They presented me with a laptop, copied all my files onto it, and equipped it with an email program. Several days later, they sent a technician to our apartment to install a high-speed Internet connection.

Mama couldn’t stop telling the other mothers about it. She invited all the ladies to our apartment for their usual coffee chat. They came into my room to see me, where I was lying in bed and clicking away on the laptop. They each kissed my cheek, and brushed away my apologies for not getting up. “Rest, rest,” Aliyah’s mother said.

Later I heard them in the kitchen, speaking about me. “And her company gave her a computer for herself, to use from home and they even came to the house and did all the connections for her,” Mama said.

Aliyah’s, Reema’s, and Hanan’s mothers cooed their amazement.

“She’s very important in her company, you know,” my mother said matter-of-factly. I rolled my eyes. I’d only been with Brookes for less than a year, and my mother was painting me as the CEO.

“God keep her always for you,” Hanan’s mother said. “She’s an excellent girl, your Nadia.”

“We both have wonderful girls,” my mother responded.

I stopped typing to listen for her response, but she hesitated.

“She is,” my mother insisted. “Hanan has a good heart.”

“She’s a stubborn girl,” Hanan’s mother replied. “Her father is sick now, all the time, and she doesn’t come to see him. Sometimes she comes, but only when she knows I will not be there.” She paused. “What did I do to her—do I deserve this? Tell me, do I?” I pushed the laptop off my lap and sat up straighter, leaning toward the open door to hear their snatches of Arabic as best as I could.

“You’re a wonderful mother,” they soothed her. “We’re all in the same position—we raise them the best we can in this country.”

“Yes, I know! Me, who gave that girl all my energy and all my effort! If that Amerkani wanted to marry my daughter, he should enter my house from the front door and not the back door!”

“Good for you!”

“You have a clever tongue, ya Layla.”

When they left, they all filed into the bedroom again to say goodbye, to kiss me again, and to wish me a speedy recovery. “Soon we will see you walk down the aisle, insh’allah,” said Reema’s mother. I knew she meant George—everyone knew about me and George—and I knew she was sincere, but I felt like she had punched me in the stomach. I tried to speak, but couldn’t say anything intelligible, and my mother swooped in to rescue me. “Insh’allah, we will also see Reema doing the same,” she said, and everyone smiled and everyone was happy.

Except for me. While Mama escorted them to the door, I looked at the blue beads she had taped to the foot of my bed. My mother believed in the Evil Eye strongly—she blamed it for Baba’s death still—and she had blue beads all over the house: in drawers, above the kitchen table, on the living room wall. The beads were flat, round, made of glass. A deep blue, “the color of the Mediterranean,” Mama said, with a black center representing the pupil of the eye.