In my mind, that was also the end of Soraya: as I said, I never saw her again, and tried to look for her only once, the summer when I was nineteen and living in Paris. Even then, I barely tried—calling two Sassani families who were listed in the phone book and then giving up. And yet if it hadn’t been for her, I don’t know that I would have gotten on the motorcycle of the young man who washed dishes at the restaurant across the street from my apartment on the rue de Chevreuse, and ridden back with him to his apartment in the outskirts of the city, or gone to a bar with the older man who lived on the floor below me, who went on about the job I knew he would never get for me at the nightclub he managed, and then, when we got back to the building, lunged at me on the landing in front of his door, tackling me in an embrace. I watched a movie on the dishwasher’s sofa, and afterward he told me it was dangerous to go home with men I didn’t know, and drove me back to my apartment in silence. And somehow I broke free of the nightclub manager and ran up another floor to the safety of my own apartment, though for the rest of the summer I was terrified of passing him on the stairs, and listened for his comings and goings before I worked up the courage to open my door and bolt down the stairs. I told myself that I did these things because I was in Paris to practice my French, and had resolved to speak to anyone who would speak to me. But all summer I was aware that Soraya might have been near, somewhere in that city, that I was close to her and close to something in myself that drew me and frightened me a little, as she did. She had gone further than anyone I knew in a game that was never only a game, one that was about power and fear, about the refusal to comply with the vulnerabilities one is born into.