I never wanted to fall in love. To me, love looked like pale light. Not lustrous enough to illuminate the world or dazzle one’s eyes, but bright enough to fool you into thinking it might. In the harem, some of my mothers told me love was a decadent ambrosia, something to be sipped and savored. Others told me it was an open wound. One of the mothers—a slip of a woman who wouldn’t survive her first pregnancy—had pulled me aside and told me something I never forgot: “Love is like Death without the guarantee of its arrival. Love may not come for you, but when it does it will be just as swift and
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