Jenna had to smile at “kid.” Boyle had become distinctly avuncular as they had come to know each other.

“I’m fine, Sam. Really—I’m okay.”

The funny thing was that it was almost true. Unlike most new prisoners, Jenna needed to learn the trick of living one day at a time. She had lived that way before, in the women’s quarters of the royal palace in al-Remal.

True, in the palace she and the other women had access to every physical luxury their whims might suggest, whereas here, luxury was an extra slice of bologna in the lunchtime sandwich. But psychologically, the similarity was remarkable: when it came right down to it, the women in the palace had been prisoners, too.

The jail, at least the women’s wing, wasn’t especially grim. Essentially a small dormitory, it wasn’t even crowded; Palm Springs was hardly a high- crime area. Most of the handful of inmates were single mothers who worked in minimum-wage jobs or survived on public assistance, very much like women Jenna had known at the free clinic in Boston. Their typical offense was shoplifting or writing bad checks. At first, they treated Jenna like a celebrity, even a heroine. A housemaid named Latronia Parrish broke the ice.

“You that princess shot her husband?’’ “Yes.”

“What you shoot him for?”

“He was trying to kill my brother.”

Latronia nodded, as if this were nothing out of the ordinary. “What’s it like bein’ a princess?”

They all wanted to hear. After lights out, nudged along by a dozen questions, she began the story of her life. It went on for several bedtimes. She began to feel like the girl of A Thousand and One Nights. The others wept when she described the events in al-Masagin, gasped in disbelief about Alexandria, cursed the beating that had hospitalized Amira. By the time it had all been told, the others treated her less as a celebrity and more with the respect due a survivor.

For all that, the loss of freedom was hard, and hardest of all was Jenna’s inability to go to her son. Every day, he was slipping farther away from her—she could feel it—and there was nothing she could do. She didn’t even know where he was. If only she could see him, talk with him, for just one moment. Wouldn’t a word, a touch be enough to make him remember, to change his heart? Sleeping on the hard prison cot, she dreamed that the jail’s steel bars were modeling clay, the kind she and Karim had played with when he was a little boy. She could bend them aside and slip through, back into the cozy apartment in Boston, back into the past. She hated waking to find that the dreams were only dreams.

It was during a visit from Toni that Jenna had an inspiration.