The nurse peeled back Raghad’s top sheet. Rania averted her eyes. Her mother would hate the ugly feeding tube taped to her nose and the way her skinny limbs poked inelegantly from her dressing gown. She’d once joked that when her time was up, she wanted to go dressed in her furs and gold. As the nurse rolled Raghad onto her side, Rania bumbled about the periphery, fluffing her mother’s pillow and feeling thoroughly useless. The nurse pressed a switch on the heart monitor. Raghad’s pulse flicked across the screen. Rania eyed her mother closely, hoping for a sign of consciousness.

“The doctor said there’s been bleeding in the upper part of the brain,” she whispered. “But still, it’s not impossible that she’ll wake up, is it?”

“I’m not a doctor, but if she is no longer responding to light, sound, or pain, the outlook can’t be good.” She eyed Rania solemnly. “If the feeding tube was removed, we could keep her comfortable throughout.”

“Let her starve to death?” Rania shook her head. “She wouldn’t want it.”

“I doubt your mother would want you to feel guilty, either.”

“There’s no avoiding that.”

Rania’s laugh was fifty percent sob. She’d already betrayed her mother. Even as she sat at Raghad’s bedside and stroked her limp hand, her mother wasn’t foremost in her prayers. Instead of reciting the Koran as a proper daughter should, all she could think of was Hanan. She’d planned to send her back to Basra, far from Malik’s lecherous reach. But now, with Raghad nearing death, her last safe harbor was gone.

Rania pressed her hands to her eyes, desperately trying to think of a way to find money for a passport for Hanan. The regime had long ago taken most of her family’s land, just like it did to Basil’s clan. Then they drained the marshes and diverted the waters her tribe needed to prosper. But Raghad had sailed on regardless, flying her extravagant flag. She’d barely been admitted to hospital when the moneylenders began to call in their debts. Rania imagined they were stripping the farmhouse right now, taking the rugs and chandeliers, tearing the copper plumbing right out of the walls.

She thought of the envelope of cash that Malik left as a down payment for the president’s portrait. Would the finished work earn her enough to secure Hanan’s passage out of Iraq? As Rania did math in her head, she cursed the president, his sons, and his enablers. They’d taken so much. Now they denied her the chance to mourn her mother with her whole, undivided heart.

* * *

Kareem removed his glasses and tucked them in his shirt pocket. Without the thick lenses, his dark eyes seemed even smaller than Rania remembered from their encounter at the Khan Murjan. He nodded at the old bookkeeper waiting by the door.