As the driver pulls into the road, I turn. The man is standing in front of the print shop, where I stood only moments ago. I see the light of a cell phone in his hand, but he’s not looking at the screen—he’s watching the taxi.

At the hotel entrance, a female guard pats me down behind a curtain. If her hand lingered on my chest for a second, she would have felt my heart pounding. When my purse and body have passed through the security layers, I take the elevators up to the room and open the safe, my fingers trembling. The jewelry box sits alone and vulnerable in its small cell.

I open the box and touch the stones. Will the ring be protected here? Will it mean half as much to anyone as it has meant to me?

I tuck the box into the pocket of my cardigan, then leave the room and make my way down the hallway, into the elevator, and up to the empty rooftop balcony. The temperature has started to drop again. I peer out onto the swimming pool and the faint lights of cars approaching the hotel entrance.

From this humble summit, a hilltop set against mountains, I turn my gaze to the starlit night. The long tail of Draco still curls around Ursa Minor, as it did when I was a little girl. The sky is full of conquests and sorrow, heroes and villains, monsters and magic.

“Can you see me better from here?” I whisper to the still night, my cheeks tingling with cold. Below, the city is a pale reflection of the sky. I fill my lungs with the smoke of burning rue and grumbling generators, of freshly baked bread and a hint of gun smoke, of bright cardamom and heady hashish. The air intoxicates me, turns me foolish and honest as a drunk.

“Forgive me,” I say, with my hand raised to the blanket of stars above, ashamed of how long it has taken me to return to the place I came from, to ascend into the elsewhere I’m intended to be.

Chapter 56

The azaan echoes across the dawn sky, the hopeful muezzin singing that prayer is better than sleep. I have forgotten how to pray. The surahs I had learned to recite in my childhood in the sacred language of God were the first casualties in my private war. But the call wakens me, even if it doesn’t waken something in me. I slide one leg and then the other out of bed. Mom is a few feet away on the second bed, curled on her side with her back to me.

I imagine Tilly here with us, listening to the azaan. I picture her whipping a comforter off the bed, spreading it on the floor, and prostrating herself to see what it is like to worship a foreign God. The image brightens my morning.