In the end, Jihan let Amira coax her out to the shaded arcade, but the other women’s faces, their eyes, their sudden silence breaking into oversolicitude, told that they all saw the dream on her.

She no longer kept the diary, for the dream came nearly every night now, so that she dreaded sleep. Worse, it haunted her waking hours, as well. It was as if the whole familiar world—the house, the garden, the faces of everyone she knew—were only a shimmering, gossamer veil that might lift at any moment to reveal the sand pit snarling like a black jackal beyond.

She knew that something was wrong—wrong with her, wrong with the way she was acting. It was sinful. First and second wives did not always get along— although quite often they did—but both women were expected to keep any dis- sonance between them from intruding on their husband’s happiness. Jihan had failed in this, even denying Omar her body for many months now. Certainly, that was a sin, and she dreaded having to account for it in the time to come.

But weren’t there reasons?

You’ll be the only one, always, the only star in my sky. It was another diary entry, from another time. She had been fourteen when she wrote it, on the morning after her wedding night. Omar, who was eighteen years older, had said it to her. In those days, he often spoke to her in words that sounded like poetry—in those days, and for months and years afterward. And it was more than words. They had had an understanding. They had had a happy marriage. Perhaps that was why he did not divorce her despite the thing, all the things, wrong with her now. The only one. She shook her head and, in her mind, gave a bitter little laugh.

Instantly, from the women’s eyes, she knew that she had made the sound aloud.

“Your throat is dry, Um Malik,” said Um Yusef, gracefully covering the moment. “Let me bring you some tea.” She hurried to the task as a good second wife should. Jihan watched her narrowly. It was well enough, she was thinking, for Um Yusef to make a show for the others, but the truth was that this pretty, pretty, young, young, young woman not only occupied the place of second wife but had usurped that of first wife, as well. Ever since Yusef ’s birth, all of Omar’s attentions had centered on the baby and its mother. Where was the respect, the veneration, that was due to the first wife, the mother of the firstborn son?

But it was her own fault, Jihan knew, only hers.

O