Sadie goes searching for a bathroom, and instead of following her into the mall, Glenn and Hannah stand at Wisconsin and M, people watching. It’s mostly tourists here, a few students and businesspeople.

“Can you tell where people are from by looking at them?” she asks Glenn.

“Wisconsin,” he says, laughing, pointing at a middle-aged man and woman in University of Wisconsin sweatshirts.

“Too easy.”

“Iran,” he says, nodding at a group of well-dressed twenty-somethings speaking in a language other than English.

She catches a few words of Arabic. “No, pretty sure they’re Gulfies,” she says.

“Ah, you know the nuances better than I do.”

“She never told people where we were from, before. It’s something that she told you.”

“I wish I could go with her to see her father. But she says no, it would be too hard to get a visa, and too hard to introduce me when she hasn’t seen people for so long.”

It’s weird to hear this confession. He’s in his fifties or sixties, probably. She is not used to people older than she is, her parents’ age, speaking with longing.

Sadie comes back, holding a new cup of coffee. She’s smiling, happy to see them talking.

“We’re guessing where people are from,” Hannah says. “No one could ever guess where we were from.”

Sadie’s face snaps into the serious expression Hannah remembers from her childhood. How she rarely smiled—because she was afraid of getting caught? Hannah doesn’t care why things were the way they were, though. What matters to her is years of not knowing who she was.

Sadie doesn’t want to talk about it. Hannah can tell by the way she flips her hair back, indignant that her daughter would bring up such long-ago history.

It’s not anything in particular her mother does that afternoon, or says. But Hannah knows, after years of therapy, that she is not to blame for her mother’s mistakes. That’s what she wishes she could explain. How she was affected by the choices Sadie made decades ago, the years of brainwashing, the wrong memories. She remembers grieving for a dead father. She did that. It’s a true memory. But he was not dead. It was grief she didn’t have to experience.

“She shouldn’t come,” Hannah says, keeping her eyes on Glenn. “If she goes, I’ll have to explain to my dad that she’s there. I don’t want to lie to him. I won’t. I’ll have to tell him I saw her. If she doesn’t go, he won’t ask, and I won’t have to lie. I’m done lying. I don’t know what she’s told you about my childhood.”

Is it her place to tell him? She doesn’t have to contemplate the question, though, because he knows.