, the word staff used like a stain.
Their eyes don’t stay on his face. They catalog him instead. The paint-shadow on his cuffs. The way his vowels land a fraction off-center. The small bag at his side, transformed in their imagination from necessity into suspicion. Each detail becomes a thread they tug until it unravels into a story: intruder, opportunist, mistake.
And the worst part is how efficiently the room agrees. Without saying it aloud.
Parvaneh’s crew moves like a practiced tide. A velvet rope appears where there was only gravel; a server’s tray becomes a reason to pivot; a smile is offered like a bandage. One path is “temporarily closed,” another “this way, please,” and suddenly Kian is shepherded toward the hedges, away from the terrace lights, as if he’s a spill to be blotted before it stains.
Farimah catches my eye as she slips toward the service corridor, ink on her fingertips like she’s been bleeding honesty all night. She doesn’t get far. A woman with a family pin (small gold, heavy meaning) intercepts her with a smile polished to courtesy. I can’t hear the words, but I can read the shape of them: professional, contained, remember whose night this is. Farimah’s chin lifts; her hands still. She nods like obedience. It isn’t.
I stop where the roses begin to thicken, where the arbor pretends it’s only an arch of flowers and not a boundary. The air here is cooler, wet with the garden’s channels and the breath of orange blossoms, but my skin stays hot. Heat trapped under silk and duty.
The mirrored pavilion throws me back at myself from a dozen angles. A jawline caught in candlelight. A mouth arranged into a smile I don’t remember choosing. Eyes that look calm until you see how they don’t settle on anything for long, as if still searching for an exit my body already knows isn’t there.
In every shard of reflection, the same scene repeats with small variations: people leaning in, laughter softened into something private, hands rising to cover words that were never meant to be kind. The music from the courtyard reaches this edge as a distant insistence, the violin pulling romance through the air like a ribbon someone else will tie around my wrists.
I don’t hear what they’re saying. I feel it instead. The way attention changes temperature when it turns predatory. The way my name becomes an object passed between mouths. The way he becomes a shadow attached to me: a rumor with paint on its cuffs.
For a second, I think of walking back into the terrace lights and performing the easy version of myself. The one who laughs on cue, who makes the right joke, who turns scrutiny into applause. It would be so simple to varnish this moment, to make it harmless by making it charming.
But my charm has always been a kind of consent.
I swallow, and the taste of pistachio and rosewater from earlier turns bitter in my throat. I watch my own fractured faces watch the crowd, and I understand something with a clarity that feels like punishment: whatever story they’re building, they don’t need proof. They only need me to flinch.
So I don’t. I stand still long enough to let the guilt settle where it belongs and then I turn, already feeling the ceremony’s gravity tugging me back into its orbit.
Two guests tilt toward each other near the edge of the reflecting pool, shoulder to shoulder the way conspirators do when they want the world to notice they’re not speaking aloud. Their bracelets click once, tiny, deliberate punctuation. A server drifts by with a silver tray and lingers half a heartbeat too long, eyes lowered, posture perfect, but the tray is only an excuse to hover within range of names. The kind of loitering that looks innocent until you understand it’s listening with manners.
Across the lantern-washed courtyard, one of the security men shifts his weight and lets his gaze travel: my face, my hands, then past me toward the service corridor. Not searching. Verifying. As if my private moments have been itemized and assigned a doorway.
In the mirrored panes, everything doubles: candlelight, smiles, the angle of a hand shielding a mouth. Reflections make a language out of fragments. I can’t hear the words, but I can read the structure: how a glance becomes evidence, how proximity becomes intent, how a stranger’s exhaustion becomes an accusation. Closeness, rewritten as a strategy. Tenderness, repackaged as leverage. And my name, quietly stitched to it all like a seal.
Instinct lifts my old remedy to my mouth like a glass. An elegant smile, a soft joke about the garden’s theatrics, a gracious deflection that turns curiosity into laughter. I can feel how easily it would work. How quickly I could make myself the story in a flattering way and, by doing it, invite more eyes to look harder, listen closer, gather proof like souvenirs.
I don’t take it.
I let my face go still. I let the silence be awkward. If their hunger needs a target, it can have me. Let them say I’m cold, arrogant, distracted, ungrateful: anything that keeps their attention from sliding down the service corridor and finding him, or catching on Parvaneh’s people like lint on black silk.
Charm, tonight, would be collaboration. So I stand there and burn.
The weight of what I’ve risked lands with a cruel kind of precision. Kian’s outsider edges will be sharpened into a threat; his paint-stained cuffs turned into proof of bad intent. Parvaneh’s crew will be punished for “laxity,” as if tenderness were a breach. Farimah will be recast as a woman staging drama, not saving face. My guilt doesn’t soften. It narrows into vigilance.
I drift back toward the pavilion as if I’m arriving by choice, as if the garden hasn’t been quietly tightening around me all evening. The music threads through my ribs; orange blossom catches in my breath like a sweet warning. I watch the small signals: an aunt’s imperceptible nod, a cousin’s exhale, Nahid’s mouth flattening with displeasure. I wear obedience like a tailored coat and, underneath it, I start counting exits.
Mehrzad lets the paper rest against his palm as if it’s weightless, but the texture catches on his thumb: thicker than earlier, freshly handled. The program is warm from someone else’s skin, a small heat that shouldn’t matter and does anyway. I lift it closer, pretending I’m admiring the flourishes like any dutiful groom, and the scent of ink rises. The lantern light turns the page into a thin, obedient thing, but the fibers fight me when I slide my nail along the edge. New stock. New print. A replacement that wants to pass as continuity.
A laugh breaks somewhere behind me, too bright; a cluster of cousins shifts to make room for an elder, and the movement corrals me without anyone touching my arms. I tell myself it’s coincidence. I’ve been telling myself that all week.
My eyes go to the timeline first. Because schedules are safe, because numbers don’t accuse. Welcome. Music. Processional. Sofreh arrangement. The words are the same shapes I approved, yet they sit differently on the page, like furniture moved an inch in the dark. The calligrapher’s hand is exquisite, controlled, reverent. Whoever ordered this knew beauty can be used like a lid.
I glance up toward the mirrored pavilion. Security at the side gate stands in pairs now, not singles, their shoulders angled as if they’re guarding something fragile. Or preventing it from leaving. The service corridor entrance (usually alive with trays and whispers) has a man posted there who doesn’t belong to Parvaneh’s crew. He watches the crowd with the stillness of a decision already made.
I swallow, and the practiced smile comes automatically, the one that asks nothing from my eyes. My thumb rubs the paper again, searching for the familiar soft give of the original, and finds only this new firmness, this insistence. I turn the page as if I’m impatient to see what comes next, as if I’m eager.
The page answers like a trap closing gently.
I find the section I remember approving: the safe, ceremonial part where names become ornament and time pretends to be holy instead of strategic. My finger drifts down the column of Persian, following the curve of each letter the way you follow a river you’ve known since childhood. Here, I think. This is where it should match. This is where my signature, metaphorical, at least, used to live.
But the calligraphy doesn’t mirror my memory. It’s too perfect, too seamless in its authority, like the page was born this way. No hesitation in the strokes, no faint pooling where a pen paused to breathe. The ink sits on the paper like a verdict: glossy in the lantern light, black so deep it feels blue at the edges. Whoever wrote this didn’t just copy a program; they composed inevitability.
I tilt it, searching for the telltale difference: an older line beneath, a scraped correction, the ghost of the version I saw. Nothing. Only that immaculate flow, confident as a hand on my shoulder.
And then my eyes snag on a phrase I never agreed to, nestled among blessings and logistics as if it’s always been part of the ritual.
One line, tucked between the lighting cues and the rosewater blessing, changes the whole architecture of the night. Not an edit you can argue with: an addition dressed in reverence, phrased the way elders speak when they mean law: Address by the groom, in gratitude for the union and the new partnership, placed there like it has always belonged before the mirror, before the candles, before the words that make the marriage real.
My pulse trips over itself. An address is not a request; it’s a ritual. It turns my mouth into a public doorway.
And it sits exactly where my last sliver of privacy used to be. No corridor pause, no breath behind the curtain, no moment to pull Parvaneh aside and say don’t let them do this. Just me, upright in front of witnesses, expected to bless the trap out loud.
I scan for the little escape hatches I’ve learned to live on, optional remarks, family welcome, a parent stepping in with a toast that buys me time. Nothing. Every softer synonym has been shaved away. The language is all imperative now, polished into inevitability. Even the spacing feels intentional, as if blank space could tempt me to improvise.
I lower the program an inch, just enough to see over it, and the garden reshapes itself into a mechanism. Attendants drift in practiced arcs, elders pivoting conversations like doors. No one blocks me outright; they simply occupy the spaces I might choose. My chest goes cold with the clarity of it: the evening has been rewritten around my body, and whatever I do next will happen on someone else’s timetable.
Parvaneh catches me at the edge of the service corridor the way a seasoned nurse catches a patient trying to pull out an IV. No panic, just a hand in the right place before damage becomes spectacle. Her headset is half-off one ear, the wire biting into the neat line of her jaw; her black suit has the faint sheen of someone who’s been moving all day and can’t admit it to herself. She looks smaller here, away from the guests and their perfume and judgments, but there’s nothing small about the authority in her posture.
