Welcome.

You have made an excellent decision picking up this book. Truly. Your taste is impeccable and your free time is about to be destroyed in the best possible way. Please make sure you are comfortable, your phone is charged, and you have no important obligations for the next several hours. You were warned.

Now. Before we throw you headfirst into Dubai's luxury real estate world, the drama, the tension, the two people who are going to spend a significant portion of this story pretending they do not have feelings for each other while very clearly having feelings for each other, let us introduce the people you are about to become entirely too invested in.

You're welcome in advance.

THE MAIN CAST

In order of who will stress you out the most

IMARA ZAWADI ODHIAMBO

Our leading lady. CEO. Unbothered. Lying to herself.

Twenty-eight years old. Kenyan-Emirati. Born and raised in Dubai, which means this city is in her blood in a way that is not metaphorical. She runs Odhiambo Properties, which she inherited from her late father and then proceeded to build into something the industry could not ignore, thank you very much.

She is composed, elegant, and in complete control of every room she walks into. She has rules. She follows her rules. Her rules are excellent and make complete sense and she is absolutely not about to throw them out the window for a man.

She is about to throw them out the window for a man.

She does not know this yet. Please do not tell her. She will figure it out.

Current status: Focused. Professional. Definitely not thinking about him.

Favourite place: Her corner table at Chapter One.

Deepest wish: Number one. Always number one.

Biggest problem: Number one has a face and the face is a problem.

REEM NASIR AL-FALASI

Our leading man. CEO. Unreadable. Also lying to himself.

Thirty-one years old. Emirati. Sole heir to a legacy he took and turned into an empire. He runs Majd Estates, which sits at number one in Dubai's luxury real estate rankings, a position it has occupied with the particular smugness of something that has forgotten what second place looks like.

Reem is controlled, precise, and largely indifferent to most things and most people. Women have pursued him for years. He has not noticed. He is very good at not noticing.

He is about to notice.

He comes from a warm, loving family who think the world of him, which makes it somehow worse that he is the way he is. They gave him every opportunity to be a normal person with normal feelings and he took all of that love and warmth and became someone who communicates primarily through silence and the occasional devastating sentence.

He is going to say something to Imara at some point in this story that will make you put the book down, stare at the ceiling, and say something unrepeatable. You have been warned.

Current status: In control. Completely in control. Totally fine.

Favourite place: Anywhere he is number one, which is everywhere.

Deepest wish: He would say he has no wishes. He would be wrong.

Biggest problem: Imara Zawadi Odhiambo exists and he cannot stop noticing that she exists.

NISHA ANIKA CHADHA

Imara's best friend. Café owner. Sees everything. Says half of it.

Twenty-eight years old. Indian. Born and raised in Dubai, which means she and Imara grew up in the same city and found each other and decided to keep each other, which was an excellent decision for both of them.

She owns Chapter One, a café in Dubai that became one of the city's most beloved spots entirely by accident and entirely because Nisha made it feel like exactly the kind of place you needed on the days you did not know what you needed. She did not plan to become a beloved Dubai institution. She just wanted good coffee and a space that felt like hers. The people followed.

Nisha is warm, funny, perceptive to a degree that is almost unfair, and is currently carrying her own feelings about her own complicated situation. She knows exactly what those feelings are. This is both better and worse than not knowing.

She is Imara's one person. The only one who has seen behind the wall. The one who will know about Reem before Imara admits it and will say absolutely nothing until Imara is ready, at which point she will say everything.

Current status: Fine. Running a café. Definitely not thinking about a certain Emirati doctor.

Favourite place: Chapter One. Always Chapter One.

Deepest wish: For the thing that was never named to finally get a name.

Biggest problem: His name is Zayed and he just called her.

ZAYED SAEED AL-ZAABI

Reem's cousin. Doctor. Warm where Reem is not. Also has a situation.

Thirty-one years old. Emirati. His mother is a born Al-Falasi which means he moves in Reem's world comfortably, but he has his father's warmth and his father's name and his own life entirely, which is medicine, which is about as far from luxury real estate as you can get while still wearing nice shoes in Dubai.

Zayed is the person in this story who knows what his feelings are and what to do about them and is simply waiting for the right moment, which is both admirable and deeply frustrating to watch. He is warm where Reem is controlled, open where Reem is unreadable, and is the only person in Reem's life who can ask him a direct question and get an honest answer.

He and Nisha have history. Sort of. The problem is the "sort of." The problem is that it was never officially anything, which means it was never officially resolved, which means it has been living in the space between them for years doing absolutely no one any good.

He has made a decision. Things are about to get interesting.

Current status: Decided. Quietly decided.

Favourite place: His father's garden.

Deepest wish: See: Nisha Anika Chadha.

Biggest problem: Years of unsaid things do not disappear. They wait.

THE SUPPORTING CAST

Who will make you feel things you did not sign up for

MARYAM AL-SUWAIDI ODHIAMBO

Imara's mother. Emirati woman who chose a Kenyan man against her family's wishes, took his name, never looked back, and raised a daughter in the image of both of them. She knows things before you tell her. This is not magic. This is just Maryam.

THEMBA ODHIAMBO

Imara's late father. You will not meet him in the present tense. You will meet him in the way he lives in every room Imara walks into, every decision she makes, every morning she stands at her window and measures herself against the city he loved. He built something. She is finishing it.

MAJID AL-FALASI

Reem's father. The man who mentored his son into exactly what he is and considers this one of his finest achievements. Quiet, authoritative, and the reason Reem named his company Majd. Nobody outside the family knows that. Now you do.

