“Upstairs, Fadi. Or your mother and father will yell at me.” She tries to say “up” in Arabic. He grabs her hand. She marches him upstairs and nudges him inside the apartment.

Outside, sunset prayer is ending, and down the street, the corner shop’s metal accordion gate shudders open. Crossing the intersection, she stumbles on her abayah—again!—as she lifts her foot to the high sidewalk. A group of men walk toward her. To appear less conspicuous, she pulls her scarf across her face, the way she’s seen Lamees do.

She treads carefully, because wearing the veil is like wearing dark glasses. What she sees are shadows of cars, but no taxis, passing by on the main road. As though her body has turned to sand, she drifts aimlessly down the sidewalk, past apartment buildings with aluminum balconies, vacant lots strewn with rebar and worn-down tires, yellow dogs sniffing at banana peels. The grass median smells like sewage. The trees’ feathery leaves and coral-colored blossoms appear shrouded.

The taxi driver she hails wears his red-and-white headcloth piled high, so it nearly touches the ceiling. He speaks urgently through yellow teeth. He expects her to understand Arabic. In English, he knows “Where?”

She shows him the address of the restaurant Zee picked, jotted down in her notebook.

The cabdriver speeds up a ramp onto the freeway. After ten minutes or so, they descend another ramp into the streets of the city, hitting traffic that slows them down. The driver leans into his horn often. Hannah concentrates on the green neon signs that flash by on squashed white shops, advertising Pakistani food and tailors and shawarma.

The drive to the Corniche takes forty-five minutes. The cheesy-looking restaurant is made up of huts on stilts in the water and a series of bridges in between. She tells the taxi driver to wait for her. Her face uncovered, she holds onto the handrail as she crosses the first bridge to the maître d’ stand. When the maître d’ speaks to her in Arabic, she feels herself blushing. Not knowing the language that is her birthright is a special kind of stupidity.

With his bouffant black hair, European suit, and bow tie, the maître d’ seems to be looking down on her. Zee is around somewhere, but she made a terrible mistake coming here. How would it look for her to appear in public with an American soldier?

As she walks back to the cab, the water beneath floats dark as a veil. If she threw off her scarf and abayah, they would disappear into the sea.

The cabbie loses his way, and the drive to Randah’s villa takes forever. Hannah doesn’t arrive till nearly ten o’clock, and just as Summer said, Randah doesn’t care. Shoes are piled in the entryway, a warning that many people have gathered. Randah brings Hannah into a room with a gauntlet of people standing, waiting to meet her.