I look at him just a second more, just long enough to see him—one shoulder a smidge lower than the other from the backpack he keeps slung over it, the faint lines around his eyes from sun glare on Afghan plains, the perfectly mussed chestnut hair.

“Have you been to Bagh-e-Babur?” I ask.

“Not with you,” he says.

I purse my lips and bury a smile.

The gardens are a mere ten minutes away. I can feel eyes on us as we step out of the taxi. I glance over my shoulder, but no one looks like the man who followed me outside the restaurant. I am certain by now that my anxieties got the best of me that night.

We stand just outside the high walls surrounding the gardens. I catch a few men looking at me. I’m dressed in a long skirt and a tunic with sleeves that fall to my wrists, like so many of the women here. And yet I exude an otherness that demands their attention. For a second, my neck warms with the heat of their curiosity, at the possibility that they are passing judgment on an Afghan woman walking with an American man.

But inside those high walls, the air clears and I feel my shoulders relax. We ascend stone steps and walk the avenue lined with maple trees. The Mughal gardens are rectilinear in design, laid out in sections with right angles and straight borders. Behind us, adobe homes adorn the skirt of a high hill.

“This was one of my father’s favorite places to picnic,” I recount. “I don’t know how many biscuits I’ve eaten sitting on one of these tree branches. My mother would scold me and tell me to come down before I fell and broke a bone. But my father . . . my father made it seem like the trees had been planted a hundred years ago just so that I could climb them.”

Clay walks beside me, loose-limbed and attentive.

“Your mom sounds like my mom. I lost my mom a year ago, out of the blue. She used to ask me why I couldn’t write about sports or maybe even politics,” he tells me. “I was here when she passed. I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I reply, and Clay clears his throat.

Three men in heavy coats sit on a blanket on the lawn, playing cards. A light wind rustles the leaves of the trees overhead. One man slaps down a card and lets out a triumphant shout. His friends shake their heads and accuse him, merrily, of cheating.

I am reminded of my parents playing, my father sitting cross-legged and my mother with her legs tucked to her side, her eyes hidden behind dark round lenses. I would peer over my father’s shoulder as he arranged his fanned cards by suit, guarding them dramatically from my mother’s eyes.