Excerpt from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And yes, maybe she feels a few inches of gratitude for the armistice he has granted her. And yes, probably the waiting days smother her, the twinned knowing and not-knowing what happens after, imagining Henry at every turn, cartoony with rage or puzzlement, but what is she to do?

* * *

AFTER THAT, HE drowns her himself. And who could blame him? If you want a job done right, you'd better know the end of this sentence. He comes upon her in the bath. He wraps his hands around her bare shoulders and thrusts her beneath the bathwater. Soap bubbles and air bubbles bloom in multitude. An artery in his skull skitters wildly. The water fights. The walls steam with tension.

She tries to thrash away from him, of course. She tries to defend herself. But he's six foot two, built like a person who wrestles lions in his leisure time, and she is not. There is nothing more complicated here. He is not the first man to do this, or the wealthiest, or the angriest. He certainly isn't the last. As they say, it's one of the oldest horses in the stable.

Eventually the water stills. Her body floats. He sits on the brim of the tub, head bowed, the cuffs of his doublet dripping, his fingers pruning a gentle shade of violet. Up close, murder is a messy business, decidedly unroyal, too much flesh and screaming. He sits in wait—for how long, who knows. When the surface moves again and she sits up, feral-eyed and vomiting bathwater, he sighs.

"What do we do with you?" he says, not so much a question as a regret. And she has no answer, of course she has no answer.

* * *

IT IS HE who helps her out of the tub, although she resists. He hands her the bathrobe, courteously studying the mosaic of the floor while she covers up. He helps her back to her rooms.

You will want her to scream at him, perhaps. To shove her house key through the soft wetness of his eye, to land a solid, bone-cracking punch to his solar plexus, or at the very least to kick him in his royalest of parts, but she has just survived death. She is alive. Today, that will have to be enough.

* * *

ANNE'S LADIES NEVER stray far. Where are they going to go? They hold their tongues. They massage their fists back into impassive hands. They, too, have intimate knowledge of the place between a rock and an even harder rock.

Sometimes they will perform small acts of metonymy. A pamphlet folded into a paper airplane is a clandestine invitation to the city. They will fetch her those darling meringue pastries if she is doleful, and so when they say, We will bring you the French cookies, it means We are rooting for you to find a way.

Or: an elegantly embroidered handkerchief means I bayoneted this cloth nine thousand forty-two times and imagined it was the flesh of your enemies. A pair of white gloves means We will help you bury the bodies. We will not ask questions. We know you did what had to be done.

If they tune up her automobile restlessly, it's to say, Are you listening? We have a plan.

A book of poems with no poems inside is this: You are not defined by the tragedy of it. There is always one more page.

They will nod with such enthusiasm that they black out, which means Do you know how much we hate this?

Sometimes they will weep in private, because there is too much to be said and nowhere to say it. Because they know that leaving is the most dangerous thing she can do. Because all they want is the impossible and is that really so much? Because this is one of the very few ways they can uncork their anger, and it is such a fine vintage, the very best. Because their fury is the scaffolding upon which their waiting lives are begotten, and it is so fathomless and pure, it clenches up their jaws and grinds their teeth into their gums.

In this particular case, their tears mean We will be your remembrance. We will salt the earth with the blood of our eyes so nothing can ever grow again.

* * *

HENRY IS LEARNING.

Excerpted from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad. Copyright © 2026 by Senaa Ahmad. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.