“Parvaneh. She answers before I can shape the question, as if she’s already heard it in my breathing. “They’ve reduced the access points,” she says, low enough that it could pass as a reminder about trays or timing. “Two doors only. Staff list was updated.”
My stomach drops with a quiet, humiliating precision. Two doors only means the garden has been given a spine and I’m expected to walk its length. It means the service corridor is no longer an artery; it’s a vein with a thumb pressed against it.
“Updated by who?” I ask, and even to my own ears it sounds like a boy asking which adult to blame.
Parvaneh’s eyes flick, not to the crowd, never to the crowd, but toward the pavilion, where mirrored walls throw back lanternlight in shattered copies. “I was told,” she says. Told, not asked. She swallows, then adds, “Registry folder too. It’s not where it was.”
The folder. The paper that turns myth into contract. I feel the weight of it even though it’s not in my hands.
“Moved?” I manage. My smile is still on my face because my face has learned to survive without my consent.
“For safety,” she replies, the phrase delivered with the same exhausted neutrality as the candles are being relit or the violinist is late. But her mouth tightens on the last syllable, and that betrayal of emotion is what makes it land.
I try to make it lighter, because lightness is my last weapon. “My family and their talent for apocalypse planning,” I say, almost laughing, almost charming, almost convincing.
Parvaneh doesn’t laugh. Her gaze holds mine, steady, practical, apologetic, as if humor is a luxury the schedule can’t afford.
I let the corner of my mouth lift, the old reflex. “We do love a contingency plan,” I murmur, like I’m teasing the universe instead of accusing my blood.
Parvaneh doesn’t take the bait. Her eyes don’t brighten; they soften, and somehow that’s worse. Practical. Apologetic. The look of someone who’s been ordered to close a door and is trying not to slam it on your fingers.
Behind us, the corridor breathes with movement. Rubber soles, a tray clinking, the hush of staff passing like ghosts around the living drama. Out there, music swells and collapses in pretty phrases, as if the garden itself is singing me toward the mirror.
I feel my smile start to ache.
“It’s just… tighter tonight,” she says, not defensive, not conspiratorial: just stating weather. Her hand hovers near her headset as if she wants to pull it off and can’t. “Don’t make it a thing, Mehrzad.” The plea is almost inaudible, threaded through professionalism.
I swallow. Humor would be easier if she would let it be true. But she stands there like a ledger: exact, tired, unwilling to lie for comfort.
When I ask about the registry folder, Parvaneh’s voice dips, half a register, half a life, into the tone people use when they’re trying not to name a disaster. “It was moved,” she says, and her eyes flick toward the pavilion as if the mirrors might be listening. “Not on the side table anymore. It’s with coordination.”
“With you,” I press, too softly to be brave.
She shakes her head once, the smallest refusal. “Signed out. For safety.” The phrase is smooth, pre-approved, but it snags on her mouth. A beat. Her fingers tighten around the clipboard as if paper could anchor her. “It’s under a name,” she adds, and doesn’t look at me when she says it. The corridor suddenly feels narrower. “I can’t say it out here.”
I follow the faint tilt of her chin, and the garden’s choreography reveals itself. At the pavilion’s edge, security has tightened into a quiet ring. Hands folded, shoulders squared, eyes trained to intercept. Attendants glide in with practiced smiles, turning guests away with murmured corrections, steering them like water into channels. A strip of stone clears in front of the mirror, precise as a stage mark.
Something in me clicks into place: no relief, no peace, just the hard, clean certainty of a door that has already been locked. This isn’t a mistake waiting for my signature to undo it. It’s a choice, executed in quiet ink and soft orders. There will be no pause carved out for me, no private breath: only motion, ritual, witnesses, unless I become the break in it.
Under the mirrored vault, I stop pretending the reflections are romantic. Every surface doubles the room, multiplies the faces, turns a single glance into a chorus. If I look up, I catch myself, smile in place, jaw held, eyes too bright, and it’s like seeing a stranger rehearsing my life.
So I look down. I watch feet.
The pavilion has its own grammar: the elders anchor the corners, immovable as pillars; the attendants orbit them in obedient arcs; security makes a perimeter so polite you could almost mistake it for courtesy. People don’t drift here. They’re placed. They slide into positions as if drawn by threads only they can see.
A man in a dark suit touches his earpiece and, three breaths later, a tray appears where a gap might have opened. A cousin leans toward an aunt, murmurs, and the aunt’s laughter rises on cue: bright enough to cover whatever instruction just passed. Two women in matching silk step aside simultaneously, allowing a clear line of sight from the front row to the sofreh, like someone tested the angle. Even the musicians seem to time their crescendos to the movement of bodies: swell when a cluster needs to turn, soften when a private word must be swallowed.
I catch Nahid’s profile near the edge. Chin lifted, eyes narrowed as if measuring the strength of everyone’s manners. They don’t look at me directly, not once, but I feel the pressure of their attention like a pin through fabric. A warning disguised as indifference.
Parvaneh crosses behind the mirror’s stand and is gone again, efficient as a blink. Not a guest, not allowed to be seen feeling anything. Kian is somewhere beyond the glittering crush, if he’s here at all, too honest to survive in a room arranged like a trap.
The floor beneath the rugs might as well have tape marks. Step here. Pause. Turn toward the mirror. Take the honey. Smile for the witnesses. Say what you’re expected to say.
Sanctuary was the story they sold me. But standing inside the pavilion’s light, I understand the set design: this is a stage, and my autonomy is the one prop they don’t intend to return.
A hand lands on my shoulder and stays there a fraction too long to be casual. I know this touch; I’ve been patted and blessed and anchored by it since childhood. To anyone watching, it’s tenderness, an elder claiming me with pride, a benediction performed for the cameras that aren’t allowed.
To me, it’s a lever.
The fingers tighten, not enough to bruise, just enough to instruct. I’m guided a half-step forward, exactly into the lane of sight they cleared. My body obeys before my mind can argue, muscle memory trained by years of being the good son, the gracious host, the man who doesn’t make scenes in beautiful rooms.
His thumb presses once, a small pulse through fabric, approval, warning, ownership. I feel my breath hitch and smooth it out immediately, because the crowd will forgive nerves but not resistance. Somewhere a whisper goes soft, a laugh rises, and the whole pavilion pretends this is affection.
I nod, as if grateful, and hate myself for how easily I translate pressure into gratitude.
I lift my eyes despite myself and the mirrors catch me in pieces (cheekbone, mouth, the clean line of my collar) stitched together by light into a man I recognize and don’t. The smile is there before I choose it, a reflex with its own bloodstream. The suit sits perfectly, expensive enough to signal gratitude, conservative enough to signal obedience. Even my stillness reads like confidence. These were my tools, once: posture that said I was unshakable, calm that suggested consent. Now they look like the garden’s other ornaments, candelabra, jasmine, crystal, objects arranged to reassure the room. I watch my own reflection perform, and the worst part is how convincing he is.
Two attendants meet eyes over the sofreh, a flicker of silent arithmetic, and then they move. One slides a chair back an inch, the other nudges a silver tray so its edge catches the light. The space opens and tightens like a breath rehearsed. I follow the adjustment and feel it in my bones: this isn’t decor being perfected. It’s me, being placed for a line I never wrote.
The realization arrives without drama, like ice setting in a glass: everything they’ve ever called my charm is just varnish. It doesn’t pry doors open; it makes the lock look beautiful while it clicks shut. Tonight isn’t a tribute, not a celebration of me. It’s a conveyor belt disguised as romance, and I’m the package they intend to deliver.
I draw a slow breath through my nose, the way my mother taught me when I was small and tempted to cry in public: inhale like you’re smelling orange blossoms, exhale like you’re releasing a prayer you don’t want anyone to overhear. The heat behind my ribs doesn’t vanish; it condenses. It becomes weight I can carry without spilling.
My smile stays where it belongs, pinned to my face like a boutonniere. But something in my eyes unhooks. I stop offering myself as reassurance. I stop trying to look like a man who agrees.
If I react, they win twice: once because I comply, and again because I give them a spectacle to point at later, Mehrzad is unstable, Mehrzad is ungrateful, Mehrzad ruined a sacred night. I can almost hear the story being drafted in the mouths of people who have never loved me, only relied on me.
So I do what I’m good at. I observe.
The program cards in the hands nearest the front row are not the same as the ones I glimpsed earlier on the reception tables. Subtly heavier stock, a different ink sheen, the calligraphy strokes sharper, more confident, like the person who wrote them knew they would be read out loud. A change you’d only notice if you cared about paper and lies.
Security shifts a step when I shift a step. Not aggressive. Just… anticipatory. As if my body has been translated into a risk assessment. I catch the glint of an earpiece, the small tilt of a head toward the corridor that leads behind the pavilion, and I understand the geometry: exits that look open until you reach them.
I could ask an elder. I could pull Nahid aside and demand an explanation. I could let my voice rise and watch the mirrors swallow it into a hundred versions of scandal.
Instead I lower my gaze to the details no one thinks I’m looking at. Hands that pass a folder too quickly. An attendant who avoids meeting my eyes like she’s carrying guilt instead of sweets. The absence of something that should be present, the registry, the physical proof of consent, like a missing tooth you can’t stop tonguing.
