We are writing to inform you that your son, Fouad Muneer, has been detained illegally by the United States government. We learned of his detention from another illegal detainee, an Iraqi client of ours who has attended Muslim Student Association meetings with Mr. Muneer at the Sullivan School of Business and has not been told his own reason for being detained. We fear the same is likely true for your son.

Mr. Muneer is being held at the federal facility in Miami, Florida. We would be happy to assist with his legal counsel. Please contact us at the number included on this letterhead.

“You buried the fucking lede, Dad. My brother’s in jail?”

“Don’t swear, habibti.”

That word: My love. My dear. It still has the power to slay her, to surprise her. It’s the dream she worries she’ll one day wake up from: her father is alive, and he loves her.

GONE SOUTH

Hannah never finds out for sure if her father has worked on Hamza behind the scenes, but in the end Hamza convinces her to take on Fouad’s case. Her firm’s partners agree to let her do it pro bono.

She’s seen Fouad a few times since she first met him in Jidda when he was six. A couple of summers later, her dad brought the kids and Lamees to visit her. When Fouad started college, she meant to go see him in Florida. She regrets she hadn’t gone down before.

Foofoo wants to meet his “Young Uncle,” as Hamza and Hannah start calling him.

“Is he five like me?” Foofoo asks.

“No, he’s nineteen.”

“That’s not young.”

For the past year and a half, since the United States invaded Afghanistan, Hamza has been saying Iraq would be next. With the war there started, Hannah can’t sleep more than a few continuous hours. She wakes up sweating from dreams in which she dives into the Red Sea with her clothes on.

“That dream has nothing to do with war,” Hamza says.

But it does, because the last war was happening when she saw the Red Sea.

“Everything has to do with the war,” she says. “My brother in custody has to do with the war. It’s a war on us.”

A war on us even though she is not religious. They are not religious. Which sounds like a cliché, something many of her Christian and Jewish friends say whenever anything vaguely God-related comes up. But the problem runs deeper for her, taps into how weird her childhood was. Lack of religion was part of the disguise her mother created for the two of them.