“We’re the new paper on the block. I don’t trust our royal patron to cover our butts,” Imad tells Muneer, using English idioms, while they’re driving to grab lunch one day. In the car, he can say what he can’t say in the newsroom, where they know there are probably spies and bugs. Imad switches to Arabic for a more heartfelt sentiment: “God is the Protector. I need this paper to survive.”

So does Muneer. It is his life’s dream to uncover the truth. Digging up half-truths is better than nothing.

Finding Hanadi matters more than anything. He dreams of a child who looks nothing like his memories of her, and yet he knows her to be his daughter. There is so much he no longer knows: How tall is she? How deep is her one dimple? She was learning her English letters when he last saw her. What books is she reading? How long is her hair? What phrases does she fall back on over and over? Where is she? What will it take to get her back?

He needs Akhbar al-’Urus to survive, and he needs Fareed to survive, too, to continue to be able to pay for the PI’s search for their daughters.

Four years pass. Everyone but his mother stops urging him to marry.

In 1979, when terrorists lay siege to the Holy Ka’bah, no one, Fareed included, has the balls or the permission to run it in his paper. The secret police personally visit the kingdom’s newspaper editors, telling them to keep it hushed until the government says so. As though no one listens to BBC Arabic. Imad never announces it to the staff, but the reporters gossip, and they know the newspaper editors of Makkah and Jidda are the ones who have leaked the news to the BBC and the foreign wire services. Muneer is happy to be a reporter, a lesser person who doesn’t have to make such a tough call.

He makes a handful of trips to the United States over the years. Near the fifth anniversary of the disappearance—Hanadi’s tenth birthday—Muneer’s younger brother Tariq, newly at work for the airlines, helps him buy a discounted ticket. It is thin, wispy, but it feels like a million dollars in his hand. Muneer walks onto the plane in his thawb. A pair of khaki pants and a button-down shirt are carefully folded in his carry-on. Midflight, he washes up in the tiny lavatory, lifting his foot up and into the sink with his hand. He prays in his seat, though others pray in the aisles. The layover in Frankfurt is purgatory, but when he lands at JFK, he feels more hopefulness than he’s felt since Hanadi’s birth.