Certain stories are best left untold, he has said to Hannah many times. If Hannah doesn’t understand, it’s because she’s American. She shrugs the accusation off. There are a lot of things she doesn’t tell people, and it’s not her fault she was born there. But the lawyer in her wants him to tell this story of her father being wronged by his own government.

“How could they imprison you without a trial?” she’d said once when he called to wish her a happy birthday. She brought up the book regularly. “What law were you breaking? Some unwritten rule about not rocking the boat?”

He insisted he didn’t have the time to write about his days in prison. He didn’t want to argue about it.

He changed his mind last year after going to a journalism conference in Cairo, where he met Bassam, an up-and-coming Lebanese American agent who asked if he’d ever thought of writing a book. With the hubbub of the conference swirling around them, he was emboldened to say yes and, in the dark, far corner of a hotel restaurant, to spill his secret to this stranger. Confessions, Muneer insisted, are often easiest to make to people who don’t know us, who have no ingrained picture of us to be muddied and mussed by revelations we’ve kept to ourselves for so long they seem impossible to accept, dangerous to believe.

“I suppose so,” Hannah says. She’s a little miffed he listened to the agent and not to her.

On a spring evening, Hannah and Muneer are eating dinner, the two of them, in a fancy seafood restaurant in downtown Seattle, blocks from her office. He insists on treating her, and she knows better than to argue.

“I’m not surprised this agent guy wants your book,” she says. “Everyone everywhere in the world wants to know the hidden details of life in Saudi.”

“Hidden from whom?” He sips ice water. “We know who we are.”

Hannah has agreed to help him write the story of what he lived through in those dark days of 1991.

“Of course I’ll help,” she says. “I’ve been wanting you to write this for ages.”

He says he does not need new trouble, so he has insisted the book be published under a pseudonym. His editor in London doesn’t know his real name.

Hannah asks if he has journals he wrote while he was detained. She wants to know why it happened.

“The government was investing a lot in the war, in convincing us it was the single path possible. They didn’t like the columns I published questioning American motives. They needed silence until the war was won.”

“And you wouldn’t stop?”

“I would have stopped if they asked me. They didn’t ask.”

“Shouldn’t a journalist believe in the absolute right to a free press?”