I was warmed by Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s generosity and love, but I did not want to have this conversation with Bilal. Two baby goats playing a game of tag almost landed in the firepit. Bilal knocked over the kettle trying to push them away.

As if reading my mind, he said, “I’m sorry. This isn’t even what I wanted to talk about. I want to tell you about Tamara.”

“What about her?” I tensed at the name.

“Him.” He held me in his stare. “Tamara is a fake name. Itamar is his real name, the man your husband, my brother … They were lovers. Are lovers … I think. They loved each other. That’s what I wanted to tell you. The real story that sent my brother to prison, then to Kuwait; what made him a collaborator.”

My body reacted separately from my thoughts. It went limp of its own volition, relieved to hear what it already knew. My body had understood Mhammad’s rejection. It knew it had been powerless to seduce him. At the same time, my mind seized with painful memories—the ways I’d tried and failed to be desirable; the sustained erosion of my dignity; my sense of failure and bewildering abandonment. I had been confused by Jamil’s tears, the man I’d thought was simply Mhammad’s dear friend in Kuwait. But my body knew. My stomach had knotted then. And now I understood. Mhammad had used me. He had robbed me. He was my first rapist, not the man on the beach. And he was also a collaborator, a different kind of rapist.

“Habibti, are you okay?” Bilal said.

Bilal called me habibti. “Of course. I’ll always be okay,” I said.

They met, Bilal said, “on a program that brought Israeli and Palestinian teenagers together when they were in high school. Itamar was an Iraqi Jew. Even back in the seventies, Western do-gooders were trying to bring Palestinian and Israeli kids together, as if our condition was just a matter of two equal sides who didn’t like each other, instead of the world’s last remaining goddamn settler colonial project.”

He stopped, exasperated with himself. “God, I’m trying to tell you something personal, but it all comes out like a political lecture. Sometimes I think I don’t even know how to have a normal conversation.”

I slipped my hand into his, squeezing it gently. We had held hands before, but this felt physically and emotionally intimate. The two baby goats stopped in their tracks, then made funny sounds, as if they were talking about us. Bilal and I laughed and leaned back against the tree trunk, our fingers still interlaced.

“Mhammad was changed by that camp,” Bilal said. “I was only twelve, but I recognized that he was different. He was distant, always gone, and when he was home, he’d just play his oud or write in his diary.”