“In a few weeks, women will be allowed to drive here. June 24. My daughters and granddaughters are getting their licenses. Alhamdulillah, it will be a great day for them.”

“Yes, it’s wonderful news.” How different would her past visits have been if she had been able to drive?

“Those women and men activists, the ones arrested for colluding with enemies—too many Saudi papers called them traitors. Innocent until proven guilty, I say.”

“I don’t follow the news much. That’s terrible.”

“We don’t want the unrest of other countries. Remember the Arab Spring? But small social changes—we need those. What does your father say?”

“I didn’t ask him that.”

Randah called her to eat before they put the food away. But she was hungry for this, sitting with her grandfather, not for street food.

She watched saline drip from the bag. He fidgeted against the raised back of the bed.

“Where’s your mother? Randah said she was coming. Did she fly with you?”

She can’t tell him the truth: that she, Hannah, denied him the possibility of seeing his daughter.

“Do you remember what she looks like anymore?”

“Of course I do.”

“I don’t have a photo.”

“I don’t need a photo.”

He seemed wide awake when she came in, but now he seems a bit groggy. It would make her feel better about her dishonesty to know the answers to some of her questions.

“When I was a child, did you know? Where she was? Where we were?”

“I didn’t know. We had—what do you call it? A private investigator. I wanted to know where she was, but I couldn’t bear to make her come home. Her mother would have wanted me to. Randah knew. Randah got the reports. She never told me. I paid for the PI. Your grandmother thought you should be here, with your father, but I couldn’t cause you to be taken from your mother.”

They could have brought her home. Maybe her isolation from her family could have been briefer, a blip she would barely remember.

Or maybe nothing would have changed the fact that her mother had stolen her.

Several family members have left the sitting room—she feels bad she doesn’t know their names, but how can she be expected to keep track of so many? Randah and Riham are packing the food back into its bags and tying the plastic into tight, nearly impenetrable knots. A plate of food they made for her sits on the coffee table.

She eats so she won’t have to talk.

When she finishes, the words gush out. “Randah, you knew where we were.”

“We found her, and she begged me not to bring her back.”

“Found her where?”

“When you were in California, before she moved you back to Ohio. I don’t understand why she did that.”