“I’d have had something better for you to eat if I knew you’d be here tonight,” Ziba said, mixing with a spoon the leftover abgoosht she was warming on the stove.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m not hungry.” Although I had eaten little on the plane I had no appetite.

“She isn’t a stranger,” Darius said.

But I was a stranger, with people I had not seen for so long and hardly knew any more. I looked around the imitation modern kitchen—redone since I had left—with plastic chairs made to look like wood, a brown formica table, a flimsy gas stove and, instead of the wooden icebox, an old refrigerator with its enamel chipped. The gold-colored curtains were soiled with spots of grease.

“What did you do that for, not come back for so long?” my father said, his eyes still cast downward.

“I was busy, time went by—it didn’t seem like so long.” I couldn’t seem to find the words. “And my work—it’s hard to get away from it.” I was a biologist, a researcher in a consulting firm near Boston. Although I worked hard, building a career, my refusal to return for visits, in spite of my father’s pressure, had taken an effort on my part. I had tried to forget my past. But gradually, after years, that had no longer been possible. Little by little I had been filled with a sense of futility and restlessness. Vague dissatisfactions with work, with Tony, with people I knew had set on me.

“You’re back now,” my father said, as though trying to avoid unpleasantness.

“It seems she never left,” Darius said, punching me gently on my side.

“But you look different,” my father said. “You look Western.”

My hair was short, just to the nape of my neck in a blunt cut. I had plucked my eyebrows so that they were almost straight, making my eyes seem larger than they were and my face more angular. I wore a silk blouse, a scooped-neck sweater, and slacks.

“You don’t expect me not to have changed,” I said.

“She’s just as thin as she used to be,” Ziba said, putting a bowl of abgoosht and a slab of gravel-baked bread before me.

I began to eat reluctantly.

“She was thin as a child,” my father said. “Thin as a reed.”

“We’ll have to feed her well,” Darius said.

“Why didn’t you bring your husband with you?” my father asked.

“He had work to do.”

“He teaches college, right?”

I nodded. Tony taught urban planning at a university in Cambridge.

“A college professor,” Darius said with a touch of mockery. “Do you have any pictures of him? You never sent one us.”

My father had objected so strongly to the news that I wanted to marry Tony—an American—that I had kept most of the business to myself.

I took out a photograph of Tony from my wallet and handed it to Darius. In the picture Tony sat on a swivel chair in his study in our house. Behind him there was a shelf filled with books, in front of him a formica desk with a typewriter on it. He sat smiling into the camera. He seemed to be smiling at me. A wave like a distant breeze touched me. The brittleness that had begun to mark his behavior and the defiance that often lurked in his eyes did not show in the photograph. When we had first met he was full of optimism.