Muneer bundles Saeedah in the blanket and scoops her up. She feels heavy as anything.

This experience binds them together—or should. Because he has saved her and the baby, and tonight, she will be OK. The child will be OK, will be born beautiful and whole, will be named Hanadi. He will pray two raka’ahs in thanks tomorrow morning, and another two daily for a month. He will beg his professors to give him extensions on his coursework and to let him graduate if he finishes by the end of the summer, and they will agree.

But doubt will return bit by bit, like the whisperings of a devil. Aunt Faizah, who will need no convincing to fly across the world to help take care of her baby granddaughter, will yell at him for failing to prepare and boss him while he sets up a crib from Sears in the spare bedroom she and Hanadi will share. His mother-in-law will guide him toward the things Saeedah did not: blankets and onesies and tiny caps and socks with yellow ducks on them. Bottles and nipples and pacifiers and canisters of formula and boxes of diapers.

“Good God, the two of you, both so ignorant,” Aunt Faizah will say. “Didn’t you take care of your younger brothers and sisters? It never occurred to you that you needed these things?”

“The baby was not supposed to come for a month,” he will insist, and in his mind he will place the blame on Saeedah. If she had been willing to talk to him these last months and weeks, she might have told him what they needed.

Aunt Faizah will wrap the baby so tightly the little thing can’t move, can do nothing but sleep, and Muneer will wish he could be swaddled and kept safe from the world. He’ll spend most of his time at the library, and when he returns home, Saeedah will usually be sitting in the rocking chair, holding the baby when her mother lets her, looking always like she is in shock. Jameel and Diane will come to visit, and the pity in their eyes will tell him the shell-shocked look is on his face, too.

After his mother-in-law leaves, he will muddle through the year of his internship, writing for a little local paper in Beachwood, covering shopping mall Santas and fire department fundraisers. He will inhale the fragrance that emanates from the top of his daughter’s head, the essence of her, and watch her shove her fists in her mouth and grab her mother’s dangling gold earrings so that Saeedah has to carefully extract them before Hanadi can tug them straight through her earlobes, as a thief once did to Saeedah’s sister at the Haram Mosque in Makkah.