When Hannah gets tired of watching censored CNN in her father’s apartment, she goes to Randah’s or Summer’s to watch more CNN and drink tea. They have drivers who can pick her up. The streets are empty, as they have been the last few weeks. People are staying home. Most nights, her father’s not home till well after midnight. She and Lamees and the boys eat dinner without him: scrambled eggs with tomato, olives, feta cheese, and pita left over from lunch. No ful mudammas or muttabbaq, though, because these are street foods and they have no man to go out to buy them. No fresh bread from the bakery, either. Hannah tries to convince Lamees that she and Mary could walk to the commercial strip mall down the road and pick up food for their meals, but Lamees says, “No, no, no.” Hannah wakes up to the sound of her father returning home in the middle of the night, and she turns over and goes back to sleep. In the morning, he’s gone before breakfast, and he doesn’t come home midday for lunch, as he did before the war.

Two weeks after the start of the war, he doesn’t come home.

Hannah, Lamees, and Mary go to bed at midnight, as usual. Hannah expects to be woken by the lock clicking slowly as he lets himself in, by his footsteps down the hallway, by the faucet running as he washes for prayer in the bathroom. Instead, she sleeps soundly enough to have dreams. There is no click, no thump, no drip of water. She sleeps until morning. She wakes up expecting another day like the string of fourteen days before it.

But today, Mary is frantic.

“Your father, ma’am. He’s not here.”

“He leaves so early.”

“No, ma’am. He was not here last night.”

“Where’s Lamees?”

“She’s gone to talk to your grandfather Fareed.”

Mary says Lamees knew something was wrong when Muneer was not home for dawn prayer. Lamees called the paper. She called Muneer’s brothers. But for some reason, she did not wake Hannah up.

“What can I do?” Hannah says. “I’m sure he’s OK.”

She worries about car crashes—the driving in Jidda is horrendous, worse than California driving—she worries about heart attacks. Her chest constricts. How unfair it would be to lose her father right after she found him.

Mary tells Hannah she can watch the three boys alone. Within half an hour, Summer and Nasser arrive to pick Hannah up, and they rush to her grandfather Fareed’s, an old-fashioned white-washed villa in the Al Hamra district with wooden windows.

“Old money, Saudi style,” Summer says.