The scratchy call transported Huda two months back in time, to when she crossed the Iraqi frontier in the Land Cruiser. She’d felt like an astronaut cut loose from her craft, watching her world grow ever more distant, while space unfurled around her, full of stars but deadly cold. The air too thin to breathe.

Unlike Rania’s long trek, it took Huda less than half that time to flee from Lake Habbaniyah to the border, rocketing along the jet-black highway, overtaking filthy oil tankers and the occasional pickup truck. Not one of them—Huda, Ally, Khalid, or Hanan—spoke more than a couple of words the whole way. They stared at the flinty plains and tried to erase from their minds the red fan of blood on the beach. Perhaps they thought if they stayed silent, it would be as if it never really happened.

Fifteen miles from the border, Huda took the compass from the glove box. She switched the Land Cruiser to four-wheel drive, turned off the highway, and plowed through the gray sand. She wasn’t sure of the exact moment they crossed into Jordan, there were no markers that deep in the desert, but eventually they found a dirt track and passed a pickup truck with Jordanian plates. It was almost too easy.

Huda remembered thinking that the highway should have been rougher, the desert should have bogged them down, they should have been made to get out and flail at the burning sands with their bare hands, they should have been made to suffer somehow, not simply roll across an invisible line and leave their country behind. Even now, as the old woman hugged her grandson and trilled her happiness to the sky, Huda expected someone to grab her by the back of her neck and call her to account.

On the far side of the road, two young women strolled out of a juice bar. One of them had long curly hair like Hanan, and Rania too, when she was young. Hanan had left for London a month ago, after one of Rania’s friends found her a scholarship at a school popular with exiled Iraqis. Rania would soon follow Hanan to London. She had connections to smooth her passage. Much had changed, but she was still a Mansour. Despite Huda’s best intentions, she tasted resentment in her mouth.

Rania should have told her about the gun hidden in the pashmina scarf. If she had, their escape would have gone differently. Huda often tried to talk to Khalid about the Bolt Cutter, and all that happened at the lake. But every time, the light went out behind his eyes.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Huda told him repeatedly.

“Do we have to talk about this?” Khalid would turn away and pull a dog-earned comic from his schoolbag.

“It must have been very frightening. You must feel upset or confused or . . . something?”