The anger is there, steady now, clean. Not for the staff. Not for the flowers, the music, the old prayers. For the person who decided my “yes” is a resource to be extracted.
And with that steadiness, I start moving toward the edge of the pavilion where the real work happens and the real orders are obeyed.
Parvaneh is where I expect competence to hide (half in shadow, half in motion) at the lip of the service corridor behind the mirrored pavilion, a clipboard tucked against her ribs like a shield. Her heels don’t match the marble; they’ve learned the back passages, the places the cameras don’t love.
“Parvaneh,” I say, and keep my voice low enough that it has to be chosen to be heard. Not demanded. Chosen. “The program cards. They’re not the originals.”
Her eyes flick once to my face, then to my hands, as if checking for a tremor she can’t afford. “There was… a reprint,” she says, already bracing.
“Who approved it?” I ask, gentle the way you are when you’re holding a blade by the flat. “When did it change? And what, exactly, is different?”
Her jaw tightens. “This afternoon. A courier. Instructions came through the family office.” She swallows. “They added a segment. A ‘statement.’”
The word tastes like iron.
“And the registry folder,” I continue, still soft, still precise. “It’s not under the sofreh.”
Her gaze slips past me toward the pavilion entrance. “It was moved. I was told. “I was told to keep it ‘secure.’ Not there. Not yet.”
As she answers in fragments, I let my eyes do what my mouth cannot. The estate rearranges itself around us with the quiet efficiency of a decision already made. Two guards who had been decorative at the pavilion’s edge step closer, not quite blocking the entrance, just thickening it: bodies turned at angles that say please, not permitted. A young attendant with a tray of tea drifts into the shortest line toward the rose arbor and lingers there too long, a polite obstacle with trembling wrists. Behind her, Parvaneh’s staff are redirected with hand signals and murmured codes, service carts rerouted, curtains drawn, corridors narrowed. Even the air feels guided, like water pressed into unfamiliar channels. And every adjustment pretends it’s for beauty.
I keep my tone warm as I turn to the workers hovering at the margins: hands stained with rosewater, eyes darting to the guards. “Thank you,” I say, and mean it, because gratitude is safer than accusation. I ask small questions like they’re favors, not interrogations. But I let my gaze hold a beat too long. Don’t worry, it tells them. I’m not here to punish you. I’m here to find who gave you the lines.
The last piece clicks into place with the soft finality of a latch. What I’ve been swallowing all evening tilts and finds its proper target. Not the rugs. Not Parvaneh’s tired competence. Not the guests sipping sweetness. The unseen author, tightening exits with one hand while adjusting the spotlight with the other.
The lanterns are hung at exactly the right height to flatter faces and soften angles, each flame sheltered in glass like a secret permitted to exist. The water channels run obediently through the garden’s geometry, their surfaces broken into gold ribbons by the moving light. Orange blossoms scatter their perfume with an almost aggressive sweetness, the kind that insists on innocence.
It would have worked on me once. It still tries to. My body still wants to believe that beauty means someone cared enough to make things gentle.
But now I can see the hinge.
Perfection isn’t a blessing when it’s engineered; it’s evidence. Proof of coordination. Proof that hands met in rooms I wasn’t invited into and decided what the night would mean before I arrived in my tailored suit and practiced smile. Even the symmetry has teeth. The paths curve just enough to guide you where you’re meant to go, and the places that look private are lit a fraction too well, as if the garden itself is trained to refuse you secrecy.
A trap doesn’t always look like bars. Sometimes it looks like hospitality so complete it becomes surveillance.
I follow the small tells: a server pausing half a second too long near the corridor mouth; a guard’s gaze not scanning the guests but fixing on the spaces between them, the possible routes. The fountain basin with its floating candles feels suddenly less like romance and more like an altar for watching. Every flame reflected, multiplied, impossible to count, like witnesses you didn’t know you’d invited.
And the air, God, the air. Warm and perfumed, as if someone is trying to sedate the part of me that panics. As if the garden is saying: see? This is sacred. This is tradition. Don’t embarrass us.
I let my fingers brush the edge of a lantern stand as I pass, grounding myself in the cool metal. I don’t need to shout to know what’s happening. I only need to accept the uglier truth: tonight’s beauty isn’t for blessing.
It’s for proof that I stood here, under this light, and let myself be claimed.
I read the crowd the way I read a balance sheet, columns, liabilities, hidden clauses. The elders aren’t simply seated; they’re placed, a ring of polished authority near the front where the light catches their silver hair and makes their approval look inevitable. Each one is a guarantor: if I sign, the room becomes a contract; if I hesitate, the room becomes a courtroom.
People who used to stand close to me are kept at a gracious distance, spaced out like decorative vases. Near enough to be seen, too far to intervene. My cousins laugh a beat too loudly when I look their way, as if volume can cover fear. Even Nahid, usually a sharp blade at my side, is angled toward a cluster of patrons, ready to cut down any rumor before it sprouts.
And the strangers (new faces I can’t name, academics, business partners, a pair of journalists pretending they’re here for the roses) are threaded through the aisles like listening devices. Close enough to overhear anything real. Close enough to carry it out intact.
Before a single vow, the witnesses are already arranged.
Tradition, I realize, isn’t being offered to hold me steady; it’s being used to pin me in place, velvet-wrapped restraints presented as heirloom silk. Every ritual object is suddenly doubled. Symbol and tool. The mirror isn’t there to bless us into clarity; it’s there so my face can be caught reflecting obedience. The sugar cones promise sweetness, but they also promise a photographable moment: proof I accepted what was arranged. Even the prayers, murmured like comfort, become a grammar that edits me: so any pause in my voice can be translated as arrogance, any question as sacrilege.
It’s not love they’re guarding. It’s the story of love, polished until it becomes a weapon. And if I move wrong, the wound will be named my fault.
The romance they’ve written for me, smiles timed to music, tenderness rehearsed like a line read, shears off in my hands. Under it there’s only machinery: leverage, stakes, names in ledgers. Obedience isn’t devotion here; it’s a signal flare. I can almost see the profit margins of my compliance, the collateral of my refusal. My mother’s face, my company’s spine, someone else’s ruin, neatly pre-approved.
If there’s any love in my life that isn’t part of their choreography, it won’t be rescued by a speech under chandeliers, by a noble refusal delivered where everyone can package it into legend. It will have to survive the aftershocks: the headlines, the elders’ icy prayers, my mother’s silence, the way kindness gets rebranded as betrayal when it costs them something.
My gaze snags on the microphone stands the way a sleeve catches on a nail: small resistance, sudden awareness of skin underneath.
There are four of them. No, five. Too many for vows that are supposed to be whispered into each other’s mouths and carried only by breath and incense. They’ve been planted like slim black reeds around the sofreh, angled not toward the couple but toward the audience, toward the elders’ semicircle, toward the aisle where the families will sit like a jury. Someone has measured the distances. Someone has thought about echo and applause and how a sentence will sound when it’s replayed.
For a moment I tell myself it’s for the musicians, for the officiant, for the usual indulgence of grandeur. But the placement is wrong for music; it’s right for capturing a voice cleanly. A confession. A declaration. A line that can be clipped, exported, and repeated until it becomes the only thing anyone remembers about me.
My mouth tastes like metal.
I track the cords with my eyes, neat as veins, taped down so no one trips. No accidents tonight. A sound technician kneels near the pavilion steps and doesn’t look up when I pass, as if the only person in his world is the equipment, as if he’s been told not to meet my gaze. Security stands a shade closer than they did earlier, shoulders squared toward the service corridor like they expect a body to try to slip through.
It’s not subtle anymore. The garden’s softness is just fabric over scaffolding.
If I say yes, it will be heard too well. If I say no, it will be heard even better.
And the worst part (the part that makes my chest tighten, not with fear but with fury) is the certainty that this isn’t for Soraya’s academics or the journalists’ notebooks. This is for my own blood. For the people who will smile as they set the trap, then act wounded when it snaps.
I force my face into the practiced calm they trained into me, but my eyes keep returning to the microphones, counting them like exits that have been bricked over.
An attendant glides past me with a stack of programs held like offerings. I take one with the same light touch I use for handshakes I don’t mean, as if it’s just paper, as if nothing in this garden can still surprise me. The cardstock is thick, expensive, faintly perfumed. Orange blossom clinging to ink.
At first the layout looks familiar: the expected prayers, the expected procession, the expected sweetness scripted into order. Then my eyes catch the seams.
Items have been reshuffled with a neat brutality, like furniture moved in a room you thought you owned. A section that should be empty (a pause, a blessing, an interlude for photographs) has been filled in with crisp handwriting, the kind that pretends to be casual while making itself impossible to ignore. Not printed. Added. Authorized.
I run my thumb down the crease and feel it: a second fold, tight and deliberate. Inside, tucked into that narrow spine, a timing cue is hidden like a private instruction. Three words, a minute mark, and the unmistakable implication that I’m expected to speak on command.
My pulse doesn’t spike; it narrows, like a lens forced to focus until the rest of the world blurs into irrelevance. The old instinct, smooth it over, soften it, offer them a charming half-step backward dressed as reverence, dies in my throat. There’s no “elegant delay” left to purchase with smiles and poetry. This isn’t a celebration that can be steered by grace; it’s a sequence. A cue. A lock clicked into place.
