I told Bahr about the call and he seemed worried, more worried than I thought he’d be. He took his bag from behind the door and asked me to get mine. We left the hotel in a hurry.

Outside, we stood at the line where the palms met the desert. We waited there until a taxi came by that seemed robust enough to manage the whole route. The sun was racing into the heart of the sky as we drove away.

A few hours later the engine cut out and refused to restart. The driver said he’d have to get help. We looked around. There was nothing: no shops, no cafés, no garages. We told the driver that we’d go with him. “You won’t be able to walk all that way in the sun,” he said, and with those words, to our astonishment, he left us, drawing away until he was just a point in the distance and winking out.

There we were, all alone. We sat speechless in the back of the car: no water, no food, no reception on the phones. An hour passed, two, and the sun began its return to earth. We decided to walk.

We got out, and walked until the roughly laid road disappeared and we were surrounded by a landscape of scrub and sand. Bahr said that we should stay where we were and wait for someone to come by; we didn’t want to get lost in the desert.

So we sat, slouched against our bags. We began to grow drowsy and Bahr stretched out on the ground. “We’ll go on when we wake up,” he said.

But the drowsiness was a mirage. We didn’t sleep, and out of the blue, Bahr decided to answer my question:

“I didn’t choose you, Seif.”

He said nothing for a moment, then continued, “I didn’t ask for you to come with me. Truth is, I’d never heard of you, never read anything you’d written. I didn’t know you. Leila vouched for you, but she didn’t pick you, either. She told me about you—about what you’ve kept hidden from me—and I worked out the rest. You seemed perfect for the trip. Like you were closing a circle that had been broken since the day my eyes first opened on the world.”

He turned to me.

“Why did you switch your phone off, Seif? The day of that business with Alya? Did you know?