“The bomb?” she asked, unaware that the Dari word for “roof” is pronounced the same as the English word for a large explosive.

“The roof,” Antonia said, clarifying. We stumbled upon these confusions daily in our bilingual conversations, filling the gaps with whatever was within reach.

I locked the door behind them, as ordered, and gave them enough time to make it down the street before I peeked out the window and confirmed that they had turned the corner. Shuttered storefronts left the street quiet and dark.

To the sound of the ticking clock, I changed into a shirt and pants and tied my hair back. I knotted a headscarf under my chin and buckled my shoes with trembling fingers. Running through my checklist, I placed a lemon and a piece of bread in a plastic bag and took one deep, steadying breath before entering Chicken Street.

I rehearsed my story in my mind. Like Antonia, I’d spent the last two days rehearsing for tonight, practicing lines from a script of my own creation. As I’d hoped, most people did not notice me or the lemon bouncing against my hip. Even stray dogs were too disinterested to uncurl themselves as I passed.

When I spotted a police officer on the corner, I went down a side street and came back on the other side of him. This added minutes to my route, but I was determined to be smart, not hasty. Like a mouse in the dark, I moved through the clay labyrinth of Kabul.

And it worked.

I stood at the end of my block, looking for signs of movement inside my home. This time there was no car parked outside. None of the neighbors were outside either. There was an unseasonable bite in the air, a chill that seemed to have driven everyone into their homes and out of their yards.

I walked in measured steps toward my house, the second from the last on this block, passing a row of homes connected by rooftops and hidden by privacy walls that partitioned yards and ran the length of the block.

I was close enough to see the latch of our front gate, the latch that had been loose for about a year. Even if the gate was locked from the inside, it gave way if the door was pushed up and in at the same time.

I was twenty feet from the gate when a soldier ambled around the corner. My foot seemed to hover in the air until I could force it back to the ground and keep walking. The soldier and I were headed straight for each other, a face-off. I could barely breathe.

To my horror, the soldier stopped directly in front of my home and, with movements fit for a stage, arranged his feet and shoulders into a guard’s posture.