The revised program sits in my hand with the weight of a contract, and I can almost hear the stage manager in it: now, now, now. Even my hesitation feels anticipated, allotted a margin like a breath mark in sheet music. If I stall, I won’t be improvising. I’ll be performing the part they wrote for resistance.
As I circle the pavilion’s edge, the pattern I pretended not to see earlier sharpens. Two guards where there had been one, bodies angled to block the rose arbor as if it’s suddenly “closed for beauty.” Staff are rerouted with murmured instructions and tight nods, trays pivoting mid-step. Even the strolling guests are guided, by smiles, by shoulders, by velvet ropes of courtesy, back toward the sofreh, back toward me.
I smooth the program flat, iron my thumb over the incriminating fold until it pretends to be ordinary, then slip it back onto the attendant’s stack as if I’m returning a blessing. My smile holds. Behind it I tally the collateral: my mother’s posture, an elder’s vengeance, a cousin’s demotion, Parvaneh’s job, a rumor fed to Soraya, Kian’s humiliation. From here, even my quiet counts.
The microphones sit at the courtyard’s edge like a line of obedient insects, their foam heads drinking in the lantern glow. I notice them the way I notice signatures on a contract. Not just for the guests in front of me, but for absent people, future people, the people who will lean in and decide what kind of man I am from a clipped sentence and a camera angle.
The musicians in the central courtyard slide into something sweet and old, strings tightening around the air. Somewhere near the orange grove terrace, laughter rises and falls in timed waves, as if someone is conducting it. I can smell rosewater on a passing tray of sweets; it should feel like comfort. Instead it feels like a scent they’ll use to describe me in stories: romantic, dutiful, blessed.
My practiced smile arrives without being invited. My face has learned to do this. My chest doesn’t.
I track the flow of bodies like I track votes. Elders clustered near the reflecting pool, close enough to intervene; younger cousins orbiting the mirrored pavilion, ready to film if a crack appears; security at the service corridor entrance with their shoulders squared a little too hard. Parvaneh moves through it all with a clipboard like a shield, eyes scanning, fixing, swallowing her own fatigue. Farimah’s ink-stained fingertips flash as she adjusts a place card, too casual to be casual. She glances up, and the look she gives me isn’t pity. It’s a question she’s too kind to ask out loud.
And then there’s the outsider’s presence like a bruise I keep touching, Kian, somewhere in the periphery, not polished enough to disappear, too sincere to be harmless. My throat tightens at the thought of him hearing my voice through those microphones, hearing me become someone else.
I could pretend the microphones are for music. For blessings. For tradition.
But I know better. They are for capture. For leverage. For making sure any promise I make tonight belongs to everyone except me.
It arrives with the cold clarity of numbers: there won’t be a graceful postponement disguised as etiquette, no tender pause slipped between a toast and a blessing where I can renegotiate my life in whispers. Tonight has been engineered like a deal timeline until the only question left is whether I comply or detonate. The garden is beautiful, but it’s also a corridor; every lantern is another checkpoint, every relative’s hand on my arm a gentle shove toward the next mark.
I feel the funnel tightening in small, humiliating ways. The way Parvaneh’s staff closes ranks when I drift toward the side paths. The way an uncle steers me back with a laugh that doesn’t reach his eyes. The way the ceremony program has been revised. Even my superstitions betray me: I catch myself counting steps between the reflecting pool and the pavilion, as if the right number could change the ending. It doesn’t. The ending is already queued, and I’m the one they’ve dressed for it.
My smile stays where it’s been trained to stay, polite and unthreatening, like a signature that never wavers even when the hand does. Inside, something unclenches. Not relief, not courage, just the end of a childish negotiation I’ve been conducting with fate all week. I stop offering the universe bargains in exchange for a miracle. There is no arrangement where the elders feel properly revered, the investors feel soothed, my mother keeps her pride intact, and I get to breathe without the weight of someone else’s future on my ribs.
I’d been hunting for a sentence that could mean two things at once: obedience and escape. But language doesn’t bend that far. Tonight isn’t asking what I want. It’s asking what I’m willing to pay, and what I’m willing to let burn.
I begin to inventory the damage the way I’d price a hostile bid: not in feelings, in fallout. Which headline can be softened with one phone call and which will metastasize. Which uncle will punish my mother for my spine. Who in the company will be offered up to keep the elders clean. Which vow can be delayed, reshaped, technically honored: without splitting the business open.
I choose the only angle that isn’t a superstition I can bargain with: protection over applause. Let them keep the stage; let them keep the microphones fat with other people’s prayers. I turn before anyone can hook an arm through mine and steer me toward a sentence I don’t own. I slip along the pavilion’s edge, toward the staff-only corridors, where power moves in murmurs and timing, not vows.
The service corridor is a different country. Behind me, the garden continues its performance: music swelling, applause arriving on cue, the polite thunder of a world congratulating itself. In here, the sound collapses into muffled vibration, like a heartbeat heard through a wall.
Someone brushes past with a tray of tea glasses, the small spoons chiming softly. A runner murmurs into a headset. The air smells of hot wax and detergent and the metallic edge of chilled water bottles. It’s absurd, how quickly I start to feel human again, as if the only thing that makes me a symbol is proximity to the lanterns.
I slow, not because I’m lost, but because I can finally stop pretending I’m in a hurry toward something I want. My hand finds the seam of my jacket, a familiar anchor. My face does what it has always done: sets itself into the expression that says I’m grateful, I’m steady, I’m the kind of man who deserves what he’s being handed.
Then I let it slip. Not dramatically. Just a fraction. Like loosening a tie no one here is watching. Air makes it all the way into my lungs, and I realize I’ve been taking half-breaths for hours.
A staff member nods, eyes respectfully downcast, and keeps moving. They don’t ask where I’m going. They don’t call me by my full name with the weight of lineage attached. To them I’m just another body in formalwear who doesn’t belong in the corridor, and that anonymity is a small mercy.
I pass a door ajar to a storage nook. Boxes of candles stacked like offerings, spare jasmine garlands beginning to brown at the edges. The sight pricks at my superstition; decay in the middle of celebration. An omen, my mind whispers, hungry for patterns. I refuse it. I refuse everything that sounds like fate when it’s really just people.
My footsteps quiet. I smooth my cuffs once, out of habit, and then stop touching myself like I’m an object being arranged. The applause swells again, distant and pleased. I keep walking anyway, toward the one person I can’t afford to punish with my escape.
I find her where the corridor opens onto a side door, the kind the family never uses unless something is breaking. The light back here is honest and still she stands as if the chandeliers are trained on her, spine straight, chin level, the fabric of her dress refusing to look rumpled by reality. Two attendants hover at a respectful distance with clipboards, then drift away the moment Parvaneh snaps something quietly in their direction. Even offstage, my mother’s gravity edits the room.
Our eyes meet, and whatever smile I’ve been wearing all night, careful, rehearsed, useful, simply doesn’t make it to my face in time. For a second I’m bare, and she sees it. The fear, yes, but also the resentment I’ve tried to iron flat, and the longing I keep misnaming as fatigue.
Her gaze flicks over me the way it always has: checking damage, checking composure, checking whether I’m still her son or already someone else’s headline. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say I tried. The words crowd my throat, dangerous in their sincerity. So I hold them there, swallowing an apology that would sound like accusation if it escaped.
I lift my hand between us, small, contained, the kind of gesture that can pass for etiquette if anyone glances in. Two fingers to my sternum, then a brief dip of my head. Not surrender. Not performance. Pardon.
Not for what I’m about to refuse, but for the way I’ve carried it: tight-lipped, smiling, letting my quiet drag behind me like an insult. I’ve made my doubt look like contempt. I’ve made my fear look like arrogance. I’ve let her stand alone in a room that reads every pause as sabotage.
My eyes ask the ugliest thing I know how to ask without words: Can you forgive me for not being easy. When easy is what keeps you safe?
Her expression tightens, not cold, but careful, the way it does when she’s doing sums no one else can see. And I finally register what I’ve refused all evening: the eyes on her, too, the invisible hands measuring her worth against my compliance. The anger in me thins into something steadier. I don’t offer drama. I offer terms: my silence, my restraint, my refusal. Arranged so she can survive it.
Without a syllable, I set the bargain in the space between us: I will not light a match in the middle of her altar. No scene, no mic-drop, no headline with her name bleeding through it. But I also won’t step obediently into a life that edits me out, line by line. My gaze holds, steady, pleading, precise. Damage control, not capitulation. Truth, delivered gently enough to survive.
I slip off the terrace the way a liar slips off a promise. The laughter and music don’t stop for my exit; they don’t even hiccup. The garden keeps applauding itself while I cross into the narrow vein behind it, where everything that looks effortless is actually held together by tape and tired hands.
The service corridor smells like hot wax first, then detergent, then the bruised sweetness of orange blossom crushed underfoot. The air is warmer here, intimate in the unromantic way of kitchens and backstage wings. Someone has left a crate of bottled water sweating onto the tiles. A mop leans in a corner like a bored guard.
I follow the scent and the quiet urgency of movement until I see her.
