“He turns out to be half Spanish and half English—not a coincidence, I’m sure.”

“But he’s raised in an Arab culture. He’s an orphan and—”

“Oh, Alex—men who kidnap women or buy them at bride auctions? That’s Arab culture? Come on.”

He didn’t respond.

“You know that’s racist, don’t you? They didn’t understand Arab culture then.”

“Of course I know that.” He kissed her hand and said, “Let’s forget it. We can agree to disagree.”

She didn’t see how he could agree to disagree, because you cannot disagree about something that’s incorrect. You could never say, for example, “I just don’t believe in a heliocentric view of the universe, but we can agree to disagree.” But she dropped it, because there’s always a time period in a relationship, usually toward the beginning, when people accept anything, when nothing is enough to make into a big deal. She kept quiet even when they had dinner with his friends for the first time and he introduced her as Reema, his “beautiful harem girl” to elicit a laugh and break the ice. When he asked her to tell him stories of her childhood, about her parents and their idiosyncrasies, about her brother and how he’d met his wife during a two-week vacation to Palestine, and then said that he felt like Sultan Shahrayar of the Thousand and One Nights—which Reema supposed made her like Scheherazade. She just kept reminding herself of how blue his eyes were.

Since she had been old enough to understand it, she’d been bothered by the fact that people told her that she looked “exotic” (which, until the age of fourteen, she’d confused with “erotic”). The clerk at the post office, the police officer who’d stopped her for running a red light, people at school, such as the classmate who’d insisted that the shape and darkness of her eyes made him imagine “what Cleopatra must have looked like.” It was all very silly—but she tolerated it because it never seemed appropriate to be offended.

“We’ve all gone through stuff like that,” Aliyah told her one day. “I hate it when white guys tell me I’m ‘mysterious’ or something like that. It’s different once they get to know you.”

“But Alex keeps saying that stuff. It gets worse and worse.”

“That’s weird,” Aliyah agreed. “On the other hand, he’s really nice … and handsome.”

Reema knew that was one major consideration, despite her most logical attempts to argue with herself. But the truth was it felt good to be with someone like Alex, someone she thought would never be interested in her. Someone who wasn’t scared of her culture, hesitant about leaping into something completely different.