“I work at the American embassy,” she explained. “I must go there today, but I will come back very quickly. Do you understand?”

Tilly popped her head out of the bedroom. She had on a pink bra and turquoise palazzo pants.

“You’re not seriously thinking of leaving, are you?” she asked Nia, her hands on her hips.

I tried to understand why Shair had left me with a woman from the American embassy. Was he using me for some sort of a plot?

“I’ve got to, Mother,” Antonia replied. She slipped on a blazer and walked toward the door. She paused for a beat, looked down at my hand, and then turned to me. “The man who brought you here. Do you know his name?”

I tucked my hand behind me and did not reply. I’d been wearing the ring with the stones tucked in my palm, but the glint of the band was hard to hide.

Antonia smiled as if to tell me she wasn’t upset by all that I would not share with her. I could see she didn’t want to leave.

“I will come back very soon. You will be fine here. My mother likes to talk,” Antonia said softly. “But you don’t have to—”

“Go if you have to go,” Tilly said, charging across the room in her bra and pants to shoo Nia out the door. “I can almost guarantee we won’t burn the place down while you’re out.”

Tilly put on a shirt and went to work in the kitchen. She cut orange slices into circles and triangles and arranged the shapes on a plate to create a face, complete with rinds for eyebrows and buckteeth made of two square crackers. I looked up at Tilly in confusion, which seemed to delight her. She shook her shoulders and twirled on her heels.

She sat down beside me and sucked on an orange wedge. Then she placed one hand over her chest and repeated her name slowly and deliberately. I looked at her splayed fingers, her perfectly round nails, and the pale brown spots on the back of her hand.

“Tilly,” she said one final time. “Like ‘silly,’ but with a ‘t.’”

She might as well have handed me a wrench. What was I to do with this name? Never in my life had I addressed an elder by her first name. My parents would have been mortified.

Music blared in the street. I looked at the window. In the daylight, the curtain did little to hide the unbroken sky. The air carried the faint scent of charred wood and gunpowder. I wondered if Tilly smelled it too, or if the red smoke I’d breathed in that night would stay with me forever.