Abu Moathe showered me with gifts of jewelry, clothes, shoes, and purses. But I had to leave those at the secret apartment because Mama was already perplexed by our change of fortune. She didn’t know about the college savings, and I kept my previous jobs to account for my income and time out of the house. For the first time, we didn’t teeter on the verge of eviction, and Mama could spend her sewing earnings on herself. “May God bless you, my daughter. You are worth more than all the gold in the world,” she’d say. She believed my stories, because what I was really doing was so far from her imagination.

I teased Abu Moathe once about his promise to marry me, and he said, “Um Moathe would probably cut off my balls in my sleep if I went through with it.” I never mentioned marriage again, and he soon stopped paging and changed the lock on his apartment. He had moved on to another woman.

That’s what I told Bilal years later. But it isn’t the whole truth. Abu Moathe didn’t just stop paging me. I let myself get pregnant, thinking I could trap him into marrying me. I thought he could help me get a divorce. But he took me to Egypt instead, my first trip on an airplane. There, we went to a clinic. Two elderly women assisted me onto the table in a filthy room. A nurse stuck an IV in my arm, and when I woke up, I had thick bloody pads between my legs. The same elderly women walked me out of the filthy room. I bled for two weeks straight, got a fever and terrible cramps. Terrified to go to a doctor, because what they’d find could send me to prison, I turned to Um Buraq, and she took care of everything. She brought me to her home and fetched a doctor, who said I could die of sepsis if they didn’t get me to a hospital, but agreed they could wait one day to see if the intravenous antibiotics would kick in. I barely remember any of this, but it’s what happened. Um Buraq brought a traditional healer after that, and they nursed me back to health. She covered for me with my mother, telling her that we were camping in the desert where there were no phone booths. It took me a week to regain my wits and some strength. The doctor said my pussy was messed up and scarred inside; he said I was no good for kids anymore.

Abu Moathe’s callous dismissal helped to crystallize the reality of my life. I tried paging him, but he didn’t return my calls. After I called his office several times, he rang Um Buraq to deliver a warning that he would destroy us both if I continued to harass him. I curled my body around my hollowed womb and lay there, encrusted in profound loneliness. I felt small in the world, unlovable and worthless. I bore stains that could never be washed away, and I had a true desire to die, until Um Buraq shook me one day from the bed, Deepa standing next to her with a drink.