Her sister and mother tread ponderously. Nafeesa’s shawl and Tahera’s jilbab are plastered to their bodies, the edges fluttering wildly. There’s the same concentration in their faces, the same determination as they struggle against the wind. How small and fragile they look, like birds stranded in a storm. She left them behind in order to speak with Fiaz alone. She’d only have memories of silent, serious faces if she kept fleeing from them this way.

“Isn’t this lovely?” she calls out, smiling a welcome at them, and gesturing toward the red towers and the cables, the blue skies and the water. “The last time I was here was with your children, Tahera.”

She’d ended up here with Amina and Arshad as the sun set, unexpectedly happy with their day together.

She’d been beyond surprised when she’d received a call from Tahera in March. Their last conversation was more than a decade earlier, when she called Tahera to wish her well on her marriage to Ismail, after Tahera moved to Dallas to join her husband. The letter Tahera wrote her after made it clear she wanted no more contact.

It turned out Tahera was in San Francisco attending a conference hosted by the American Academy of Family Practitioners, invited to give a talk on healthcare for Muslim women. Her husband had accompanied her, for a day of meetings at his company’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Santa Clara. They’d brought the children along.

Then: “I heard you’re getting divorced.”

So the call was clearly obligatory, imposed on Tahera by Nafeesa, their go-between, relating news of one sister to the other. Yet, hearing Tahera’s voice after such a long time, Seema immediately yielded to the lure of the past, craving that sympathy from her younger sister, so soothing and familiar from her childhood. She found herself narrating details of the breakup—brave and telling—calculated to arouse that past sister’s solicitude. She even considered disclosing something she’d learned barely a week earlier, and was still grappling with—that she was pregnant as well.

But Tahera displayed neither sympathy over the phone nor exulting vindication, only the sense of duty. Seema was to be denied any satisfaction—neither the knowledge that her sister was gloating at her misery, nor the catharsis of reconciliation.

After listening mostly in silence, Tahera asked, “Do you need any help?”

“No, I’m fine,” Seema replied, hearing the effort it took Tahera to frame the question. To prove to Tahera, and to herself that she was really fine, she’d agreed to meet the visiting family for dinner.

I had been all of an inch then, my presence made real only by the accompanying symptoms—morning sickness, heartburn, the ripening tug of my to-be mother’s breasts. She had no concept of me except as cells quickening in her body, cells she could still choose to expel if she wanted. I was a to-be child she hadn’t decided yet to keep.

What did she see in her sister’s children that trip that made up her mind?