Farimah is wedged between stacked candle crates and a tower of folded linens, as if the estate has tried to store her with the other necessities. Her dress is beautiful in the wrong light (too honest back here, too textured) and her fingertips are smudged with ink that no amount of elegance can disguise. She’s bent over a ribbon that has begun to fray at the edge, worrying it with the concentration of someone repairing the world one invisible thread at a time.
No one will notice it. Not the families trading alliances over saffron and pistachio, not the elders counting blessings like shares, not even the bride, who will be looking for meaning in everything except the things that actually hold. Farimah will notice. Farimah always notices. It’s her curse and her kind of prayer.
A runner hurries past, whispers something to someone in a headset. A tray clinks. Farimah doesn’t look up until her fingers finish what they started, tightening, smoothing, tucking the ugly end into the seam so it disappears.
Then her eyes lift and land on me, and for a second I feel caught the way a child is caught near a forbidden drawer: not with guilt, but with an intimacy I didn’t ask for. Her expression shifts, guarded warmth, irritation, concern, like she’s flipping through a stack of drafts trying to find the correct version of herself for this moment.
“Mehrzad,” she says, softly, as if my name could break something fragile here. And maybe it can.
She starts immediately, as if my presence is a problem she can solve with her hands. Her voice stays low, threaded through the clatter and footsteps. If I need air, there’s a side gate by the rose arbor; Parvaneh can divert security with a “vendor issue.” If I need time, she can swap two name cards so the right aunt sits in the wrong row and argues long enough to stall the procession. If I need a sign, she can change the lighting cue at the mirrored pavilion. One dimmer “accident,” a candle relit too slowly, a musician prompted to repeat the prelude like a prayer no one notices being extended.
She’s already mapping the estate in her mind, turning it into an instrument she can play: corridors as breaths, curtains as cover, ribbons as lies tied neatly enough to pass for tradition.
I let her finish. I watch the way she takes my panic and files it into shapes she can carry without bleeding. The ink on her fingertips looks like proof of something honest, and I hate how close I come to leaning on it.
When her hand goes toward the ribbon again (toward another contingency she can braid into beauty) I stop her. Not grabbing, not dramatic. Just my fingers lifting between us, palm half-open, a quiet barricade. The gesture feels unfamiliar on my body, like a boundary I was never taught to draw.
“Farimah,” I say, and keep my voice low enough that it belongs in this corridor, not on a stage. “Don’t.”
She blinks, ready to translate that into a plan anyway, but I shake my head once. Slow. Steady. The truth sits bitter on my tongue and I force it out without ornament: I’m not asking to be rescued from the cost. I’m not asking her to turn consequences into décor, to make my cowardice look like elegance.
“I can’t keep making you the hands that tidy up my life,” I whisper. “Not tonight.”
Farimah’s face goes tight (as if she’s biting back a lecture) then the tension drains, leaving a tired kind of clarity. She doesn’t bargain with me. She just studies my eyes like she’s checking for fever and asks, very simply, “Then what do you need from me, if not a trick?” I swallow. “Stay. Tell me the truth. Stand close when they decide to punish me for being human.”
We make a pact that has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with weathering what’s coming. No clever sabotage, no perfect loophole. Just ground we choose and refuse to surrender. Farimah will keep the beauty from turning into a weapon if the room goes cruel; I will stop handing her my cowardice. When my line arrives, I’ll speak it. And carry it.
The corridor keeps trying to make me smaller, narrow tile, low ceiling, the press of bodies moving with purpose, but the garden’s noise still reaches in, diluted into a distant applause. For once, I don’t grab at it like a rope. I let it wash over me the way you let rain fall when you’ve already accepted you’re going to get wet.
My mind does what it always does at the edge of trouble: draws exits, calculates angles, invents a version of me who can slip out of consequence without anyone noticing the missing weight. Side gate. Driver. “Emergency call.” A fainting cousin as distraction. A canceled vow dressed up as concern.
The old reflex rises, sharp and sweet. Then it breaks against something new and ugly and steady: there is no clean exit. There is only a cost, and the lie has always been that I can choose none.
I breathe in. Wax, detergent, crushed blossom. I breathe out, and I stop bargaining with ghosts.
One aim. Not purity. Not heroics. Reduce harm.
Protect the company’s stability. Because people who have never looked me in the eye will still lose their jobs if I light everything on fire. Protect my mother’s dignity: because she has paid for my name with years of her own silence. Protect, if I can, the smallest possible space for truth: so I don’t have to keep living as a rumor that smiles.
My chest tightens, not with panic now, but with the weight of deciding. It’s an unfamiliar heaviness, like putting on a garment that actually fits.
The practiced smile returns to my face, reflexive as a prayer. For a second I hate it: this polished curve that has gotten me through condolence lines and shareholder meetings and rooms full of predatory affection. Then I understand: a mask is not only obedience. A mask can be chosen. Worn on my terms. A tool, not a surrender.
I meet Farimah’s eyes and let the smile settle. Not to reassure her. To tell myself: I am not running. I am walking back in. And when the room demands my performance, it will get one. Just not the one they wrote for me.
I lean toward Farimah as if I’m asking about the seating chart or the timing of the musicians. Close enough to be intimate, ordinary enough to be invisible. My mouth barely moves.
“No scenes,” I murmur. “No last-minute ‘maybe.’ No letting them pretend this is a misunderstanding that time will smooth over.”
Her lashes flick, the smallest flinch of protest. I keep going before she can offer me an exit disguised as artistry.
“When I speak,” I say, “I speak as myself. Not as the poor pressured groom. Not as the son who had no choice. No blaming ‘circumstances,’ no hinting that someone forced my hand. If it hurts, it’s because I chose the words and I meant them.”
I feel the sentence land in my body like a stone dropping into water, heavy, final, ripples I can’t predict.
Farimah’s fingers hover near my sleeve, then stop. Her ink-stained hand closes into a fist and relaxes again, like she’s relearning what it means not to intervene.
“Plain,” I add, almost harsh with myself. “Clean. And owned.”
I spot Parvaneh where the service corridor spills into the pavilion’s shadow, half-visible between a stack of silver trays and a knot of anxious cousins. She’s doing three things at once, eyes counting, hands guiding, mouth saying nothing that can be quoted, and still she feels the shift in me like a change in weather.
I don’t wave. I don’t call her name. I just lift two fingers to my cufflink, the tiny, fussy gesture of a man who cares about details, and then I let my shoulders drop with a slow exhale I can’t afford to make in public.
A pause, I tell her without words. Not an escape. Not a scene. Just one controlled breath before the next cue locks like a clasp around my throat.
Parvaneh doesn’t even look at me again. She just makes the world obey. A whisper to a runner, a palm pressed flat against a silver tray as if it’s suddenly out of line, a quiet, efficient “Not yet” swallowed by the music. She taps the registry folder, checks the seal, nods like it’s routine. A minute slides into place, harmless as protocol, and I can breathe inside it.
In that stolen minute, I draft a sentence the way you strip a wound: no perfume, no family script, no soft “circumstances.” I keep what must survive, jobs, my mother’s face held upright. I concede what I can: silence about the rot behind it. I refuse the one lie I’ve lived on: that I’m agreeing. Then I move toward the lanterns, composed as if I’ve only been checking the time.
From the edge of the courtyard I watch the elders redistribute themselves with that frightening, inherited grace. Like pieces on a board moved by an invisible hand none of us admit exists. My uncle drifts toward the one journalist who doesn’t belong, intercepts him with the warmth of a host and the angle of a bouncer. He laughs, touches the man’s elbow, steers him toward pistachios and away from the mirrored pavilion as if conversation can be redirected the way water is guided through channels.
An aunt (one of the women who can turn cruelty into charm with a tilt of her chin) steps between two clusters of guests just as a rumor begins to take shape. I see it in the way mouths purse, in the quickening lean of bodies toward one another, hungry for scandal dressed as concern. She lifts her hand, light on her necklace, and releases a laugh that lands like a lid on a boiling pot. Her eyes never soften. They count.
A cousin, younger than me, performs assistance as if it’s affection: “This way, khanom, the view is better,” and the guests obey, because in this family even hospitality is an instruction. He is crowd control in cufflinks.
Their smiles aren’t warmth; they’re barricades. Not for me: for them. For the idea of us. For the fragile architecture that keeps the company’s name from becoming something people spit instead of toast.
I catch myself doing what I always do: translating gesture into motive, tallying alliances, measuring how close each person stands to each other like distance is a kind of confession. It would be easy to hate them for it, to call it manipulation, to imagine I’m the only honest thing in this garden.
But the truth tonight is uglier and, somehow, steadier: they’re not celebrating. They’re securing. They’re building a perimeter out of etiquette and roses, because if one crack shows (if the wrong face tightens at the wrong moment) everything they’ve stitched together with money and tradition and silence could tear in a single loud second.
I catch the tiny tells I was trained to interpret as piety or age. Anything harmless. Tonight they read like emergency signals. A strand of worry-worry prayer beads worrying harder, knuckles whitening under gold. A patriarch smoothing his waistcoat, then glancing past the musicians not once but twice, tracking the cleanest line to the gate as if he’s memorized evacuation routes. An older aunt’s smile held too long, jaw locked beneath lipstick, the kind of smile you wear when you’re holding something together with your teeth.
