“These are my tools.” She inflated her chest. Rania saw the resemblance to her brother in her round face. “My jaddah is teaching me all sorts of things, like how to read bones and coffee grounds. If I see a peacock in the grounds it’s good news for the future. Rats are bad. I would be inside now, helping her, but you know kids like me aren’t welcome at the birth visits. Not that I mind. It’s so boring.”

“My whole life is taken up by these visits,” grumbled Rania. “I feel like I’ll never be free.”

“Hah!” Huda sat up straight. “Let’s see.” She cupped her tiny talismans in her hands and tossed them onto the sand. “Wait, that’s what my jaddah says. Give me time to look. When I am ready, I will tell you what I see.”

The two girls were on their hands and knees, charting the future in wishbones and shards of shiny oyster shell when Rania’s mother emerged from the house.

“My mother is going to Baghdad for a month,” whispered Rania. Overhead, a white-tailed hawk turned circles in the sky. “I will stay at my grandmother’s house. Come find me when your jaddah visits next.”

* * *

High above Basil’s garden, a hungry hawk prowled the sky, as if it had flown out of Rania’s memory and taken root in the present.

“So who is this woman?” demanded Basil. Rania knew he wouldn’t be satisfied with tales of birds and boats and village girls with oyster shells.

“Her brothers were killed in the uprising,” she said. “She knows I used to be involved with the opposition. She thinks I influenced her brothers to rise up.”

“Do I know these men?”

She shook her head. “Mustafa and Ali were village boys.”

He eyed her curiously. “Village boys?”

Rania dragged her hands down her face. Of all the memories that had come back to her, the one that hurt the most was of the last time she saw Mustafa. He was in the hallway of her apartment in Basra, his face lit by yellow lamplight. A photo of her dead husband hung in a frame on the wall. To Rania, it seemed he was watching them: his widow and the village man, alone, at night. Out in the street, gunfire had crackled and spat. A helicopter thudded overhead. More than ten years later, Rania could still recall how her heart kept time with the thwack, thwack, thwack of its blades.

“Ten thousand men died during the uprising,” said Basil. “Why does this woman blame you? What are you not telling me?”

“Nothing.” Rania stared at her feet, barely daring to breathe. “Clearly fear has driven Huda mad. She’s so desperate to save her son, she’ll turn me in if she doesn’t get what she wants.”

“And what exactly is that?”