The Sister in Law

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which is how I knew it was bad news. Good things never come on Tuesdays. They come on Fridays, maybe, when the week is winding down and people are feeling generous. Or Saturdays, when the mail is late and you've forgotten to expect anything at all.

But Tuesdays? Tuesdays are for bills, for final notices, for letters from lawyers informing you that your brother has died and left behind a wife you've never met.

I read it three times standing in the lobby of my apartment building, the envelope still damp from the mailman's hands. Rain had been falling since dawn, one of those Istanbul rains that turns the whole city gray and makes the Bosphorus look like it's bleeding into the sky. My neighbor's cat watched me from the stairwell, unimpressed.

*My condolences on the loss of your brother,* the letter said. *As you may know, he was married. His wife, Ayşe, has been living in his apartment in Beyoğlu. There are matters to discuss regarding the estate.*

Matters. I hated that word. It was the kind of word people used when they meant money but didn't want to say it.

Mehmet had been dead for six weeks. I'd found out from a Facebook post, of all things. A photograph of him from twenty years ago, young and grinning, holding a fish he'd caught on a trip to the Black Sea. Someone I didn't know had written *Rest in peace, brother* underneath it, and I'd stared at that post for an hour before I understood what it meant.

We hadn't spoken in three years. Not since the argument about our mother's house, the one he wanted to sell and I wanted to keep. He'd called me sentimental. I'd called him a vulture. Neither of us had been wrong.

Now he was dead, and apparently he'd been married, and apparently his wife was still living in his apartment, and apparently I needed to go meet her.

I didn't want to.

I wanted to throw the letter in the trash and pretend I'd never seen it. I wanted to go back upstairs to my apartment, to my books and my quiet, to the life I'd built that didn't include Mehmet or his secrets. But I knew I wouldn't. I knew because I was already calculating the bus route to Beyoğlu, already wondering what kind of woman marries a man like my brother and stays in his apartment after he's gone.

The cat blinked at me. I blinked back.

---

The building was old, the kind of old that tourists photograph and locals ignore. Six stories of faded pink stucco with wrought-iron balconies that sagged under the weight of potted plants. Someone had tried to grow geraniums on the third floor, but they'd given up. The pots were empty now, just dirt and dead stems.

I climbed the stairs because the elevator was broken. A sign taped to the door said *Arızalı* in handwriting that slanted to the left, as if even the letters were falling down.

By the time I reached the fourth floor, I was breathing hard and regretting the cigarettes I'd smoked in college. The door was painted green, a deep forest green that reminded me of the ceramic tiles in the mosque near our mother's house. I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again.

The door opened, and there she was. Ayşe. My brother's wife. My *yenge*, though I'd never called her that, never even known she existed until six weeks ago.

She was smaller than I'd expected. Not short, exactly, but compact, like someone who'd learned to take up as little space as possible. Her hair was dark brown, wavy, pulled back in a bun that was coming undone. She wore khaki pants and a loose linen shirt, and there was a smudge of something on her cheek, ink or dirt, I couldn't tell.

Her eyes were hazel. They looked tired.

"You're Bekir," she said. Not a question.

"Yes."

She stepped aside. "Come in. I made tea."

I followed her into the apartment, and the first thing I noticed was the books. They were everywhere. Stacked on the floor, piled on the windowsill, crammed into shelves that bowed under the weight. History books, mostly, in Turkish and English and what looked like German. A framed map hung on the wall, showing Anatolia in the Bronze Age, all those cities that had risen and fallen before anyone thought to write their names down.

The second thing I noticed was that Mehmet wasn't there. Not in photographs, not in objects, not in anything. The apartment was hers. Completely, utterly hers.

"Sit," she said, gesturing to a chair by the window. "I'll get the tea."

I sat. The chair was wooden, hard, and uncomfortable in a way that felt intentional. Through the window, I could see the Galata Tower, gray against the gray sky.

She returned with two glasses of tea, the kind that curve inward at the middle, and set them on a small table between us. Then she sat across from me, and for a moment, neither of us spoke.

"I'm sorry for your loss," I said, because it was what you said.

She laughed. Not a happy laugh. "Which loss? My husband? Or the brother who stopped speaking to him three years ago?"

The tea was hot against my palms. "Both, I suppose."

"He talked about you," she said. "Not often. But sometimes. He said you were stubborn."

"I am."

"He said you were smart."

"I am that too."

She smiled, just a little, just at the corner of her mouth. "He said you'd hate me."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I drank my tea and looked at the map on the wall, at all those lost cities with their unpronounceable names, and I wondered what I was doing here.

"The lawyer said there were matters to discuss," I said finally. "About the estate."

"The estate." She said the word like it tasted bad. "You mean the apartment. The one he bought with money from selling your mother's house."

The tea burned my tongue. "Yes."

"I don't want it."

I looked at her. "What?"

"The apartment. I don't want it. I never did." She set her glass down, and her hands were steady. "I'm leaving. Next month. I've been offered a position at a dig site near Boğazkale. Hattusa. The Hittite capital."

"You're an archaeologist."

"I am."

"And you're just going to leave?"

She tilted her head, studying me like I was an artifact she couldn't quite place. "Why would I stay? For the ghost of a man I barely knew? For a city that never felt like home?"

"You were married to him."

"I was." Her voice was quiet. "For two years. And in those two years, I learned more about your family than you probably know. I learned about the house, and the argument, and how he cried the night you stopped answering his calls."

The words hit me somewhere below the ribs. I set my tea down, careful, precise, because my hands had started to shake.

"He cried?"

"Every year on your birthday. He'd buy a cake, a small one, and he'd sit by the window and eat it alone." She paused. "I think he was waiting for you to call."

The rain had stopped. Outside, the city was starting to dry, steam rising from the rooftops like something breathing. I wanted to leave. I wanted to stay. I wanted to hit something, or cry, or both.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

She stood, walked to the window, and looked out at the Galata Tower. "Because I'm leaving," she said. "And someone should know who he was. Before I take the last of him with me."

She turned back to face me, and in the gray light of that Tuesday afternoon, she looked less like a stranger and more like someone who'd been carrying a weight she never asked for.

"Stay for dinner," she said. "I'll tell you the rest."