Ally slumped over her desk. For the tenth time since she returned from the riverside, she pulled out her mother’s postcards and thought about tearing them up. Ally knew it wasn’t a good idea, but she removed Yusra’s photo from her bag anyway.

The young nurse smiled at her. It was obvious from Yusra’s straight-up stare, she would have struggled every day to still her tongue. Same as Ally’s mother. With a shiver, she remembered Miriam Pachachi’s warning, Two can keep a secret only when one of them is dead.

Ally wiped a tear away and wondered, could guilt have caused her mother’s cancer? Did shame multiply inside her cells? Did she lie in that darkened bedroom and pop pills to kill the pain, or was it to keep the memories at bay, until the woman who wrote the postcards was thoroughly erased?

Like her mother, Ally had come to Baghdad dreaming of the possibilities under its enormous blue sky. Now, Huda was under the mukhabarat’s boot. Khalid would end up in the fedayeen. Hanan could be raped and killed. Ally couldn’t stop thinking about Rania’s description of the wild dogs that Uday kept in a cage.

She put the postcards and photos away, crept to the bathroom, and splashed water on her face. She drank a glass of tepid water then lay down with sliced cucumbers on her eyes, while anger and guilt and fear galloped through her chest.

After the cucumber grew warm and floppy, Ally forced herself to get up and put a pot of water on the stove. She checked that she still had potatoes in the pantry, and cheese, butter, and green beans in the fridge for dinner, then lay down with a second round of sliced cucumber.

When the locks on the front door squealed, she didn’t move.

“I’m home,” Tom called.

“I’ve got a migraine coming on,” she called from the darkened bedroom. “There’s some dinner for you on the stove. I’ve taken a couple of ibuprofen. I’m going to try and get some sleep.”

“Sorry, babe.” He ambled to her bedside, bent down, and kissed her cheek. “I’ll try not to wake you when I come to bed.”

“Thanks,” mumbled Ally. She wanted to scooch aside, pull him under the covers with her, and whisper everything she’d learned in his ear. But she knew he’d never agree to her smuggling Khalid and Hanan out of Iraq. Much less in an embassy vehicle. But what else could she do? Abandon Khalid? Leave Hanan to Uday? Look away while the regime destroyed more lives—just like it did with Yusra?