Jameel says the Corolla zipped ahead, merging into the left-turn lane. He told Diane, “Follow that car,” like he was in a cop show, but Diane drove along like she hadn’t heard him. Maybe she hadn’t. He pulled himself forward with his hands on her headrest. “That car, the orangey-red one. Follow it.”

“She said, ‘What the fudge—Jameel, you’re going to make me crash,’” Jameel tells Muneer.

“Thank God you’re fine,” Muneer says.

“The girls asked what the heck we were doing. I screamed at Diane, ‘Turn left!’”

Jameel thought for sure the girl and the car had disappeared. But miraculously, Diane made the left turn, and up ahead was the Corolla.

Jameel gushes, and though he means to show love, solidarity, understanding, Muneer wants to hang up the phone and not have to be grateful. Jameel says, “Since Hanadi disappeared, whenever I come to the States, a sliver of my brain wonders if I’ll finally see her.”

He’d never expected to actually see her—especially not in Cleveland. Why would the girl and her mother come back here?

“Keep on with the story,” Muneer says, though he wonders the same thing. Wonders if this is another apparition, a doppelganger jinn sent to confuse him.

On his desk is a photo of his two older boys dressed in feminine ruffles to ward off the evil eye, when Fouad was an infant and Fadi was one, and another more recent snapshot, with the boys at two and three years old. He doesn’t yet have a picture of the new baby, Hatim. Muneer keeps the pictures slightly behind his typewriter. Lamees is superstitious. She would worry about the eye if she knew the photos were out in the open for people to see.

His photos of Hanadi are safely stashed at home.

“So, we chased after the car,” Jameel says. “You should’ve been with us.”

He tells how they followed the Corolla down an avenue lined with old, oversize colonials, and around a wooded pond. Muneer knows this family so well, he almost feels he was there with them. Saw how the girls looked out their windows expectantly, their hands slightly lifted, as though they were eating popcorn and watching a movie. Heard how Diane worried: “What are we going to do if it’s her?” Witnessed her knuckles whiten as she tightly gripped at ten and two.

The Corolla pulled into a driveway, and they drove past. Jameel says he needed another glimpse of Hanadi. “To make sure. Because I don’t want you to come here on a wild duck chase.” He says the idiom in English.

“Goose?” says Muneer.

But Jameel didn’t see. Diane hit the gas, rather than the brakes, and the car squealed down the street.

“What the hell?” Jameel said.

“She would have seen us. Duh, Dad.”

“Turn around.”

“What are you going to do, Meel, go inside?”