I went back to working at the salon and helped at the bakery sometimes, though Ghassan didn’t really need me. I visited Hajjeh Um Mhammad every day, but I’m ashamed to say it became more of a chore than something I truly wanted to do. It was hard to watch her deterioration. My heart was perpetually stuck in my throat.

Realizing I couldn’t understand her words, Hajjeh Um Mhammad mostly squeezed my hand as I relayed news from the village. There were some good days, when she was more alert. On one such occasion, she pulled me closer, insisting I comprehend. Two of her sisters helped make out her words. She wanted Bilal and me to marry. It wasn’t the first time she had suggested this, but now it had the gravity of a dying woman’s request. I knew our living arrangement was not sustainable in our conservative culture, and I wanted to stay close to Bilal. But marriage unsettled me. The physical intimacy of it. Its permanence. The ownership of belonging to a man. People would surely gossip that I had married both brothers.

“You’re good for each other. Take it from an old lady who knows more about the world than you,” she whispered hoarsely. Her sisters concurred. They had all spoken of it. Of her four sisters, Hajjeh Um Mhammad was the only one who had given birth to fewer than five children, the only one without daughters and grandchildren. The only widow among them now would be the first to die, though she was not the oldest.

She envied the abundance her sisters had produced—sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She’d once confided in me that she sometimes wondered if God was displeased with her for some offense she might have committed. Then she shooed away the thought, begged God’s pardon, and thanked Him for all she had and did not have. “One must always be grateful to God for one’s fate, alhamdulillah,” she had said.

I looked into Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s eyes, unsure what to say. She spoke again, and I understood perfectly. “He loves you. And I know you love him,” she said. How strange to be brought into this family as the wife of one brother, only to fall in love with the other and receive benediction from their mother to marry him after divorcing the first.

I did love Bilal, though those words seemed too small for his expansive presence in my heart. He saw me in the fullness of my shame and broken parts, and didn’t look away. Through his eyes, I saw and maybe became another version of myself—a thoughtful, powerful, intellectual woman who could love, be loved, affect the world, and maybe be touched again by a man.

“Your elders know best, daughter,” her sister whispered. “Bilal will honor you. Ease our sister’s heart before she dies, darling Nahr. You are the nearest she has to a daughter in her final days.”