“Do you want me to marry next?” She pulled the shimagh from her lips, leaned in, and kissed him. He tasted sweetness, like candied almonds. “God forgive you,” she said. Her sly smile a crescent moon.

“God forgive me.”

He steered the car back toward her house. The sea was on her side, and he felt as though the night had wrapped itself around them.

Without thinking, he drove to the front of the house. Guests were arriving in sedan after sedan. The cars dropped off the women, whose sequined hems peeked out from under their black abayahs. The men, in their formal camel’s wool mishlahs with gold borders, parked and headed for the courtyard.

Beside him, she’d hidden below the dashboard, the top of her head close to his thigh.

“What are you doing?” she said. “Drive around the back.”

He licked his upper lip; it tasted like sweat. She widened her eyes: What are you waiting for? He let his hand float to the top of her head, and with one hand on the steering wheel, returned the car to their meeting place. Leaving his shimagh behind on the passenger seat, she got out of the car and stepped up onto the high sidewalk. She looked at him once before slipping through the back gate, and his heart flew out to her.

He saw none of what happened after she left him. But later, when they were married, she told him somehow she had convinced herself she was home free, and as she skipped upstairs, she hummed the sweet chorus of an Abdel Halim song. Already, he can’t remember which one. She opened the door to her parents’ room without knocking. Her aunts had taken the room over for the bridal preparations. Her older sister Randah, the bride, sat on the bed, a floor-length prayer scarf wrapped around her.

“You missed Isha prayer,” Randah had said.

“I prayed alone.”

“Big liar.”

“Bitch.”

“Riham saw you. Getting into a car with a boy,” her sister said. “She told all of us.”

When Saeedah told him what had happened next, he swallowed hard and tried to imagine it: she’d slapped her sister straight across the face. Randah hadn’t fought back because there was their mother, a man’s thick black iqal in her hand like a weapon. Behind her, Muneer’s mother, united with her sister.

“Give her what she wants,” his mother had said. “And she won’t be your problem anymore. She’ll be my son’s problem, God help them.”

They were married in August, on a plane to America less than a week later.

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