The Color of Saffron

Rania Idrissi has spent eleven years turning her family's crumbling riad in the Marrakech medina into a small, quiet sanctuary, for guests, and for herself. She has built a life of careful walls: warm enough to keep the business alive, high enough to keep her own truth hidden from a city that knows her name. When a French-Algerian photographer named Chloé Bouzid arrives for a six-week residency to document the disappearing crafts of the medina, Rania expects another guest to feed, another door to lock behind. She does not expect someone who looks at her the way Inès does — like she's already been seen. Chloé has come to Marrakech running from a life that stopped fitting her the day her mother died and left her, at thirty-four, without the one person she'd been performing stability for. She tells herself the trip is about the work. It becomes about the woman who pours her tea from a height of three feet without spilling a drop, who moves through the medina like water finding the path of least resistance, who is, Chloé realizes slowly and then all at once, the most guarded person she has ever wanted to know.