Is it my fault? Amira wondered, watching her mother nod as if she were having a conversation with herself. Is it something I did? Is it because I was a bad daughter, that one night, that my mother and father have become strangers? Is that why my mother has changed so much, so quickly?

She hardly recognized Jihan these days—the dull eyes, clouded as if with frost, that once had sparkled; the tight, pursed mouth that had charmed with its smile, its laugh, its quick jokes, and compliments and kisses; the sunken, defeated body that had never been able to sit still for five minutes, so full of life it was, yet, now lay motionless for hours in a darkened room. Her mother was an Egyptian, a Cairene, a sophisticate from the capital of the Arab world, exciting and even deliciously scandalizing to the conservative Remali women around her: “Movies? Well, of course, they’re against the law here, but in Cairo, we saw them every week. Yes, women, too. Even American movies. Do you know the story of Scar- lett O’Hara, who fell in love with a rich sheik and then with a handsome smuggler? Be serious, you’ve never heard of her? Well, let me tell you …”

Now that same woman hunched in a chair in the corner, looking like some- one’s crazy great-aunt who might, at any moment, start muttering darkly about how things were better under the old king.

O

“The king was very handsome, very elegant, wasn’t he, Mother?” “What? The king? Farouk, do you mean?”

They were in Jihan’s room, the curtains drawn, twilight in the middle of the day. Jihan lay with a cooling damp cloth on her forehead.

“Yes. Farouk.”

Jihan sighed. The Cairo Horseback Riding Club. A day in spring. Herself as a girl. The king passing by with his entourage, a glance at her, a greeting to her father. “When he was young, there was no man more handsome than Farouk,” she said. “People forget, because of the grotesquerie he became.”

“When he asked about you,” Amira prompted, “your father said you were already promised, didn’t he?” It was a story her mother cherished, she knew.

Jihan only nodded. Who knew what was true? Her father might have made it all up to please her.

“What if you’d married the king? What then?” Anything to keep Jihan talking, to break the shell she had grown that was slowly crushing her.