“Don’t come, Mom,” Hannah says. “What if your dad dies and your brothers won’t let you leave? What if they find out about your cross?”

“Why would they keep me there? I’m old. It’s not like I’m young and they’d want to marry me off, or something.” She laughs and glances at Glenn. “I’ll leave my cross here.”

“Nothing to lose,” Glenn says. He hesitates. “Unless you consider me.”

“I want to go,” Sadie says. But Hannah can tell she’s sown a seed of discord between them. And later, when her mother calls to say she’s changed her mind, and will Hannah pay her respects, Hannah is not surprised.

RETURN

At the Jidda airport, her father is waiting. He asks about her grandfather, about Fareed and Hamza. He hands her two hundred riyals “in case.” The darkness they drive through, before they reach the city, feels different yet familiar. She has not been back since before Fareed was born. Every time she returns, it’s to a place she remembers, like a favorite tourist destination. With family baggage.

Her father drops her at the hospital, where the Saudi and Filipino front desk workers speak English. They send her upstairs, to a suite of sorts. Her grandfather has been downgraded from intensive care—though the brief interlude of healing will not last. In a small sitting room attached to her grandfather’s hospital room, members of her mother’s family are taking tea. Without asking if Hannah wants any mint, Randah stirs sugar, hot water, and mint in a finjan. She knows how many spoonfuls of sugar her niece prefers. The crystals and leaves swirl in the tiny glass. Hannah doesn’t want the hot liquid, but saying no would be rude, so she accepts the mint tea and sips. A young man in a crisp white thawb and well-ironed shimagh comes in with steaming bags of muttabbaq, ful, and tamees. Most likely he’s a cousin who was little the last time she saw him. Teenage girl cousins in tarhahs, tittering around her, look like colorful birds.

“How was your flight?” one asks in English, the consonants emphasized. Hannah’s heart flutters at how the words sound heftier, more earnest, when spoken this way.

“Good, alhamdullilah,” she says, and wonders how flimsy her Arabic sounds to them.

Randah lets Hannah’s grandfather know she’s there, and gestures for her to come into the room.

“You came,” he says in English. Her grandmother Faizah, who speaks only Arabic, sits at his bedside and smiles.

Grandfather Fareed’s face is puffy, his hair whiter than Hannah remembers—and sparer. His teeth are hanging on for dear life in his gums. She holds his soft hand.

“I have a picture of my son Fareed for you.”

He brings his hand to his heart. “Very handsome.”

They sit quietly for a while.