“Your press is buying the Bushes’ new war hook, line, and sinker—like they swallowed the first Gulf War,” he says. “I met them, the American journalists who came to cover that war. They had never been to our country before—”

“Because the Saudi government wouldn’t let them.”

“And they thought they knew our ‘Arab minds.’ We were not trustworthy. We haggled in the bazaars, we didn’t have a word for negotiate.”

“The Iraqis are who they were talking about.”

“The Arabs. Anyway, the press is treating this new war the same way. They would’ve made up an excuse for it if the government didn’t already have one.”

She picks a sliver of jicama out of her salad and chews on it. Sometimes, she wants to go back where she came from, like the racists demand. But she’s tried that already. Sometimes, it seems like there’s nowhere in the world to be.

“Ours is a good country, with good people. I left the prison cell and went straight back to journalism. The secret police not-so-secretly shut down Akhbar al-’Urus, but no one stopped me from starting another paper. Now, after 9/11, I am saying many things about our country, good and bad, that the world should know.”

“You’re putting that in your book?”

“We’re better off today than we were in the past. We have to stay on the road of modernization our rulers have put us on. But our society wants to forget the past. That’s the root of our problems. We have to know our history.”

“Bad people are the root of everyone’s problems.”

“That’s simplistic.”

“OK, Baba.” This project might be more difficult than she thought. She had hoped for a way to bond with her father, to spend time with him, carve time out of her busy life. But they would not agree on everything he wanted to say. She couldn’t always put herself in his shoes, but she would have to learn to be his conduit.

Tonight, Hannah’s father wants to tell her something else, not related to the book. They order coffee—fully caffeinated for both of them, though it’s after seven o’clock—and he takes a letter out of the breast pocket of his tan suit. It arrived the day before his planned flight to visit her about the book project, he says.

She holds the letter in two hands, as though reading a newspaper. The note appears to be from an American law firm, and she’s unprepared for the punch it delivers.