“And wasn’t it a military coup? The army turned against the president. All those people in the palace thought the soldiers were there to protect them. Do I have it right?”

Shair’s nostrils flare, his eyes shine. I am pulling at a loose thread.

“I am one man,” he says. His voice teeters, then comes close to breaking.

“There were innocent people there. People who trusted you. People who treated you kindly.”

His daughter steps back into the room. She takes one look at her father’s face and becomes alarmed.

“Padar? What’s going on? Is he okay?”

I don’t turn away from Shair. He is crumbling, and I want to hear every word that comes out of him.

“What man can stop a river?” he asks, then slips into Dari. “What man can stop a river? This is God’s river. I am nothing. God is God.”

“Oh, Padar,” Shair’s daughter cries, thinking he is lamenting the future when his mind is on the past. “God is good. He will take care of you.”

Shair’s daughter wraps her arms around her father.

Tears slide down his cheeks, and he wipes them away with the pale palms of his hands.

His daughter stuffs her phone in her back pocket and sniffles loudly. She turns back to the chair and fishes in her purse until she finds a packet of tissues. In all my meticulous planning, I did not anticipate how it would feel to see his daughter with him. I wanted to loom over him and press him for answers. I wanted to pin him on the role he’d played that night as a traitor.

I step toward Shair, lean in close enough to him that I am reminded of the night he told me to play dead and carried me to a truck.

“You will tell me where they’re buried,” I whisper in his ear in Dari, my voice breaking. “You will tell me everything.”

I slip out of the room and close the door behind me. Shair groans, and my throat threatens to close.

“So you’ve brought me here for this,” he says, sounding almost amused. “Everyone waits on a darkening sky and the heavy fogs, but here is Judgment Day. I never expected to escape it. I never did.”

“Padar, what are you saying?” his daughter cries.

I grab my bag from my office and sneak out the back door of the clinic before Lacey or anyone can see my wet cheeks. He is no longer a lion. And I am no longer a little girl.

I melt into the crowd outside, absorbed into the thrum of a city that has taught me never to forget.

Chapter 43

I don’t know how to feel about this afternoon’s encounter with Shair. I am rattled and triumphant and nervous and a bit ashamed too. I did not expect to feel like this.