“They said they wanted to install a new bathroom in the salon,” Jumana chimed in, twisting her mouth toward her brothers. “I had been begging them to fix a few things for months. Suddenly they were ready to take on a major rehab project.” In theory, Jumana was speaking to me, but she didn’t look my way, moving her eyes between her brothers, her glass of tea, the food, and Bilal. “I knew something was up, but I never imagined this.” She swept her eyes across the walls.

I was twitching, needing to move. The body has its own logic, an impulsivity that betrays emotions running through it. But I held myself steady with a fatiguing determination to hide my discomfort.

“We decided to completely gut the bathroom and expand it,” Wadee said, describing how they had measured the precise location to dig, a corner of the underground chamber just outside the existing bathroom stall.

They managed to haul away twelve truckloads of dirt without raising suspicion.

“What about neighbors and spies?” I asked.

“People were curious, yeah. And we knew some of them had to be spies and collaborators. So the first thing we did was to dig through and then obscure the access behind a wall. Then we let people come and look around the renovation of the salon, as if we had nothing to hide.”

I turned to Jumana, forcing her to look at me. “And you weren’t the least suspicious?”

“Yeah. I was. I did finally demand to know why the simple toilet upgrade I’d asked for became a much bigger bathroom with cabinetry and shelves, why the late-night work, why their neighbor Samer was helping, why they were also redoing other parts of the salon,” she said, laughing.

“We had rehearsed ways to tell her, but at that point, we didn’t even know where to start,” Wadee said. “Instead, we just showed her.”

It had been Jumana’s idea to bring Bilal into the fold. Ghassan was in prison at the time, doing a stint in administrative detention.

“We grew up together,” Jumana said, looking at me now. “I trusted him, and he was the only person I knew who could help us make sense of this, and what to do with it.”

Despite the work they had done to excavate and create secret entryways, they had not given much thought to its use. “At least it would be a place to hide if any of us needed to disappear,” Jumana said. “But it was Bilal’s idea to amass weapons here. Between the army’s constant house raids and our own traitors, it’s difficult to hide anything from them.” Jumana looked again at Bilal.