Outside the afternoon grew stormy. The windows rattled. A dehumidifier clicked on and hummed. He had to remind himself that things were different now. He wasn’t in Remsfjord—despite the spruce forests outside, and the cold blue cast of the sea. He wasn’t a bewildered exile. He’d gotten through all that. He’d survived. He’d been married and divorced, had an American passport in his pocket, an apartment in Berkeley, a job in graphic design. His poems had been published in small journals—in both Farsi and English. And yet sitting there, in the library on Trachis, he was thrown into a tailspin, brought back to those terrifying first days of exile.

He closed his eyes and thought of Lailah. Lailah, who was only twenty-four. A bud in the world. The same age he was when he’d fled Iran. She’d come to the United States under a much more benevolent circumstance: a fully paid scholarship in macroeconomics. Was she at all near, Pars wondered, beyond the leaded glass, out on the spit of sand? And lost in these thoughts in the corner of the library, his fingertips grazing his chin, he didn’t notice the swing door open, or the figure enter. And neither did Claartija deJong see him sitting in the red chair in the dark. She hadn’t been in the library before either; she was just now exploring the house while her brother went down to the beach. She’d come to the library at that very moment, as Pars Mansoor looked up from his trance and saw, silhouetted against the panes of glass, the figure of a young girl.

He felt his spine go cold.