Tahera gives no answer. Yes, she’s almost numb, but the warmth of the apartment is more jarring than welcome. She’d been pacing in the cold pale reality of the rooftop with only the moon for company, like the many times as a girl in Chennai, but there was only so long she could avoid the gathering in her sister’s home.

Fiaz rises to greet her, Leigh waves. Tahera returns a perfunctory smile, a mere tightening of her lips, and fends off her mother hovering about her: “I have to pray my isha namaz.”

Ignoring everyone in the room, she rummages through her suitcase for a fresh set of clothes, a fresh pad, then heads for her shower. A wadu will not be sufficient today, she will need to do a full ghusl. Her period isn’t over yet, though the major flow has perhaps ended, but there is still some bleeding. But she can no longer go without her namaz. She needs its strength to face a world that feels even more hostile than it did just yesterday, with everything that has happened since the news of the arson. The room, with Ammi and Seema and her friends, feels almost like a battlefield she must steer through warily.

Tahera leaves an awkward silence behind her. Fiaz raises an eyebrow at Seema, but Seema is herself baffled. “I don’t know,” she mouths. Tahera has made no mention of Fiaz all day and had seemed happily engaged in the kitchen with Ammi when she’d left with Leigh. She looks to her mother for a clue.

Nafeesa murmurs, “Some things back home are upsetting her.” She wishes now that she’d not provoked Tahera that afternoon. Or that she’d asked forbearance from Tahera for tonight, but she’d been afraid she might only make things worse.

Fiaz asks, “Was there more trouble at the Islamic center?”

“What trouble?” Seema asks, and Fiaz explains, an eye out for Tahera’s return.

Nafeesa is surprised that Fiaz knows and Seema doesn’t. “Seema, you should pay more attention to your sister’s life.”

Seema runs through her various conversations with Tahera in the past few days—how is she to know if Tahera doesn’t talk about it? She has heard about the protests at Ground Zero in New York, of course, but hasn’t followed the news. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to connect it to Tahera and her family, anyway. She feels abashed at her ignorance. “Has it really gotten that bad?”

“I did a report on the protests at Yorba Linda and Temecula—people waving flags and chanting ‘God bless America’ in front of mosques,” Leigh answers. She recalls how taken aback she’d been by her first sight of Tahera in her hijab and jilbab, and is conscience-stricken learning about Tahera’s ordeals. “I’m not surprised worse is happening in Texas.”