Perhaps her punishment is to be that her sister and mother are forever lost to her, erased from her life. She recalls that evening decades earlier when she’d walked into her sister’s room, only to find it bare, stripped of every sign—her sister disappeared with meticulous care. And—Allah forbid!—if something were to happen to her sister or the baby now, her mother would never forgive her. As she would never be able to forgive herself.

She’d allowed herself to behave hatefully. What had gotten into her, she who has always prided herself in her righteous ways? Her son’s face rises before her eyes—she imagines it at the moment the rock flew out of his hands, the set of his jaws, the line of his brows—but no, she cannot blame her son for her actions this evening. She sees it clearly now—whatever hurt, whatever anger, whatever hate drove him to such an act, it surely also belongs to her.

For a brief urgent moment she contemplates asking the driver to turn back to the airport: she needs to be in Irvine right away, something hanging there in the balance. Otherwise she may be too late, returning to her son only to find every loving trace of him erased. Hadn’t her husband spoken of whisking her son away? But then there’s the threatened erasure, too, of her sister and mother. Why is Allah forcing these dilemmas on her?

The cab is hemmed in by the traffic brought to a crawl by the fog, too far from the airport to make it back in time for her flight. Surely Allah knows best: He is, after all, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. She can only hope she’s being led to some sort of redeeming test, her son’s and her sister’s fates somehow linked and connected.

Allah, she prays, Allah, spare my son and my sister, let nothing happen to them.

The driver turns a startled face toward her: she has spoken the prayer out loud. Please hurry, she tells the driver, please hurry—

The car revs and lurches forward into the fog, the pale nebulous light opening and closing around them. And the car swings and zips down blurred streets lit by milky lamps, past drowsy traffic lights, past phantom buildings, through the ghostly remains of a shrouded city.