The next morning, I woke up bathed in sunlight as rays poured in through the large uncurtained windows. The despair had faded, and in its place was a feeling of excitement. Possibility. I opened my laptop and glanced at Charlotte’s profile picture one more time. I then took a deep breath. “Remember,” I said aloud, and it echoed through the empty chamber of yet another new home. “You have to make room for the real thing.”

WHENEVER WE WOULD VISIT AMMAN, MY MOTHER would take Karim and me to Nablus for at least ten days. I dreaded these trips to our Palestinian hometown; a trip within the trip that required yet another day of packing into a smaller suitcase, with a new set of considerations and increasingly conservative clothing as I got older. If there wasn’t a lot to do in Amman, there was even less going on in Nablus. My days there were longer and less varied. Some afternoons, we would visit the old souk that courses through the center of town, women scooping up handfuls of cardamom and letting the spice sift through their fingers. I’d stand against a stone wall while a man carved up knafeh that steamed atop a large gold saucer of a tray, strands of cheese hanging down from the spatula as he plated slices and passed them around.

Other days, I never left my great-grandparents’ high-ceilinged house, which was a relic of Ottoman decadence, with Rococo paintings and wall-to-wall Oriental rugs, the couches fluffed up and decorated with tiny pillows. The glass-topped coffee table held framed pictures of my great-grandfather with Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, King Hussein. I would explore the house’s numerous underutilized spaces, and once spent a full day trying to open a heavy wooden door that turned out to be the front door. It hadn’t been used since 1948, the year they stopped hosting parties, the year of the Nakba, when nearly a million Palestinians were exiled from their land. My great-grandparents had been heavily involved in the Arab Revolt in the late 1930s against British colonial rule and the Haganah. They assembled their own bands of men, ones with less-advanced weaponry but equal ferocity. When paramilitary troops came to remove my great-grandparents and their twelve children from their home, they refused to leave. “My father cried so much when the soldiers came,” Teta would tell me again and again, “but he wouldn’t leave his house.” Instead, the soldiers moved in and lived alongside the entire family, including my grandmother and her siblings. “They slept in the garden,” Teta would say.

Teta had been attending Schmidt’s Girls College in Jerusalem, and had just returned home to her parents’ house after being expelled for hiding in the nuns’ private quarters. She claimed that she wanted to see what the nuns looked like underneath their habits.

“How did the soldiers treat you?” I would ask her.