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❝Angels don't lie, but you do. If I'm a devil, what are you?❞
When Burq loses his memory in an accident and doesn't remember his own wife anymore, Leyla finds it a chance to escape her beastly husband and pretends to be his friend...
The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God!
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
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"We met in Auckland one Thursday afternoon, late in the summer. The weather that day was as it is today— stormy and pouring." Leyla fills the tea in the cups and hands one to Burq. "Careful."
He takes it from her and holds it on his lap. The blanket covering his legs is keeping him warm against angry nature outside and concealing his cast. Sitting in his living room at his home, in a wheelchair, is still better than lying in a hospital bed. He can just pretend everything to be normal for a while.
"Don't tell me it was something cliché," Burq comments. "Like us running into each other in a coffee shop or my office."
Leyla hides her smile behind her cup as she sips her tea, but Burq doesn't miss it. "No, it was nothing like that. Why, I see you're expecting it to be more of a romantic encounter."
"I'll fear that, pardon me." He smirks, looking unimpressed. "Life is no novel or movie to me."
"Don't be offended now." Leyla puts down her cup, her eyes telling him she has heard the taunt in his words. "I met you at a library."
He knits his brows. "Library?"
"Yes," she confirms. "My sister studies in Auckland. I visited her to her university and then decided to check out their library. I met you there."
His memory is like a white blank sheet. He has an apartment in Auckland and runs his own factory there. But what he was doing at a university library is beyond his understanding. Is Leyla making up a story?
"How?" Burq asks, needing to know more. "You couldn't reach a book on the shelf and I picked it for you?" he jokes.
She chuckles at that, undoing her hair from the bun before tying it back up. His gaze follows every movement of her fingers nimbly. "I think I would have liked that too, but no."
"Uh huh. Then?"
"You were mumbling to yourself how libraries are quiet like graveyards and how you don't like them." She smiles, as if remembering the moment and reliving it. "I was standing beside you and looked up at you. It seemed to me only then you noticed me standing there, and you just said hi."
Burq bites his lower lip as the corners of it twitch up in a smile of his own. "What did you say back?"
"You think I wouldn't have said back just hi?"
"I think you're not such a simple woman. Apparently, yes. But actually? No."
Leyla studies him as she fixes his eyes. Burq stares, letting her as she always lets him study her.
"I replied with how that quiet was peaceful rather than haunting, and you smiled and apologized for disturbing my peace." She lowers her gaze to the cup in her hands, tracing its rim with her ring finger. "I told you how you didn't look sorry and you said it was because you weren't really." She looks back up but out to the rain pouring through the glass wall this time. "I don't remember the details, but we both ended up out in the rain that day, and you told me how you haven't been so happy in long and if we could meet again."
