Despite the veiling and the walls that separated men from women, sex was no secret in al-Remal, not even to children. But Laila’s talk of married life made it seem unnatural, even sinister. Still more unpleasant was the assumption that, in this matter, as in all others, a wife owed obedience to her husband.

Two years into their marriage, Laila’s husband was thrown from his horse while hunt- ing. The accident crushed a bone in his spine and left him paralyzed from the waist down. Though Laila publicly wept and wailed as a good wife should, privately she seemed almost to welcome his disability—shocking Amira again—because it would mean the end of some of his husbandly demands. But where previously he at least had been a vibrant figure, now Laila’s husband was merely an ill-tempered, whining old man who demanded her constant attendance as nurse and body servant.

The following spring, when Malik came home on holiday from Victoria College, the exclusive British-style boarding school in Cairo to which he had been sent, Laila used Amira as a go-between to arrange a secret meeting with him. Amira knew that this was forbidden; despite their childhood together, the two should not now be alone without the knowledge and approval of Laila’s husband. But how could such a thing be truly wrong? It was the first of many such meetings, and though Malik was two short months from graduation, he found one reason after another to make weekend visits to his family.

Then, for no reason that Amira could fathom, there came a time when Laila grew more subdued than ever before. And one morning when Amira went to visit in hopes of cheering her cousin up, the servant who answered the door turned her away with the icy announcement that Laila’s name was never to be spoken in that house again. Unable to learn anything further, Amira had no choice but to raise the subject that night at dinner.

“Has she died?” she asked timidly.

Her father’s ruddy complexion flushed crimson. “She is worse than dead!” he thundered, “although she will certainly die, too. That woman”—he would not use Laila’s name—” is with child. Not her husband’s! She has shamed herself and dishonored her family! There is only one rightful end for such a woman!”

The punishment for the act Laila had committed was death.

O

“Push,” the midwife commanded, reaching a gloved hand inside Laila, her fingers probing the birth canal. “I feel the head. A little longer, and it will be over.”

“I pray it’s a boy,” Laila gasped out. “I pray he never suffers like this, that he never endures what a woman must endure.”

Amira searched her mind for words of comfort. What could she say to Laila that would drive the specter of death away, if only for a moment? “Courage,” she murmured, “courage, Laila dear.” But would she have the courage to endure this—a filthy jail cell, cast out by her family, abandoned by family and friends? Knowing the child she gave her life for would never even know her?