A few hours later, Aunt Randah sends a WhatsApp message saying Hannah’s grandfather is in the hospital and she should visit him one last time. No one knows exactly how old he is, because there were no birth certificates when he was young, when her parents were young. And no one but God knows when a man’s time will come, Randah writes. But he’s old, and these are possibly his last days.

In between classes at the ESOL school where she teaches, Hannah reads the message. She’s alone in the windowless cliché of a teachers’ break room, which smells of burnt coffee and reheated spaghetti and chicken.

She does the math in her head to calculate what time it is in Jidda. It’s a decent hour, and probably not prayer time. It seems simpler to call Randah than to write back.

There’s no debate over whether Hannah will go see her grandfather in the hospital. Randah takes it as a given. Hannah and her grandfather Fareed have grown close in the years since her reunion with her family. A dozen times or so he’s come to visit or asked her to meet him wherever he was speaking or attending, when he was younger and more able to travel. She flew to Chicago, New York, and LA to see him. It’s been a few years. She liked the light banter they had the times they met for coffee. He brought her clothes and jewelry from her aunts and uncles—sweaters, oddly enough, and rhinestoned things and good, soft gold earrings, and pretty embroidered abayah and tarhah sets in the latest colors (it’s not all black anymore). Over the years, he’s emailed her articles he wanted her to see, about youth in Saudi, about changes that are coming (“economic diversification”) and changes that seemed like they were not, but finally did (women driving). He has a rascally seriousness she wishes he could gift to her, instead of the jewelry and clothing. Sometimes, she almost forgets he is her mother’s father. He’s more like her dad in many ways. Curious. Opinionated. A truth teller.

Her grandfather has never said whether he sees her mother in her. He never asks about her mother.

And though she named her son after her grandfather, Hannah hasn’t told her father about the times she’s seen her grandfather Fareed, since the first time she mentioned him in passing. Her father paused so long on the phone she thought the line had dropped.

“That part of the family,” he said. “I am not on good terms.” She would expect him to be grateful that her grandfather had helped get Fouad out of detention, helped her father get out of Saudi jail. But her father is embarrassed of these favors he can’t repay.