Even the staff aren’t just serving; they’re sealing seams. A runner pauses at the wrong moment and Parvaneh’s hand is already there, gentle, firm, guiding him out of the frame. A security man shifts his weight so he blocks the service corridor without looking like he’s blocking anything at all.
Someone’s gaze flicks toward the reflecting pool and away again, quick as a superstition, as if water might betray us by showing what we’re thinking instead of what we’ve rehearsed. The whole garden is a stage, yes. But not for vanity. For containment. For keeping a lid on a pot everyone can feel starting to boil.
The realization lands with a clinical, almost merciful clarity: they’re not only shielding me from gossip and headlines. They’re bracing the entire scaffolding: contracts that keep factories humming, salaries that let men go home with dignity, charitable boards that would evaporate the second our name becomes a punchline, the invisible favors that keep rivals politely outside our doors. And my mother. Her safety isn’t sentimental; it’s structural. Her standing is collateral, tied to every smile I’m expected to hold steady.
Ritual, I understand, is not romance to them. It’s a knot. A way of making promises feel irreversible. If the knot slips in public, alliances loosen in private. And if alliances loosen, the company doesn’t just wobble: it becomes edible.
For the first time, their insistence doesn’t feel like a hand on my throat so much as fingers white-knuckled around the edge of a cliff. Tradition is just the story they tell panic so it sounds respectable. I can’t afford the luxury of rage. It drains you, makes you loud. I let it run cold, turn into arithmetic. Who falls, who survives, what breaks, what can be spared.
I let the perspective sink in like cold tea (bitter, sobering) without offering it the mercy of forgiveness. I can understand their stakes and still resent the hands tightening the knot around my life. If they’re laying ceremony like bricks, then what I say next has to function as a door: slim, precise, believable. An opening that doesn’t invite a stampede.
I stop hunting for the version of this evening where everyone walks away satisfied, where the garden keeps its perfume and none of it turns sour in anyone’s mouth. That version is a bedtime story I’ve been telling myself because it lets me pretend I’m still in control. If I can just find the right sentence, the right smile, the right delay, if I can arrange my own life like Parvaneh arranges tables, then no one will have to feel the sharp edge of my refusal.
But this isn’t a puzzle. It’s a crowded room with too many eyes and not enough exits.
In my head I walk the guest list like a ledger, flipping pages without moving my face. Elders first: the ones whose blessings are really signatures, whose nostalgia is a form of enforcement. Then the partners from Tehran who keep their hands in their pockets like they’re already counting what falls out if I stumble. Then the cousins performing loyalty the way you perform prayer: correct posture, practiced sincerity. Then the friends who want to believe I’m still myself, not a role with my name stitched on the collar. Then the rivals who came to this wedding the way you come to an auction: to see what breaks, and for how cheap.
Every path creates an enemy. If I comply, I become my own. If I resist, I gift the room a story it’s been starving for. If I hesitate, the hesitation becomes the only thing anyone remembers: He faltered. If I smile too much, it looks like guilt. If I don’t smile, it looks like contempt. Even my silence is interpretive material, something people can hold up to the light and claim they see meaning in.
And somewhere in all of it, worse than the elders, worse than the headlines, is the small, humiliating fact that I don’t get to be misunderstood in private. Not tonight. Not with this many witnesses. Disappointment is no longer a threat I can dodge. It’s a cost I have to choose how to pay, and who I let it land on.
The question in me stops being theatrical. It stops being How do I get out? and becomes something colder, almost steadier: What, exactly, cannot be allowed to break? The fantasy of a clean exit evaporates the way perfume does when the night air shifts: there and then suddenly not, leaving only the memory of sweetness and the fact of your skin.
There are fixed points. The company first, not because I love it the way my father wanted me to, but because it holds other people’s ordinary lives in its teeth. If I set fire to that, I won’t be brave. I’ll be careless.
Then my mother. Her dignity isn’t an accessory I can pawn for moral clarity; it’s the only armor she’s ever been allowed. If I crack it in front of these people, they won’t comfort her: they’ll study her.
And then the collateral: Parvaneh in the shadows, staff who will be blamed for any chaos, the few friends whose proximity will be rewritten as conspiracy. Those become my boundaries. Not bargaining chips. Not sacrifices I can make to feel free for five minutes.
I pick my refusals now, before the garden can edit me in real time. I set them like small, hard weights in my mind: stones I can press my fingers against when the crowd’s current turns insistent. No public promise I haven’t already agreed to in private. No “darling, say it for them” moment where romance is just a velvet glove over a contract. No expansion deal announced at the sofreh as if my future is a sweet to be passed on a silver tray. No vows that smuggle in obligations, no toasts that turn my name into a receipt for someone else’s generosity. If they try to steer me, I will not argue, I will simply not step where they point. I will become politely, unmistakably immovable.
I let myself be flawed without turning it into evidence that I deserve the cage. If the night stutters, if a toast lands wrong, if a pause reads like defiance, if whispers flower behind fans and cufflinks, let them. Let someone call me ungrateful; let them make a story out of my restraint. I’d rather pay in embarrassment now than in years of private rot after the music dies.
I rehearse a smaller kind of courage in the hollow behind my ribs: plain words, no flourish, nothing that can be embroidered into a vow. I will offer the minimum that keeps the company steady, my mother uncornered, the staff unscapegoated. Not a grand rebellion, not surrender: just a narrow door. A clean sentence. A pause. Enough air to breathe.
At the pavilion’s lip, my face does what it has been trained to do. It’s muscle memory, the kind you build in boardrooms and at funerals, in photographs where your mother’s fingers pinch your elbow just out of frame. A practiced smile, offered forward like a signed contract.
It almost holds.
Then I catch the mirrorwork inside the shāh-nishin throwing back a hundred fractured versions of me. Each shard a different Mehrzad: obedient son, charming heir, future husband, the man who says yes before he understands what it costs. The smile falters, not dramatically, just enough that I feel air touch teeth that were meant to stay hidden. For a second I can’t tell if the falter is visible or only loud in my own skull.
Easy. If I keep the mask on, the night runs on rails. The elders get their story. The cameras get their symmetry. The deal-makers get their proof of unity, sealed in silk and candlelight. Everyone goes home satisfied, and I go home… what? A person-shaped emblem.
My superstition pricks at me: an old habit of counting omens in stupid things. The way the lantern flame leans. The brief sting of rosewater in my throat. The fact that my right palm won’t stop itching, as if money is coming or leaving. I press my thumb to the inside of my ring finger, hard, a private pressure point I’ve used since I was a boy to keep from saying the wrong thing.
The music swells, and my body wants to float with it, to surrender to choreography. I don’t. I let the smile die properly, respectfully, like a candle pinched between wet fingers. No smoke, no scene. In its place I set something plainer: my mouth neutral, my gaze steady, my breathing counted.
If I’m going to be watched tonight, let them watch me choose.
I slow by half a heartbeat and let the stream of silk and perfume slip past me. The procession keeps its rhythm; I simply step out of it for one thin breath, long enough to take inventory.
The signed registry folder should be a quiet prop, a formality tucked into velvet. Instead it sits like a detonator on a side table near the sofreh, not quite in Parvaneh’s orbit, closer to an uncle whose smile never changes. Two men I don’t recognize, wrong suits, wrong stillness, stand at the pavilion’s edge with their hands hovering near their ears as if waiting for a cue. Security, or something dressed as it.
I follow eyelines. Nahid’s gaze is a straight pin: not on the bride, not on the mirror, on me, measured, warning. Soraya’s attention skitters from the calligraphed program to the elders’ cluster, as if she’s counting contradictions. Farimah is half-hidden behind a floral stand, fingers stained with ink, watching the table arrangement like it might confess.
And there (by the service corridor) Kian. Not performing. Just looking at me like I’m still allowed to choose.
I straighten my cuffs as if the world depends on millimeters. The silk slides under my fingertips, cool and obedient, and I let the motion take longer than it needs. One button, a pause, the second. Not vanity. Not for anyone’s approval. For cadence. For the quiet authority of deciding when the next thing happens.
Etiquette has always been their leash. Tonight I make it my armor.
In that small, rehearsed ritual I steal a strip of silence no one can interrupt without looking rude, and I fill it with ruthless clarity: what I will give them, grace, composure, the shape of tradition, and what I won’t: my voice as a ventriloquist’s dummy, my yes as a foregone conclusion.
My pulse steadies. My posture does too, not softer, just mine.
An attendant leans in, breath sweet with cardamom, and murmurs about the proper moment as if timing is a law and I’m only a hand to move across it. I turn my head just enough to acknowledge him. “Thank you,” I say, voice even. “I’ll begin when I’m ready.” Not a challenge, not permission. An edit. And if there’s to be an announcement, it will be mine.
I step into the pavilion’s glow the way I sign a hard clause. Fear still crowds my ribs, hot and insistent, trying to turn my feet into someone else’s feet. I let it speak; I don’t let it drive. My shoulders settle into their own weight. Not a prince on display, not a piece in motion. Just a man arriving on purpose.
For a moment my gaze drops. Not in submission, but in inventory, the way my father used to sweep a room before he chose where to sit. I take stock of small, stupid things as if they can tell me what the grown-ups won’t.
