“The father married his daughter, who was blind from birth, to a beggar—and what happened next surprised many people.”

He pressed his hands against her face. She felt the dampness of tears—not her own, but hers.

“I didn’t take you because I was paid, Zainab. I took you because when he described you, I realized we were the same. We were both ghosts. I thought… I thought if I could protect you, if I could show you the world through my words, maybe I could get my soul back. But then I fell in love with the ghost. And that was never part of the plan.”

Zainab froze. The betrayal was there, yes—the lie of his identity—but it was shrouded in a far more painful truth. He wasn’t a beggar of fate; he was a beggar by choice, a man living in a self-imposed purgatory.

“The fire,” she murmured. “Aminah mentioned a fire.”

“My past is burning,” he said. “I have nothing left of that man, Zainab. Only the knowledge of how to heal. I treat the sick in the village at night, in secret. That’s where the excess copper comes from. That’s how I bought your medicine last week.”

Zainab reached out, her fingers trembling as she traced the contours of his face. She found the bridge of his nose, the hollows of his cheeks, the moisture in his eyes. He wasn’t the monster her sister had described. He was a man broken by his own humanity, trying to piece himself back together with his loved ones.

“You should have told me,” she said.

“I was afraid that if you knew I was a doctor, you would ask me to fix the one thing I can’t,” he stammered. “I can’t give you your sight, Zainab. I can only give you my life.”

The tension in the room broke. Zainab pulled him close, burying her face in the crook of his neck. The cabin was small, the walls thin, and the outside world cruel, but in the center of the storm, they were no longer ghosts.

Years passed.