Now that Ally was seated, only Saddam’s eyes were visible, peering over the courtyard wall topped with glittering shards of glass. She poked her tongue out at him, then flipped open her laptop. In the corner of the screen, the Internet Explorer icon sulked uselessly—its connection to the outside world severed by Saddam’s censors.

She clicked on Microsoft Word. Three paragraphs stared back at her—the measly sum of all she’d produced yesterday. She reread her description of the boy on the donkey cart, his song traveling through the streets like the jingle from some dystopian Mister Softee truck. She hated every sentence. Stuffed full of adjectives, starved of plot.

Ally straightened her shoulders and tapped at the keyboard. A few minutes later, she stopped, then hit the delete key. The cursor blinked, mocking her. She tapped out another line, frowned, and erased the sentence. The cursor moved forward, then reversed again, like a backhoe crushing her words into flat, lifeless rubble.

Ally sighed at the wreckage on-screen. Back in Australia, Tom had warned her that contrary to popular belief, the biggest danger in Baghdad was dying of boredom. Ally thought she’d keep herself busy writing a book that retraced her mother’s trailblazing path. Turns out that was easier said than done. Her mother’s apartment building had been torn down, her favorite riverside café went up in flames ten years ago, and the hospital where she worked seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Ally eyed a framed photo on her desk, of her mother laughing with the Tigris rippling behind her. She’d discovered the photo and the postcards only a few months ago, at her father’s home, a week after his funeral. She’d been sorting through his closet, folding suits for the thrift shop, breathing in the odor of his Old Spice and fighting off tears, when she found a manila envelope tucked on a high shelf. She lifted the flap. The photo of her mother stared back.

Ally’s heart had lurched like a runaway car. She hadn’t seen the picture in decades, not since she was five years old. Yet somehow, she remembered every detail: the joyful wrinkles at the edge of her mother’s eyes, the sun gleaming on her dark hair. The wind had pushed a long strand across her face, and she’d raised her hand to pull it away, almost like she was waving.