“Of course,” Hamza says, but Hannah doesn’t offer baby Fareed to her mother. She holds him tighter.

“Can we please get the luggage?” she says.

It is decided that Sadie will drive home and Hannah, Hamza, and the baby will take a cab to their hotel. They are a family, and she doesn’t fit into the portrait. She writes the church address on a slip of paper and gives it to Hamza as she says goodbye to them. Hannah and the baby slide into the back of the taxi, and Hamza opens the front door for himself.

Sadie’s hungry and tired and drained. “Hannah is so angry with me. Always,” she tells Hamza. “I can’t change it.”

“Maybe you need time.” He kisses her cheek. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

His words don’t reassure her. He’s known Hannah a few years. Sadie’s known her her whole life.

In the morning, Sadie dresses in the pink pantsuit she bought with her Dillard’s employee discount, carefully applies the new pink lipstick and lip liner she chose at the makeup counter. When she walks into the church, people smile and ask if she’s nervous.

She lifts the corners of her mouth into as stiff a grin as she can so she won’t have to lie and say no.

Sitting in the pews waiting for the ceremony to start, she keeps looking back to the entrance. But Hannah never arrives.

Me and God from now on, Sadie thinks.

DETAINED

2003

MEMOIR

The first details Muneer set down, he tells Hannah, were the contents of the Riyadh prison cell he lived in for the six weeks before the liberation of Kuwait on February 28, 1991: The bunkbed pushed against the far wall. The plastic woven prayer mat, spread diagonally facing the qiblah. The cell’s pale green walls were bare, except for a wall hanging of Ayat al-Kursi embroidered in gold thread on black velvet. Muneer wondered if the jailer who hung the ayah there thought about its words: To Him is everything in the heavens and in Earth … He knows what is between their hands and what is behind them.

The men who apprehended him had met him outside the newsroom, on a dark Jidda street smelling of wastewater and, when the breeze blew a certain way, night blossoms. Someone should investigate why the municipality irrigates parks with sewage, he remembers thinking. American parks never have such an odious odor.

Two days had passed since the middle-of-the-night start of the war—timed for American prime-time television. A day had passed since Muneer wrote an editorial column condemning the American invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein should not have invaded Kuwait, of course. He had not yet started dumping crude oil in the Gulf—that would happen while Muneer was in jail—but he should not have done that or a thousand other terrible things he’d inflicted on Iraq, on Kuwait, on Saudi.