“No. Only you.” She removes her glasses. “The negotiations are a year in the making. We’re told they have been concluded and the releases are set to take place over the next three weeks. Israel and the Palestinian Authority have turned the country upside down searching for the missing soldiers, to no avail, and it is believed they were smuggled out of the country somehow. A new organization took credit and has been demanding this prisoner exchange since the soldiers were captured,” she says. I think about what I have been doing in all that time, reading (when they gave me books), waiting for Attar, for Klara, dancing. I cannot bring myself to care, or feel.

“You are the only prisoner singled out to be released to Jordan.”

I search her face and begin to believe her.

“I am writing a feature on the exchange.”

The edges of my vision dim. They do that sometimes. I blink hard, shaking my head to restore my senses.

“Are you all right?”

I nod.

“Is it okay if I ask you a few questions?”

As I contemplate saying no, she asks, “Can you think of a reason why you’re the only prisoner they want released in Jordan?”

We stare at each other. She tries to hold benevolence in her eyes, but I can see it slipping away, and she knows I see it. She puts her glasses back on. A name percolates between us. She wants me to say it first. Her breathing changes, her chest rises higher and collapses harder. It is slightly mesmerizing.

“I don’t know,” I say, unintentionally raising one eyebrow. I am already lost in thoughts of what it all means. I roam my mind, un-earthing faces and voices in the vast terrain of memory.

Her eyelids gently close and slide open. She takes a deep breath and lets it out calmly. “Do you think your Bilal is alive?”

I return to my honeymoon, Bilal and I locked inside our home under curfew in the spring of 2002.

“Nahr?”

“Are you going to read that?” I say, motioning to the partially unfolded newspaper article.

She straightens it and begins to read aloud. It’s a long article, re-hashing the now legendary crossbow attacks, the hornet spray, the recent kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, the inability to get them back, the new Palestinian resistance inside Palestine and in the diaspora, the international boycott campaign called BDS. It quotes an Israeli general who says the prisoner release is a necessary sacrifice, and hints that they’ll eventually round them up again. “Terrorists always end up back in prison where they belong,” he says. The article mentions my name.