Being in Ohio brings back an ice-cold feeling in his limbs, although it’s a rainy summer afternoon when he arrives. The clean-shaven, jowly, balding taxi driver who takes him to the Cleveland Heights townhouse appears Egyptian—the name on his ID placard pasted on the back of the passenger seat is Hani Abdul Qadir—but Muneer does not attempt to speak to him in Arabic. He doesn’t want to have to talk about why he’s here.

In a fabric pocket inside his suitcase, Muneer has stashed a small white envelope into which he’s slid a crisp stack of hundred-dollar bills. Next to the envelope is an open-ended ticket to Jidda with Hanadi’s name on it.

Jameel is frantic, his hair a curly mop, not the usual wavy pomade. He starts talking before he’s done kissing Muneer’s cheeks. “We have to go look at the house. If they saw us, they’re long gone.”

It feels as though he’s stolen Muneer’s right to fret. Muneer sits on a white leather couch and says, “God forgive me,” to himself.

Diane asks Muneer if he’s hungry, if he wants to lie down. No, he says, but water would be nice. She gives him a weird thumbs-up as she disappears into the kitchen. For the water request? For the potential of finding his daughter?

“That house in Shaker isn’t going to vanish into thin air,” she calls.

“We’ve got to go back before they disappear,” Jameel says. “They’ve vanished a million times, right, Muneer? Slippery as a worm, that woman.”

“Worms are slimy, Dad,” Lulu says, appearing in the living room. “Who are you talking about?”

Muneer gives her a hug and kisses her cheeks. She and Summer are as fair as their mother, with nearly blond hair. Muneer knows the story of how once, in a Jidda corner store, three-year-old Lulu toddled among the aisles of Kit Kats and chips, and the shopkeeper thought she belonged to a white British woman who was leaving the store.

It’s never been clear to Muneer whether Jameel wanted him to laugh at the shopkeeper’s ignorance or take the situation as a cautionary tale of what could happen if you married a blond American: foreigners could take your daughter.

Like Jameel, he doesn’t want to dally, but he wants to pray first.

“Get ’Ammu a prayer rug,” Jameel tells Lulu.

“We have prayer rugs?” Lulu says. “Where are you going?”

Diane hands Muneer a glass of water.

“Where’s Summer?” he asks.

She straightens already straight magazines on the glass coffee table. “She’s at a friend’s. Lulu and I are getting her after we go to the mall.”

Muneer senses something held back; he’s not sure what.