Her own reasons for being here seem trivial compared to young soldiers “fighting for freedom”—if that’s how they see themselves. If she were being honest, the reasons she has come to Jidda are, in order: to piss off her mother, to meet her siblings, to avoid a semester of art school and her job at the art supply store, to see her father.

“You don’t have to work, Hanadi,” her father said as they sat in a car outside her Cleveland Heights apartment a little over a month ago, an international airline ticket on the armrest between them. If she were a better person she would have argued with him. But she’s been low on money, and her mother found her number over the summer and started calling her several times a week to tell her to come home.

She is twenty. She can live wherever she wants. Go wherever she wants. She doesn’t have to go “home” to her mother’s lies.

Her father picked up the ticket with his index and middle fingers and held it in the space between them.

“Your brothers can’t wait to see you.”

The idea of brothers never occurred to her.

She always wanted a sister, someone to share in-jokes with, to repeat lines from movies with, to be the other person in the world who knows what it was like to be her mother’s daughter.

She ran away. She looked up W’s name in the Toledo phone book, which they had at the Cleveland library, and called four people with the same last name until she heard the familiar Polish accent.

“Of course I remember you,” W said.

So Hannah bought a Greyhound ticket to Toledo with her paycheck from the convenience store where she worked at the time. She finished high school in Toledo, living with W and W’s boyfriend, Tod.

When Hannah got into art school in Cleveland, but not in New York, Rhode Island, LA, or DC, W told her not to go back.

“Your mom will find you.”

Hannah didn’t listen. She moved back to Cleveland, into her own apartment. She gave Muneer and W her new address. But she didn’t tell her mom.

Being here, she has a weird, admittedly vindictive urge to tell her mother where she is. “Here I am, in the place you kept me from, with the father you said was dead.”

Hannah slides into the crimson-vinyl back seat of her father’s white Chevrolet sedan. It smells like some sort of woody incense. Sitting in the front, Lamees turns her veiled face toward Hannah. “Did you find what you were looking for?”