Antonia touched her fingertips to my knees.

“I don’t know how, but I will help you,” she vowed, and I wanted desperately to believe her. “I will not let anyone else hurt you, and I don’t know how but we will find a way to make this better.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Nia. You start by putting your arms around the girl!” Tilly said through tears. She crossed the room and crouched next to me, wincing as she bent her knees. She smelled of oranges and cinnamon and the stubby cigarettes she smoked but also faintly musty—a scent I couldn’t name.

The phone rang. Antonia ignored it. She slid back, making room for Tilly to pull me into an embrace. She sat against the wall with her knees pulled to her chest, perhaps pondering the unkeepable promises she’d just made.

Tilly pulled away for a moment, her cotton shirt darkened by my tears.

“It’s an inside-out world, isn’t it? Sometimes the world turns inside out and we’re in the center and it’s oh so dark and we think we will never, ever see the sun again,” Tilly whispered, cupping her hands together. Her voice rising feverishly. “But it won’t stay that way because little girls can turn the world outside in again and keep it spinning and spinning. My little Nia knows it. Oh, come here, you sweet thing.”

She pulled me close again, a tangle of aches and pains and regrets.

We rocked together as a predestined pairing. Like two lines of a couplet. Like two edges of a jagged wound. Like a lost mother and a found child.

Chapter 14

“Hard to believe it was three weeks ago today. I was right here on this roof, not knowing what I was seeing. Nia kept calling, ‘Get off the roof, Mom,’” Tilly said, imitating Nia’s voice. She gazed at the sky. “I saw it all, but I didn’t know what my eyes were seeing. And to think . . .”

Her words drifted off. I imagined her on this roof while Sukhoi jets crossed the skies above the palace, firing upon us.

I sat cross-legged beside her with my notebook on my lap, as had become my routine. I’d been scribbling details of my life, bits of conversations with my parents and Faheem’s habits, afraid I would lose the private moments we had shared. Without asking what I was writing, Antonia had come home with a new notebook, sliding it across the table as casually as if she were passing a napkin. Grateful, I filled the lined pages for hours at a time, though the effort often left me drained and freshly devastated.