In that moment, time froze. Packing up her father’s belongings, Ally had never felt so unmoored, adrift without compass. Now, a spark of hope kindled in her chest. It was as if her mother’s ghost had risen, tapped her daughter on the shoulder, and said, Follow me.

* * *

With a loud crack, the power went out. The air conditioner wheezed to a halt. Ally wondered how long the cut would last. Two hours? Three? She eyed the phone on her desk. It was a clunky rotary dial, like the one Saddam used on the billboard out front. She pressed the phone to her ear. Silence. She tapped the switch hook. Nothing.

Ally entered the number for the embassy anyway, hoping that Tom might find time in his hectic schedule to eat lunch with her. After each number, the dial click-click-clacked back to its starting point. The line crackled. A woman’s voice emerged, thin as fog. A man replied, his voice even more distant, rising and falling in a sea of static.

“Hello?” said Ally. “Hello?”

The woman didn’t answer. Neither did the man. Their voices grew fainter until finally they vanished altogether. A crossed line? Maybe. The head of embassy security had warned that all their phones were tapped. The embassy was sure to be bugged, he said, and their home too. If Tom and Ally wanted to talk privately, he said they should do it in their garden or outside in the street, away from televisions, radios, air conditioners, even light fixtures—anything that might provide a power source for tiny cameras and hidden microphones.

Ally put down the phone and flicked idly through a pile of news reports she’d printed up during her last visit to the embassy. Saddam had long ago barred foreign journalists from Iraq. International newspapers, foreign television, and radio were banned too. So Ally had to use the embassy’s secure server to keep track of the news.

Ironically, Ally used to be a journalist herself, covering drug busts, burglaries, and the occasional homicide for the Canberra Herald. But then, a month before her father died, Rupert Murdoch’s lieutenants retrenched her along with a third of the newsroom. She remembered she’d been futilely scouring the job adverts when Tom brought home their Iraqi visa applications.

“That’s it?” Ally had eyed the flimsy document. “Just one page of questions?”

“Count yourself lucky,” said Tom. “Mine was nine pages long. I’m worried they’ll want a cavity search too.”

“Dependent spouse?” Ally frowned at the form. “That’s my official title?”

Tom raised his hands.

“You can always change your mind.”

Ally smoothed the document with her palm and began to fill in the blanks. At the box marked “occupation,” she paused and chewed the end of her pen.

“Housewife,” she printed.

Tom peered over her shoulder. “Housewife? Really?”

“It asks only for my current occupation, not my whole résumé.”