Candlelight trembles across the mirror tiles, multiplying into nervous stars. Each flicker makes the pavilion look alive, like it’s breathing in glass. The candelabra stand at a careful angle, identical and yet not: one leans a fraction toward the sofreh, a tilt so slight most people would call it nothing. My chest tightens anyway. In my head the old superstitions line up like prayer beads: a crooked flame, a crooked promise. I hate that I still believe in omens; I hate more that they keep being right in the only ways that matter.
Beyond the rugs, the fountain basin holds floating candles that refuse to stay still. They drift, bump, separate, reunite: tiny negotiations in wax and heat. Someone has arranged them into a loose circle, and still they won’t behave, slipping out of symmetry every time the air shifts. The same draft that lifts the jasmine garlands moves those flames, and I feel it on my knuckles like a warning: beauty is never as controlled as the people paying for it pretend.
The mirror in front of the sofreh catches my reflection again, but I don’t look at my face. I look at my hands. Steady. Visible. Capable of signing, shaking, surrendering, or refusing. My right palm itches, and I rub it once against the side seam of my trousers, a discreet gesture that reads as nothing to anyone watching for spectacle.
If I can read a contract by the texture of a handshake, I can read this too. The ceremony is a script, the light a spotlight, the stillness an expectation dressed as tradition. Fine. Let them choreograph the stage. I will choose where my eyes land. I will decide what the next movement means.
I count without moving my lips. In for four, hold for two, out for six. My grandmother’s arithmetic for panic, taught to me the first time I fainted at a funeral and everyone pretended it was the heat. The music outside the pavilion swells, strings tightening around a melody that wants to sound like destiny, and I let it become my metronome. No one questions stillness when it’s dressed in ceremony.
My smile stays in place the way a sign stays nailed to a wall: legible, polite, impersonal. The corners lift on command, the exact degree that reads as gratitude instead of giddiness. I can feel the muscles in my cheeks beginning to ache, a small, stupid pain that anchors me better than any sermon.
Breath in: I taste rosewater and pistachio dust. Breath out: I release the urge to look for exits like a criminal.
I don’t let the count make me smaller. I use it to claim timing. Each exhale is a refusal to be hurried. Each inhale is me deciding, again, not to disappear inside the role they’ve pressed onto my shoulders.
An omen slips in anyway, the way scent does. Somewhere behind me, someone steps wrong and orange blossoms get crushed into the rugs; sweetness turns sharp, green, almost bitter. A thread of jasmine, loosened from a garland, catches on my cuff and tugs like a small hand asking for attention. I should laugh at myself. I should call it nonsense, the private superstition of a boy who wanted the world to be readable.
Instead I take it the way I take a change in tone during negotiations: as information.
My body has a language my mind pretends not to speak. I don’t obey it. I catalogue it (scent, snag, the tilt of flame) quiet evidence of where the night is trying to push me.
I remember promises from when I was younger: how they sounded like metal struck clean, ringing through my ribs, so easy to mistake for virtue. Back then I thought duty was just love with better posture. Tonight I roll each word on my tongue before I offer it to anyone, tasting for hooks, for hidden clauses, for the specific weight it would lock around my throat.
I don’t exile the soft, ridiculous part of me that still thinks a crooked flame means a crooked life. I keep it tucked under my ribs like a compass I never show, the needle twitching at every glance and gesture. Etiquette becomes my lacquered box, smooth, respectable, hard to pry open, so what I choose inside it stays mine.
The doorway throws its light at me as if it’s an instruction. Step forward, be seen, let the room decide what you are. I let it hit the edge of my shoulder, the clean line of my jacket, the plane of my cheek, and I stop with my toes exactly on the threshold. Not dramatic. Not defiant. Just…accurate. A man placing himself with intention.
In the pause, I feel the weight of eyes the way I feel humidity before rain. Elders measuring, cousins hunting for weakness, strangers hungry for a story they can repeat later with their mouths shaped like sympathy. Somewhere beyond the pavilion, musicians find a note that trembles and then resolves, and I borrow that: the tremble is allowed, the resolution is mine.
I choose the angle of my chin. Fractionally down so it reads as respect, not apology. I choose the distance between my lips: enough to suggest warmth, not enough to invite questions. The smile is a small architecture. Built to hold a ceiling up.
Breath, then. Not the shallow kind that makes a body look guilty. I draw it low, where the ribs can widen without lifting my shoulders. In through my nose, rosewater again, sweet and too familiar, out through my mouth, slow enough to make my pulse behave. I imagine my exhale smoothing the air in front of me the way my mother used to smooth a tablecloth before guests arrived, pressing wrinkles flat so no one could point at them.
Someone says my name like a blessing. Someone else says it like a claim.
I don’t answer either of them yet. I let the silence become a courtesy, a practiced hesitation that looks like reverence for tradition. In truth it’s a boundary I’m drawing with nothing but timing. One heartbeat longer, and the room adjusts around me instead of the other way around.
Then I step (measured, inevitable) and the light follows as if I’m the one carrying it.
Compliments arrive in layers, the way petals do when someone thinks beauty can be made heavier by repetition. Mashallah, an aunt murmurs, fingers grazing my sleeve as if I’m a talisman. An uncle’s laugh lands too loud on my shoulder, pride, possession, warning dressed as celebration. I return each greeting with the exact pressure of a handshake my father taught me: firm enough to read as confidence, brief enough to deny intimacy.
“Thank you for coming,” I say, and mean it the way a host means it, broadly, safely. “Your kindness honors us,” to the elders, because honor is their currency. “I’m glad you could make the trip,” to the ones who want to be seen as important. Each phrase is polished until it reflects back only what they brought to it.
I let my eyes soften without letting them linger. I let my smile widen a fraction and then settle, like a door opened to show there’s light inside and then closed before anyone can step through.
If someone fishes for certainty, Are you excited? Are you ready?, I give them etiquette instead of truth. “It’s a blessed night,” I say, and keep my blessing unclaimed.
I track the room the way I track a boardroom. Only the stakes are softer on the surface and sharper underneath. An elder’s hand lifts, not to wave, but to summon; a cousin leans in before he’s called, eager to be useful. Two men I don’t recognize stand where ushers shouldn’t, shoulders squared, eyes doing the slow sweep of security trained to notice exits. The tightening is subtle. An extra body at the pavilion’s side, a service corridor gate that was open earlier now nudged shut with the casualness of inevitability.
And then there’s the program: folded paper passing between manicured fingers like contraband. People glance at it and then at me, as if the ink contains a cue I might refuse. I memorize who checks it twice. I memorize who doesn’t need to.
The first prompt comes wrapped in silk. An uncle leaning close, voice bright with implication. “And of course, you’ll share the news tonight.”
I let my expression open like gratitude. “You honor me,” I say, and I mean the politeness. Then I tilt it, gently. “After the aghd, when everyone’s settled, I’d like to speak properly: with the details, with the right order.” A promise offered as reverence. A boundary dressed as planning.
In their story, I change shape in a way that makes discipline expensive. If they push too hard, the lacquer cracks and everyone sees the hand beneath it. So I stay present, impeccably respectful, and I start naming terms with the calm of a man discussing seating charts, timing, sequence, privacy. I become the one thing they can’t parade: agreeable, but not for sale.
The music reaches for me first. Strings swelling under the mirrored dome, that old romantic ache that is supposed to make a man soften, surrender, believe in inevitability. I let it touch my skin and slide off. Sound is easy to counterfeit. So is praise. Arous damād, mubārak, cheh shāh-dāmād-i. Their voices brush past my ears like perfume sprayed too close. If I breathe it in, it becomes mine. I won’t.
I take the compliments the way I take champagne from a waiter’s tray: fingers precise, expression grateful, never drinking. My attention stays where it matters, faces, hands, the micro-flinches people don’t realize they offer.
Some smiles are clean. A childhood friend’s sister in the back row catches my eye for half a second and her mouth lifts without calculation; she looks away the way you do when you don’t want to demand anything. Affection. Real, and therefore rare enough to hurt.
Most of the others feel like signatures.
An elder’s smile is wide but his eyes don’t crease, investment, the kind that expects dividends by midnight. A man from the bank I’ve only met twice beams as if we share a secret, his gaze flicking to the side where the groom’s chair will face the mirror; his joy is a down payment on influence. My aunt’s grin wavers when she thinks no one is watching, then returns stronger: affection braided with fear, because she knows what happens to women in this family when a man disappoints the room.
I watch who speaks to my mother and who avoids her. Who touches their ring when they look at me. Who keeps scanning the service corridor as if a door might open and ruin the choreography.
Even the bride’s academic circle, sharp suits, careful lipstick, smiles with their teeth, and I can almost hear the footnotes forming behind their eyes.
I give everyone the same courteous warmth, measured like a dose. Inside, I keep counting: love, leverage, loyalty, threat. Tonight is a ledger, and my face is the polite stamp that says received without ever saying agreed.
The first future arrives like a mirror held too close, bright, flawless, and suffocating in its detail. I see myself in photographs before I’ve even lived the moments: my name embossed on invitations, my face on a charity banner, my hand clasped around hers with the exact angle that reads as devotion. Titles settle onto my shoulders like tailored coats, heavy, expensive, impossible to shrug off in public. They will call it stability. They will call it legacy.
