Rania had similar photos of her own mother dashing about Baghdad in white patent heels and frocks ordered from London, handbag blithely swinging by her side. Rania wished she could go back in time, swap places with the women on Rashid Street, and feel the breeze sweep in from the Tigris and cool her skin.

“There we go.” Basil hurried into the drawing room. “Tea is on the way.”

He paused beside a pair of wrought-iron garden chairs. Rania dimly remembered that two fine wingbacks used to sit in their place. They were probably gathering dust in a secondhand furniture store. Rania’s gaze slid to the rug. Decades of sun streaming through the window had left the outline of the missing wingbacks imprinted in the weave.

“Tell me, how is your family? Hanan must be in high school by now.” Basil gestured at the couch. “Please, sit.”

Rania remained standing.

“Do you mind if we go to the garden?” She kept her gaze on the rug. “It would be wiser to talk outside.”

“Outside?” The word emerged slowly, cautiously, as if stepping onto a high wire. “Is that necessary?”

Rania nodded, still unable to meet his eye.

In the garden, they clutched at straws of small talk. Basil spoke of family, old college friends, a book of poems a cousin had sent from London. Rania praised the beds of yellow rosebushes and the tidy herb garden. By a weeping willow, she spotted the wrought-iron picnic table that matched the chairs in the drawing room.

Basil directed Rania along a cobbled path. Creeping thyme grew in the cracks in the stone, and every step they took released a burst of lemony perfume.

“If I’d known you were coming, I would have asked the cook to prepare kebab.”

“Just like the old days?” asked Rania softly.

She remembered how their college crowd used to pass by Basil’s farm on the way to picnic at Lake Habbaniyah. On the silty shore, they’d barbecue kebab, and play Umm Kulthum or the Rolling Stones on Basil’s cassette deck. Once again, Rania wished she had the power to travel back in time. She’d swim out deep into Habbaniyah’s cool waters, till the shore disappeared, and all that was left was water and the wide blue sky.

Basil paused by a wooden arbor smothered in grapevines. It listed to the left like a sailboat ensnared in the tentacles of a giant squid.

“So, my dear Rania,” he said. “After all these years, why are you here?”

Rania did her best to explain, forcing herself to keep going as Basil’s face went rigid, first with shock, then with fury.

“This is madness.” He pressed his hands to his bulbous forehead. “I can’t get involved with this. Neither should you.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Yes, you do. You tell this woman no.”