“Don’t walk away from me!” I shout. He is already out of sight. I will not wait another day for my answers, even if it means chasing him down in the street. I catch up to him quickly, but he doesn’t bother to look at me.

“We will talk. But not here,” he says in Dari, his face stoic as stone. Fuming, I walk beside him. Because I cannot tolerate following his lead, I set my pace to be in step with his.

“Where are you going?” I demand to know.

“There is a place,” he mutters.

We walk a few more blocks. An elderly woman with a terrier on a leash smiles at us as she approaches.

“Stop playing games!” I say. I want to grab him by his shoulder and make him stop, but I can’t recruit my limbs to action. The woman pauses in her step, then frowns at me. She shoots Shair a look of pity before her dog pulls her away. “Just answer my questions. Did you kill them? Are you running from the truth? Why won’t you admit what you did?”

He still doesn’t pause. He crosses the bustling street, and a car horn blares.

“Stop!” I shout, to both him and the car careening toward him. The driver slams on his brakes, and Shair lifts one hand, a quiet apology. I am behind him then. I feel the heat radiating off the hood of the car, meet the bewildered gaze of the driver, and then jog to the opposite curb.

If I’m honest, I’ve probably dreamed of running him over.

We walk another two blocks. Shair’s breaths are heavier, labored. I can hear a faint wheeze as I walk with him.

“You will answer me today,” I warn.

Shair stops at wrought-iron gates, at a set of brick pillars that mark the entrance to a cemetery.

“Here,” he says before he trudges onward, through the entry. Cemeteries are their most honest selves in winter, when the trees are skeletal and the grass is yellowed and flattened against the cold earth. When anything that blooms announces itself as fiction, plastic. When loved ones say prayers in double time, quickened by cold gusts of wind.

Still, I’ve always found cemeteries settling—seeing the souls tucked in with their families, the tombstones carved with nicknames and finite dates, and the mounds of earth ready to catch tears. I think of Randalls Island and the people lucky enough to have been buried twice. Or the lifeless man buried in fresh flowers on the back of a truck in India, the vehicle escorted by swaths of people singing and beating drums. My grandmother’s jenaaza in Kabul had been a hushed, colorless affair, with whispered prayers and free-flowing tears blotted by handkerchiefs.