Chapter 6: The Gate

Marwan had his sweatpants on before the alarm stopped.

He didn't look for the shirt.

He took his black wool coat off the hook by the back door and put it on over his bare chest.

The white handprints I'd left on him showed at the collar.

"Stay in the kitchen," he said.

"No," I said.

"Nahla."

"It's my husband's brother," I said. "I'm not hiding in your pantry."

He looked at me for as long as it took the alarm to cut off.

Then he took a second coat off the hook, the long gray one, and held it out.

I put it on over nothing at all and did up every button.

The driver was already in the front hall, in his socks, with his hand in his jacket.

"Nothing in your hands," Marwan said to him in Arabic, quietly. "Not tonight."

The driver took his hand out.

Marwan opened the front door himself, and the cold came in and found my bare legs.

Lights were coming on up and down the street.

Two doors down, a man in a robe stood on his porch with a mug and did not pretend to be doing anything else.

The Tahoe was parked across the end of the driveway with its high beams on the gate.

Two men stood in front of it, in black leather jackets, with their breath going up white.

I knew them both.

The elder was twenty-nine and wide through the neck, and he'd carried a casket for my mother-in-law's sister with the same expression.

The younger was twenty-six.

His jaw sat a little crooked under his left ear, where it had healed wrong.

Marwan walked down the driveway alone with his hands at his sides.

He stopped on his own side of the gate, an arm's length from the bars.

"It's three-forty," he said. "Say it quickly."

"We're here for our brother's wife," said the elder.

"She hasn't asked to go," Marwan said.

"She doesn't get to ask."

"Then she's still in my house," Marwan said.

The younger brother's eyes went to the flour on Marwan's collar and then to the gray coat on the porch.

I saw him work out what he was looking at.

I came down the steps.

The gravel was frozen under my bare feet.

Marwan didn't turn his head, but I saw his shoulders change.

"Nahla," the elder said flatly. "Our father wants you in his house by Sunday night. He wants the child too."

"It's Sunday now," I said.

"Then it's tonight."

"Tell him I heard."

He moved fast.

His hand came through the bars and closed around my wrist, hard, and yanked me against the iron.

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