In the car, she puts her hand on her racing heart. Can Nasser hear it? In her purse she has a package: a manila envelope she found in a drawer at her father’s apartment, inside of which she has stuffed the FYC tape and the twenty-page letter for Malik—full of impressions of her visit, but no confession about Zee. Last night, she took ten minutes to decide whether to sign it “Love, Hannah,” or “Sincerely, Hannah,” or “Best, Hannah.” In the end, she wrote “XXX OOO Hannah.”

Before filling the envelope, she emptied it of old black-and-white passport-size photos with fluted edges like stamps, showing her father in a ghutrah, his face bleached by the flash so that he had no nose. The envelope had an address written on it in Arabic in permanent marker. On top of that, she Scotch-taped a piece of white paper with Malik’s address on it. M. Thomas, she wrote, to be on the safe side. Wouldn’t want anyone to know I’m corresponding with a boy. She meant to give the envelope to Nasser with a few riyals for airmail postage, to mail while she was at the consulate, but she forgot.

“Can we go to the post office?” she says.

“Miss, I have to go back to pick up Madam.” Nasser accelerates through a yellow light as they speed below a looming underpass.

“I’ll take a taxi.”

“Your father won’t like that, Miss.”

“I’ve done it before. Who’s going to tell him?”

“I can’t leave you with a taxi driver, Miss.”

She gives up. At her father’s apartment, Lamees and Mary are setting the floor for lunch, which they eat at two o’clock. Muneer is not able to leave the paper for lunch today, Lamees says.

Hannah isn’t hungry. She pokes at her rice with her spoon.

“You don’t eat?” Lamees says. “Have you decided to be on a diet?”

The family naps in the midafternoon, and so Hannah waits till they sleep. As she slips on her sandals, she feels someone brush her leg.

“Fadi, go back to sleep.”

He hums and tries to hug her. She can’t resist him. Holding hands, they walk to the corner store. Two men lean against the store’s shelves of toilet paper and biscuits. They wear their shimaghs with no iqal, and they chew reedy sticks that smell like tree sap. Hannah waves her phone card, and when they respond in Arabic, she waves it again.

The men point to the two orange pay phones in the back of the store.