“Fuck you!” I pushed him away. “Fuck your brother. Fuck the divorce. I’m leaving.” I sped ahead of him toward the house, but stopped in my tracks and whipped around.

“What about Hajjeh Um Mhammad? Does she know?”

“No. She has no idea, and I must ask that you please do not speak of this in the house. It would devastate her. Her health is too fragile. Please, Nahr. Can we just talk here for a bit? You have every right to be angry. But please, let me speak.”

There was a loud thud from the valley. It made me jump, and now I was shaking. I felt weakened by the deceit, but I was relieved to know that at least the love that had formed between my mother-in-law and me was real.

“I know I hurt you. And I know an apology is insufficient, but I am truly sorry, Nahr.” He tried again to put his arms around me, and I pushed him away, trying to pull myself together. I wiped my face with trembling hands and ran them through my hair, pushing it back.

“You flatter yourself to think you’ve hurt me. I’d have to give a shit about you for that to happen,” I said, my heart pumping ice.

I stared into the valley. He thought I was colluding with those monsters. All our time together had been a lie. The thought weighed me down, and I lowered myself onto a boulder. He sat next to me.

“Here, put this on.” He draped his jacket over my shoulders. “I deserve everything you want to throw at me, Nahr. Your coming here is the best thing that has happened in my life in years. My mother’s too. But I had to be sure because lives are at stake and none of us can be sloppy.”

We sat in silence for a while, staring at the moving lights in the valley. Despite the emotional trauma of his revelation, I understood why he’d done it. And I believed him when he said he took no pleasure in spying on me.

“Everything that came my way made me admire you all the more,” he said, “especially when I heard what you did to that woman occupying your family’s home, and when you ‘accidentally’ exploded a bottle of soda in a soldier’s face at a checkpoint.”

Eventually we made our way home, and I slept the sleep of depletion. It was only the next morning, when I lay in bed replaying the conversation of the night before, that I remembered the word he’d said. Khaneeth.