But the news of the baby had made her smile, and the mood lasted for days. He was giddy, too. They hadn’t told their families in Saudi or their friends here, and they held hands in the car as he drove through the low-rise suburbs toward Lake Erie, down the greenway, alongside the salt factory, the giant mural of the Morton salt girl in her rain boots. Saeedah loved the beach, though the water was fresh and brown and smelled like algae, not salty and blue and fishy like the sea they grew up with. They tugged off their sneakers and socks, rolled their jeans up to their knees, walked to the lighthouse and climbed on the rocks. They gazed across the vastness of Lake Erie, no shore in sight, as though they were gazing into the future. The wind whispered around them, lifting Saeedah’s nearly waist-length hair like black wings.

Muneer and Saeedah had never seen a lake before. They didn’t know that most lakes don’t stretch to the horizon like the sea. The sky was as blue as the Red Sea, and they fell on their backs looking up at it, letting the sun warm their faces. Ahead of them lay the baby’s birth, Muneer’s graduation in the spring, his yearlong internship in the States before going back to be a reporter for her father.

The waves lapping against the shore sounded like a prayer whispered over and over. The sand felt like a net, holding them. He would like to go back to the beach and recapture the feeling. But Saeedah waves her arm at the window, the porridge-gray sky, and the wiry trees. She smiles a wide, taut smile and rolls her eyes.

“Wouldn’t you say it’s too cold for the beach?”

Last winter—her first—wasn’t like this. She wore her hat and gloves and wound the itchy blue scarf around her neck, and together they complained about the weather. They’d watched the year’s first snowfall, the flakes like thousands of tiny miracles. They’d held out their hands and the snow landing on their skin felt like nothing. “Mashallah,” they’d said together, standing in the driveway. Their tongues stuck out involuntarily to catch the little bits of moisture, and their words came out garbled: “Mathallah, mathallah.”