Since she arrived, Hannah’s days have gone by one like the other, identical pencils in a case. There’s not much to do while her father works. She’d like to explore the city, but they don’t have a driver, and women are not allowed to drive, so they can’t go to the mall or the grocery store till he’s done with work. It’s frustrating and not what she expected, as someone used to coming and going as she pleases.

So Hannah spends long stretches of time drawing. The day after the shoplifting incident, she sits on the low cushions of the family room and props the hard, flat pillow from her bed on her lap to make a desk. The air conditioner hums, a constant sound. It’s October and balmy outside. Lamees and Mary—the young Filipina woman who cooks, cleans, and helps take care of the boys—are making lunch. Hannah would like to click the FYC tape into her father’s Sony stereo system, but there is the thing Lamees said about music.

The pillow is from the two older boys’ bed, a full that they usually share. These days, her three brothers—six, five, and three—sleep with their parents. And Mary doesn’t have her own room. Her contract is with Lamees’s sister, but she came to help take care of the boys after the littlest, Hatim, was born. She sleeps on a mattress in the formal living room, with the folding doors closed. There are too many people in this apartment, and Hannah wishes she’d known that before she agreed to fly thousands of miles to a country gearing up for war. The other day Muneer showed Hannah the blueprints for a villa he’s having built in a newer part of town. Everyone, he said, will have their own room.

“How soon?” Hannah asked.

“Next year, I promise.”

Does he think she’ll be here next year?

In the margins of her journal, Hannah sketches her toes, a minaret, a bowl of black olives. She finds a dull charcoal pencil at the bottom of her backpack, twists it in her knuckle-size sharpener, and sketches a pair of mirrored sunglasses with her own face reflected in them.

Five-year-old Fadi, the middle of her father’s boys, doesn’t think too much of her drawings. He climbs onto her lap, grabs her pencil, and scrawls on the page, embellishing her careful cross-hatching with swooping loops. He’s autistic and only speaks a few words of Arabic, her father told her, fewer than Hatim.

Fadi adds a layer to my sketches, she wrote on page seven of the letter to Malik, a few days ago. It’s a collaborative process.

Hatim is not interested in Hannah; he loves Mary best. But she is trying to win him over by folding things for him: notepaper fortune tellers, gum-wrapper swans, a hat made out of their dad’s newspaper.