FATIMA AL-DHAHERI AL-FALASI

Reem's mother. The warmth that holds the Al-Falasi family together. She will hear Imara's name mentioned once, casually, at a family lunch, and file it away in a place where she keeps things that matter. She will not say anything. She will not need to.

SHAMMA AFRA & SHAMSA DANA AL-FALASI

Reem's twin sisters. Younger, sharper, and the only people alive who tease Reem and get away with it. They know something is happening before anyone tells them. They are twins. They always know.

SURESH & SUNITA MALHOTRA CHADHA

Nisha's parents. Built something in Dubai quietly and raised two children to understand that nothing comes without work. Sunita notices everything her daughter is feeling without being told anything. This is not magic either. This is just Indian mothers.

ADITYA RAJESH CHADHA

Nisha's older brother. Protective in that specific older brother way that does not announce itself. Loves his sister. Has questions. Will ask exactly one of them.

MUBARAK AL-ZAABI

Zayed's father. Doctor. Gardener. A man who chose medicine when his wife's family built empires and never once felt lesser for it. He will become important to this story in a way nobody planned. He is also the best doctor in this book, which in a story full of dramatic people is not nothing.

MOUZA AL-FALASI AL-ZAABI

Zayed's mother. Born Al-Falasi, married Al-Zaabi, the bridge between two families and the reason Zayed knows how to move between worlds. She made a choice once that required courage. Her son inherited that too.

A FINAL NOTE

This story takes place in Dubai, a city that belongs to everyone who has ever decided to stay. It is a city of empires and ambition and families who built things from the ground up, and it is the only place this story could happen, because it is the only place that could hold all of these people at once.

Nobody in this book is going to have an easy time.

But they are all going to be worth it.

Turn the page.

I wake up before my alarm.

I always do.

5:47am and the city is still doing that thing it does in the early morning, that quiet before the heat remembers itself and decides to become unbearable. I lie still for exactly thirty seconds. I count them. Then I get up.

This is not a habit I developed. This is just who I am.

My apartment is on the thirty-fourth floor of a building in Downtown Dubai that I chose because of this window. Not the kitchen, not the wardrobes, not the marble bathroom that my mother called unnecessarily dramatic the first time she visited. The window. Floor to ceiling, wide enough to fit my entire world inside it, and every morning it shows me the same thing: proof that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

I make coffee before I look at my phone. This is a rule. The world does not get to reach me before I have had one quiet moment with my own thoughts. I learned this from my father, who used to say that a mind borrowed by everyone else first thing in the morning is never fully yours for the rest of the day. He said a lot of things like that. I kept most of them.

The coffee machine does its thing. I stand at the window.

Dubai at 5:47am is something not everyone gets to see. Most people experience this city as it wants to be seen: polished, loud, full of itself, all gold and glass and the particular kind of confidence that comes from being built in the middle of a desert and deciding that is not a problem but a statement. And it is all of those things. I am not arguing with any of it.

But at this hour, before all of that begins, the city is just light.

The towers catch the early sun differently when there is no one rushing between them. The creek sits still. The highway has not yet remembered what it is supposed to be doing. From up here I can see the shape of everything without the noise of it, and I have stood at this window enough mornings to know that this city is not performing for me right now. It is just existing. And I get to watch.

I love it for that.

I love it the way you love something that does not particularly need your love but receives it anyway. Dubai did not ask for my loyalty. I was born here, which means I arrived without being consulted, but somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of this city as the place I happened to come from and started thinking of it as the place I chose to stay. There is a difference. The second one means something.

My coffee is ready.

I pour it, black, no sugar, which my best friend Nisha has described on multiple occasions as a personality flaw and a cry for help. Nisha is wrong. I just know what I want and I do not need to soften it.

I take the mug back to the window.

Below me the city is waking up slowly. A car on the highway. A light coming on in the building across from mine, someone else up early, someone else with somewhere to be. The sky is doing that thing between dark and light where it cannot quite commit to either and the result is this specific shade of blue that I have never seen anywhere else. Not in Nairobi, where my mother's family is not originally from but where my father grew up, and where we would visit sometimes and I would stand in a different morning and feel the difference. Not in London, where I went for university and spent three years being cold and learning things I could not have learned here.

Only here. Only this blue.

I have a full day ahead of me.

This is not unusual. I run Odhiambo Properties, which my father built from the ground up in a city that was still figuring out what it wanted to be, and which I took over three years ago when he passed and left it to me because there was no one else. Some people in this industry have never let me forget that second part. That there was no one else. That I did not choose this so much as step into it because the alternative was watching everything he built disappear.

They think that makes me less.

They are wrong about that too.

I took what my father built and I made it better. Not unrecognisably so, not in a way that erases him, but better in the way that something grows when it is properly looked after. Odhiambo Properties is currently the second largest luxury real estate firm in Dubai. Second. That number sits in my chest every morning like something I have not finished with yet, which is exactly what it is.

Number one belongs to someone else.

It has always belonged to someone else.

I do not say his name before I have finished my coffee. This is also a rule.

The city below me is moving faster now. More cars. More lights. The sky has made its decision and gone full morning, the blue giving way to the kind of bright that means the heat is coming and there is nothing to be done about that. I finish my coffee. I put the mug in the sink. I go to get dressed.

I have a meeting at 8am, a site review at 11, a call with a client in London at 2pm, and at some point today I need to review the documents for a development contract that was announced yesterday, the kind of contract that comes around once and does not come around again.

The kind that changes everything.

The kind that will not be going to number one.

Not this time.

I look at the window one more time before I leave the room. The city is fully awake now. So am I.

Let's go.