Now, all they wanted was to make love. But where? He wasn’t allowed at her house—her father was too strict. She was welcome at his house, but his mother was always home and expected them to sit and have tea with her. She was ecstatic that he had an Ismaili girlfriend and even happier to have her company. “It’s just so nice to have a girl around,” she told Shafina. They tried to escape to his room, but his mother insisted they keep the door open.

His father was moving back from Rocky Mountain House soon. Ashif missed him even if he was used to his absence. It had been four years since he left. But there were other reasons he was looking forward to having him back home. Without him, Ashif had to run errands for his mom, take her grocery shopping, do the family banking, accompany her to community events, or just keep her company. Finally, he’d be able to shuck these duties and be a normal teenager. Best of all, he’d finally have more time alone with Shafina.

They started researching universities away from home. Columbia, the Sorbonne, the American University in Cairo, and McGill were at the top of their lists. They sent away for course calendars and eagerly checked the mail for their arrival. When the packages arrived, they spent hours mocking up class schedules for their first year, like mapping out a travel itinerary. “The scenic route,” she joked. Art history, film and photography, architecture, urban planning, linguistics, French, Arabic, international politics, the modern novel, natural science, macroeconomics.

Neither one of them was sure what they wanted to do yet, but she was leaning toward something in the visual arts, maybe film or photography. He was leaning toward the letters, maybe journalism or else poetry. “That makes sense, chéri. You have a poetic heart,” she said and he was elated. That day, he bought a stack of notebooks and started writing again. As if he was resurrecting a part of himself. He papered his notebooks like their B.S. books. He didn’t want his father to ever find out.

“What if we don’t get accepted to the same university?” he asked when the terrible thought first occurred to him. He could no longer imagine life without her.

“No one can separate our hearts, mon chéri,” she said. “We’ll always be under the same sky. Just like Rumi and Shams.”

After their meetings, Mel and Ashif debrief and have a quick dinner together. He likes her and he senses she likes him, too. But he knows he’ll never confide in her. They need to maintain a professional distance. So many rules, so many lines, like wands of light in a security system. You can’t cross one without an alarm being set off and showing up as a black mark on your next performance review. Merit is important, but how well you get along with people is just as important if you want to move up at the company. You have to attend endless client dinners and events. You have to participate in employee activities outside of work hours—golf tournaments, the company baseball team, weekly drinks at the local bar or during high season, every weeknight. You have to speak about sports, and, in the company of only men, women’s bodies. You have to follow the rules. He finds it exhausting. But he does it anyway. He has to if he wants to fit in. He’s always wearing a mask. A constant impostor. Not just at work, but in every part of his life. So that no one knows him. He has no one to confide in. Not Caity, not his friends from business school that he meets with once or twice a year. He doesn’t feel at home anywhere. He feels untethered, even to his own body. As if he might float away at any second.