Wearing a green linen dress, Tilly stood on the seat of the armchair holding a stapled stack of papers. A string of multicolored beads hung around her waist. Her hair, the color of rain clouds, was pinned at the back of her head. The boxy shape of the dress and its square neckline echoed the angles of her body, the horizontals of her collarbones and shoulders, the verticals of her nose and legs. My eyes lingered on the plush pink slippers on her feet.

“Before you come any farther, do you have any weapons on you?” she asked, holding a hand up to halt my entry. Antonia emerged from the kitchen, looking relieved.

My neck flushed with embarrassment.

“Good,” she said, waving me over so that I could help her descend from the chair. “Now, time to get some food into your tummy or those antibiotics might give you a bellyache. There’ll be more time for rehearsal later. And now that you’re feeling more like yourself, do you think you could at least tell us your name?”

“Sitara,” I said.

“Sitara,” Tilly repeated.

For the next few days, I was cared for like a most precious patient. Antonia checked my wound often and took my temperature. With me, their voices were light as birdsong. With each other, their conversations were often clipped and punctuated with facial expressions that needed no translation.

While Antonia’s work pulled her from the apartment, Tilly went only as far as the shops downstairs. Coming back with a melon or a bottle of orange soda, she would reenact her conversations with the store owners and talk about how the women in the market reminded her of Cleopatra. Tilly talked about Antonia too. She told me that her daughter had once set a man’s broken arm after he’d fallen off the back of a truck in Turkey. Tilly brushed my hair and brought me plates of food she insisted would help clear the poisons from my body. She sang to me and read aloud from a book about a woman who’d fallen in love with a man who rode around town on horseback.

My wound improved. Red faded to pink. The yellow fluid dried out. I still walked gingerly, but came closer to planting my foot solidly on the floor.

Tilly started calling me Star, the English cognate of my name. I spoke only a handful of words and, even then, only to answer their questions. But silence is a heavy coat, and I found myself desperate to shed the weight.