“I’m sorry,” Root looked down at the puddle on the floor and the towel she was using to mop it up. She looked sheepishly at the older woman, “I just…always make a mess.” She looked down at herself, wrapped only in a towel. Her voice was low and unsure, “I’ll go get dressed now.”
The woman watched Root walk out of the bathroom and looked down at the mess on the floor. She pressed the button on the wall to call the maid and walked out of the room after Root. “Would you like something to eat?”
Root was in the middle of putting on a shirt as modestly as she could. “Um, anything really. Thank you, Neda.”
The woman nodded. She walked out of the room and down the hallway. After dropping off a food request with the kitchen, Neda walked down the long hallway of her luxurious house and up the stairs. She passed her bedroom and walked straight into her office.
She sat down at her computer and made a video chat request the second her computer woke up.
Her cousin’s face popped up on the screen a few minutes later. “How is she?”
Neda shrugged, “She’s still in a daze. I don’t know what happened to her, but it must have been traumatic.” Neda looked at some notes she had been taking the day before, “She ate twice yesterday and sat by the pool for four hours just staring at the land on the other side of the yard.” Neda moved some papers around on her glass desk and shook her head, “Her wounds are healing well, especially the ones on her back.” Neda looked over her notes and became nauseous as she read over her description of Root’s healing wounds. “I think her recovery would go more quickly if she had some familiar faces.” She looked right into her cousin’s eyes, “It’s been five weeks at the same level of emotional…muteness.”
“That’s not possible right now,” Neda’s cousin answered over the video chat. She looked to her side, obviously on a camera attached to a phone.
“Sameen,” Neda pleaded with her cousin, “What happened to that poor woman? Her wounds are…purposeful. Someone did that to her.”
Shaw shook her head, “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Because the people who did that to her are so dangerous that you had to drop her off in my office in Tehran in the middle of the night.”
Shaw nodded. She put her hand over her eyes, rubbing her temples, “Um, give her a computer. See if she’ll-”
“I already tried,” Neda answered, “She won’t even open the laptop I had sent to her room.”
Shaw sighed. “Okay. Um…I’ll call back in a few hours. Thanks for taking care of her.”
Neda looked sympathetically at her cousin, “I’ll see if she wants to go to the beach. She seemed to quite like it there.”
Shaw nodded, “That’s a good idea.” There was a long pause like Shaw wanted to say something, but instead she pursed her lips together before muttering, “I’ll call later.”
Then Neda’s screen went black.
