When we return to New Orleans, he is shaking with fear. That night the cobblestones are slick with rain and the air full of music. We accompany Taraana through the hours of the night, singing, dancing, covering all possible surfaces where loneliness and pain may fester with our presence. We ply him with chocolate and ice cream. We move from one room of the house to another, up and down the stairs. We coax Valentina into playing the saxophone and Paheli into singing, something she rarely does. Her voice has all the broken notes of a tragedy and echoes long after the song is done. We climb into bed only when the darkness turns to blue and Taraana has regained the faint edges of the smile we’ve worked so hard for. He perseveres and ventures out into the Between again, but like a bad stench, Baarish’s servants are there every time he does.

Two weeks pass like this. Taraana’s hands are now filled with pinpricks from which he squeezed out blood, but he refuses to give up. He tries the doors leading to Balkh, Kirkuk, and Tyre, all of them old cities.

When none of these are successful, Paheli rebels and refuses to let him bleed again. They argue and she locks herself into the study with Eulalie, leaving Taraana to us. Daraja feeds him yellow jelly beans and Areum brings him some beignets from Café du Monde. Between warm, buttery pastry and confectioners’ sugar, we coax Taraana out of his shell, which is a lot more fragile than we thought.

You see, while our tormentors were human and our escape more solid, he lives his life poised to fall, anytime, on a sharp blade. He may not see his enemies around him, but he knows they’re always there, waiting. He only trusts us because we wear his tears on our palms and he can read our hearts to a certain degree.

We wonder what he reads in Paheli’s heart, but he refuses to say, claiming some things are his alone.

He likes eggplants, cotton candy, and mangoes. He likes to read, and were he allowed to live a normal life, he would write books in which all the monsters die.

“I would write impossible things like happily-ever-afters, requited love, and freedom,” he says with a smile lighter than his words deserve.

The first day Paheli locks herself away, we watch American television: a commercial that states good cologne is all a man needs to attract women; a music video of a song with lyrics that dissect the character of a woman while the singer surrounds himself with girls who are little more than accessories; the news that talks about how the promising futures of several young men are suddenly in jeopardy because a high school freshman made them rape her. We turn off the TV and bury the remote control.