Here I am now. My story is written and this is all I know. I stare again at the paper, perhaps three thousand written pages stacked along the Cube walls. In every direction there are papers. The prison warders have not tried to confiscate any of it. I suppose they are waiting until I’m done. But if they do, it will read like the gibberish of a madwoman—nonsensical attempts at an endless children’s parable. It’s coded in our 194 method.

I don’t know what compelled me to write it all. To set the record straight? To lay bare with love what others find offensive? To pass the time? To mark my place in the world? To inject life into this lifeless box? To declare simply that I survived? To keep Bilal near me?

Perhaps I will destroy it all and start over. Maybe I’ll soak all the pages in water. But Attar has not been here for some time. The musk under my arms and between my legs ripens and I do my best at the sink.

The alarm signals me to shackle my bracelets to the wall. A guard arrives carrying a chair, which tells me a visitor is coming. She places it in the center of the Cube and beckons another guard, who ushers in an Israeli reporter, a middle-aged white woman with kind eyes, unruly brown hair, no makeup, freckles, glasses, old jeans, and sneakers. I know her.

“Hello, Nahr,” she says as my arms are released from the wall. She was the only visitor who didn’t call me Yaqoot. “Is it okay if I sit?” She speaks accented Arabic.

I nod. “Hello, Nira.”

“Is this all your writing?” She sweeps her hand through the air over the stacks of paper.

“Yes.”

She has in her hand a small yellow notepad, a pen, and a newspaper clipping, which she begins to unfold. “I obtained permission to show this to you. They will not allow me to give it to you, but I can show you and read it. Would you like me to do that?”

“What is it about?”

“You might be released in a prisoner exchange.”

It wasn’t the first time I had heard such a thing during the time it had taken for my breasts to sag and my hair to turn to ash. “Is that right?”

“I think it’s real this time. An exchange. Six hundred Palestinian prisoners for the four captured Israeli soldiers, two of them dead.”

I laugh, not really believing. Israel never stopped trying to trick me into giving them information on Bilal, as if I knew anything anyway. “And you’re going around to all six hundred prisoners to deliver the news?”