In that future, tenderness is permitted but supervised. Kisses timed for cameras, laughter approved because it sounds harmless, arguments converted into “misunderstandings” before they can become truth. My calendar becomes a cage made of gold ink: board meetings, donor dinners, family lunches where my mother’s smile is both reward and ransom. Even my silence is managed: someone will translate it into humility, into strength, into whatever narrative sells best this quarter.
And when I try to want something unprofitable, I can already hear the soft correction: not no, never no. Just later, after the next milestone, after the next applause.
The second future comes like a camera flash straight to the nerve: I stand up at the wrong second, I say one honest sentence without wrapping it in etiquette, and the entire garden inhales as one body. Silence first: then the rapid, delighted panic of people who’ve been waiting for something to repeat at dinner parties. Someone drops a spoon; someone laughs too loudly to prove they’re not afraid. Security shifts, not toward me, but toward the exits, toward anyone who might carry the story out before the family can edit it.
My mother’s face goes white in a way that isn’t anger, it’s calculation under grief. The elders don’t shout. They don’t need to. They simply let me become a lesson: See what happens when you indulge a man’s feelings. Rivals don’t even have to invent chaos, I’d hand them clean, usable footage.
The third path doesn’t appear until I do something humiliatingly simple: I stop trying to save everyone at once. I let the company stay sacred in the way a backbone is sacred. I let the elders keep their choreography long enough to avoid a stampede. And then, with the same calm, I draw the line: my consent is not a clause, my heart not a merger, my choosing not for auction.
With the futures laid out like tiles beneath glass, I move toward the threshold and feel the room try to settle me into place. I don’t let it. I step in as if I’m accepting a blessing, shoulders loose, smile practiced: while inside I’m already drafting clauses. I will speak their language, timing, honor, gratitude, soft enough to pass, sharp enough to shift what they think they own.
The understanding doesn’t arrive like wisdom. It arrives like pain, small, exact, and impossible to argue with. I have been bargaining with the universe as if etiquette is a system of exchanges: if I bow at the right angle, if I choose the sanctioned words, if I swallow my own pulse and call it patience, then no one will have to lose. My mother keeps her standing. The elders keep their order. The company keeps its spine. The bride keeps her dignity. I keep something unnamed and private, tucked under my ribs like contraband.
But “proper” isn’t a refuge. It’s a blade with a velvet handle.
Every correct choice has an edge. That’s what the garden has been teaching me all evening with its careful geometry: paths that look generous until you realize the walls decide where your feet can go. I can already feel the bloodless injuries I’ve been calling compromise: the way my mother’s pride tightens when I hesitate, the way the elders’ patience thins into threat, the way the bride’s circle watches me like I’m an argument they’re ready to publish. Even the staff, moving like shadows behind the mirrored pavilion, will pay if I turn tonight into spectacle. Parvaneh’s feet, Farimah’s reputation, the security men who will be blamed for not predicting my mood. There is no clean rebellion, no clean obedience.
And the worst lie I’ve been living on is the one that paints me as benevolent: that if I suffer quietly enough, I can purchase peace for everyone else.
I can’t. The math doesn’t work. The room is too crowded with stakes, and my body is not an endless fund.
So I stop searching for the option that leaves every face smooth. I let the fantasy die: the fantasy that there is a perfect sentence that will spare my mother shame and spare me myself, that there’s a way to refuse without anyone calling it refusal. Whatever I do will crease someone. Whatever I do will cost. The only real choice is whose pain I am willing to authorize. And whether I will keep pretending it isn’t mine to decide.
The ache settles in me and, for once, I don’t treat it like weather. Something that happens to a man, excusable because it’s out of his control. I name it. I weigh it. I decide what it’s worth. If tonight hurts, it will hurt because I chose a line and held it, not because I drifted with everyone else’s hands on my back.
There is a strange cleanliness in that. Responsibility isn’t comforting, but it is simple: I stop pretending I’m a victim of tradition when I’ve also been using tradition as a hiding place. I stop letting my mother’s fear, the elders’ hunger for order, the bride’s pride, the company’s need for continuity, all of it, write my body into their contracts. They can still take pieces of me, yes. They can still make me pay. But they will not get my life for free, not through my cowardice dressed up as courtesy.
I draw one private boundary so sharp it almost sings. Whatever else I surrender, I will not surrender my consent and call it love.
I turn back to the watching circle and feel my manners slide into place like a tailored coat. My smile finds its angle. My chin dips at exactly the right moment, not submissive, not defiant: the old calibration of a son who knows the cost of making elders wait. I offer gratitude that sounds like devotion, admiration that sounds like agreement. I let my sentences breathe, let the pauses do what shouting never could: make them lean in, make them assume I’m about to give them what they came to take. Each phrase is a small, deliberate purchase: a heartbeat, a step, an inch of air. Courtesy, tonight, is not surrender. It’s cover.
In the thin gaps between praise I let my eyes do what my mouth cannot. I track hands that shepherd me toward the microphone as if it’s a guillotine disguised in gold. I note who won’t meet my gaze, suddenly fascinated by candles and crystal. And at the word partnership, I catalog the smiles that arrive too fast, too relieved, as if they’ve already heard my yes.
Under the lacquer of my manners, I keep one want unconverted into strategy. It isn’t grand enough to impress them. Only stubborn, only true. I press it to the inside of my ribs like a talisman and let it set the weight of my next breath. Whatever I say, it will orbit that center. I will not be sweet-talked into vanishing.
The mirrored ceiling turns the pavilion into a machine for making symbols. Light catches the facets above me and fractures, and suddenly I am everywhere, my profile repeated, my hands repeated, the practiced tilt of my mouth repeated, each reflection a candidate they can vote for without ever asking me.
It should feel flattering, this multiplication. Instead it feels like being audited.
In one shard I’m the dutiful son: shoulders squared, eyes lowered just enough to read as respect. In another I’m the decisive executive: calm jaw, the kind of stillness investors mistake for certainty. In another I’m the groom they can photograph: a soft gaze calibrated for romance, a man whose tenderness is safe because it is ceremonial. There are versions of me I can perform in my sleep, and the room has learned them like prayers. I can feel their expectations rising toward the mirrors, trying to pin one of those men in place and call him “Mehrzad,” as if a name is a stamp.
My throat tightens. For a second the air smells sharper. Rosewater and candle smoke and orange blossom crushed under too many polite feet. I catch my own eyes in a sliver of glass and they look too awake for someone who is supposed to be surrendering. Good. Let them see it, if they’re looking closely enough to be afraid.
I don’t need to shatter anything. I don’t need to announce a war. I only need to stop donating my body to other people’s stories.
So I choose.
Not the heir who never hesitates. Not the son who apologizes with every breath. Not the groom made out of costume and obligation. I choose the version of me that can breathe in this room without lying. Chin level, shoulders easy, smile present but not pleading. A man who can let the mirrors keep their replicas while he keeps his pulse.
Somewhere beyond the pavilion’s edge, music swells and falters, and the sound reminds me there are exits even in a walled garden. I take one slow inhale and let that be my first private vow.
Etiquette settles over my shoulders the way a well-cut jacket does. Weight I’ve paid for, seams measured to my body, fabric chosen because it photographs well. It doesn’t lock my arms. It gives them somewhere to rest.
I feel the room waiting for the familiar fastening: the first button of obedience, the second of gratitude, the third of public certainty. I can do that in my sleep. I’ve done it at board tables and funerals and dinners where the food went cold while men decided my future between sips of tea. Tonight I let my fingers hover, slow, deliberate. I fasten only what serves me.
A smile, yes, the proper angle, the proper warmth, goes on like a cufflink. My posture follows, spine straight but not rigid, the kind that reads as respect instead of fear. I let my voice soften around honorifics, let my eyes lower at the right moments, not to submit but to conceal.
Because a jacket can be unbuttoned.
Because I can choose when to show throat and when to show teeth.
I am not walking into a cage. I am walking into a role I understand well enough to weaponize.
The musicians keep the air gentle on purpose, strings laid like silk over a room that wants to clench. In that softness I can hear the real negotiations: elders trading murmured permissions behind their fans, cousins passing instructions like sweets, the slight scrape of a chair that says someone important has decided to stand. Security doesn’t look at faces so much as routes; one guard shifts his weight to block the service corridor without seeming to, another keeps his hand too near his earpiece, waiting for a cue he didn’t invent.
And then, there, near the sofreh, the registry folder. Not where it should be. A cousin’s eyes flick to it and away too fast, as if the paper itself might accuse him. Good. Let it accuse. I mark the angles, the exits, the hands that hover. I keep breathing. I keep watching.
When the practiced smile arrives, it doesn’t come with the old, reflexive softness that begs to be forgiven. It settles on my face like a polite latch. Warm, yes. Enough to keep the mothers and uncles soothed, enough to keep the cameras kind. But it holds. It says: you may look, you may applaud, you may assume. Yet you will not reach in and steer.
Inside the ritual’s sheen, I keep that one honest desire unbroken, like a thread clenched between my teeth. Not to ruin them. Not to kneel. To see. To choose. I let the room believe I’m stepping into their story while I quietly rewrite the sentence they think comes next. Whatever leaves my mouth will be mine, measured, courteous, and untouchable by glass.