PROLOGUE Sahar Rahimi arrived at the airport early only because her mother had insisted on it. The smart, lithe, yoga-­loving nineteen-­year-­old had pushed back on the early hour, trying to tell her mother that she worried too much. But her mother, Nadia, had lived in Tehran for all of her fifty-­one years. Somewhere in that instinctual space between maternal wisdom and middle-­aged pessimism, the older woman had just known she''d be right. "They''ll find a way to hold things up," she''d kept saying during the pack up. "An unscheduled search, a long interview, a fivefold check of your visa, a dispute over the weight of your luggage--­doesn''t matter. There will be something. It''s Tehran.

Trust me." A premed student near the top of her class, the nineteen-­year-­old responded with a subtle eye roll and a stream of text messages to her boyfriend, Esfan. The one-­month trip home from university had been insufferable. Thank God, it was all nearly over. With a long, labored breath, Sahar had gone on to explain to her mother that the world was no longer quite so jammed up as it once had been, even in Iran. The magic of technology had smoothed things out. Today''s Tehran was not her mother''s Tehran. It was, the daughter had advised, perhaps time for a more optimistic outlook.

Waving all of that away, Nadia replied with a mantra of near religious clarity. "You don''t know these people the way I do. There will be something," she''d said again. Recalling their conversation now, Sahar stifled a yawn and looked blearily at the queue in front of her. She checked her phone again. Still no reply from Esfan. The last she''d seen him was at a shuttle stop as she was leaving Montreal''s McGill University for the airport weeks ago, a scene she''d replayed in her mind at least a hundred times since. Because they''d both pledged to keep their relationship a secret from their meddling parents, texting had been the only way to stay in touch.

But to her liking, he''d been a little too quiet. Of late, his sometimes hours-­long silences would cause her to create wild, spine-­tingling fantasies of a forthcoming breakup. Even now she was imagining he''d found some new way to avoid her at the airport, wobbling her faith in the one immovable thing she''d been counting on: their shared flight back to Canada. This morning''s flight. At a little after four thirty in the morning, trapped in an overengineered glass tunnel somewhere between security and immigration, she stood among a crowd of fellow travelers with nervous faces, none of them Esfan''s. Adding to her anxiety, in the close confines of the tunnel, the line had ballooned and lost its shape. There was some kind of delay up ahead. Grudgingly, she''d begun to think her mother might have had a point.

Someone behind her accidentally kicked her heel. Her elbow touched the man next to her. She balled her fists in frustration and shifted the strap of her shoulder bag away from someone else. This was not coming off at all the way she''d hoped. Compounding it, her despair rang with a certain sense of inevitability, a pang of foreboding. She''d intuited it as soon as she''d stepped out of bed a few hours earlier. She told herself that her mother''s dour outlook, coupled with the disquiet of her relationship, had morphed into this stubborn sense of dread and that it would all go away soon enough. But it hadn''t.

If anything, it had gotten worse. In the car on the way in, the reporter on the all-­news station had been going on about the Iranian missile attack on the American base in Iraq, payback for the US bombing of a top Revolutionary Guards general named Soleimani. Forty dead American soldiers, invaders, the newsreader had kept saying, repeating the number as though it were a football score. Hearing this, her mother had stabbed the steering wheel with an index finger. "That''s it," she''d said. "The fools." Now, ignoring the jabs of the crowd, Sahar could picture her mother sitting in the parking lot out there somewhere, waiting in their snow-­mottled sedan, obsessing on the news. Nadia had lived through the Iran-­Iraq War, so anything of a military nature always made the woman jumpy.

As though in concert with Sahar''s own dark presentiment, Nadia had vowed to stay at the airport until Sahar''s plane had safely taken wing. Her spirits at a low ebb, Sahar supposed that whatever was happening up there might cause her to miss her flight. With a shaking thumb, cramped against fellow travelers, she began to compose a signal to her mother to wait for her, just in case. But her typing was interrupted with an incoming message. It was Esfan finally. She savored the few words glowing in front of her, the weight of her fears suddenly lifted. She canceled the message to her mother and opened a dialog with him instead. He was also in the throng, somewhere back behind her, around the corner where she couldn''t see him.

Predictably, he complained about being too early. No doubt, she replied, adding that he was lucky his mother wasn''t as much of a psycho as hers. She restrained from further comment, attempting to play it cool, giving him a taste of his own taciturnity. The line narrowed and re-­formed. Travelers were moving forward. Things were happening. She felt a rising sense of confidence. While Esfan remained out of sight some hundred yards behind her, his presence had made all the difference.

Over the next quarter hour, she passed through the gauntlet with a smile, eventually selecting a red vinyl chair in the waiting lounge where she could block the seat next to her with her bag. Aiming for a look of metropolitan sophistication, she adjusted the pink hijab across her throat and crossed her legs, checking her lipstick in a glass railing. Comprehending nothing at all, she flipped through a censored--­but mostly intact--­Vogue magazine, preparing for Esfan''s arrival. It wasn''t that hard to tune out a ceiling-­mounted TV that went on and on about the missile attack. Now and then she glanced up at the reporter, but tried not to. Nearly departed from this besieged country, she was determined not to be her mother. Yet ten minutes on, there was still no sign of Esfan. The gate agent ran through the boarding procedures over a squawking PA.

The foreboding reemerged. The connection time in Kiev was painfully brief. If he missed this flight, then she wouldn''t see him for another day, perhaps even three, given the sparse schedules out of Tehran. A tortured breakup fantasy bubbled up from the depths. Who was she to think she could hold on to him during this long time apart? She stewed on her shortcomings for another few minutes before her substantial reasoning powers finally won out. Even if he was going to dump her, she reminded herself, he still had to come. He had school starting in a few days and responsibilities of his own. It made no sense that he would turn around now.

Then where was he? She leaned forward and looked up the concourse in a fruitless search. It made no sense. She lost control of her fingers, texting him three times in forty-­five seconds with essentially the same message: WTF? But no response came. She soon regretted sending them and melted under a hot wave of self-­incrimination. Exasperated with her overactive imagination, she stuffed the magazine into her bag and stared at the carpet, her phone on her lap, just in case it should come back to life. But it didn''t. When her row was eventually called, she proceeded glumly through the door, down two flights of stairs, and out onto the tarmac. It was still dark, only five thirty in the morning.

A cold breeze ruffled her headscarf. Sahar gaped at the big blue airplane before her, which hissed from its ground turbines and gleamed under the floodlights of the terminal building. She climbed the boarding stairs and squeezed into the cabin, where she was greeted by an enviously pretty Ukrainian flight attendant. Sahar thought that a flight attendant with those looks would have no problems with men. She settled into her seat and waited; in order to distract herself, she watched the other passengers stow their bags. She watched the luggage streaming into the belly of the plane. It was going to be another gloomy day, but there was a small gleam of pink as dawn crested an eastern ridge. Pulling out her phone, she snapped a picture of it.

She coached herself to stop caring about Esfan. If he wasn''t coming, then so be it. She thought about posting the photo to Instagram with a few words about a new day, a new year, a new semester, faintly hoping he''d see that she''d turned the page. But nothing clever came. Better to leave it alone than say something stupid, she thought. Besides, her father had told her to avoid Instagram while home in Iran. She was suddenly glad of the excuse. Reminded of her parents, she texted her mother, letting her know she was safely on the plane.

The incoming text found Nadia a half mile away through a cordon of security fences. On seeing it, she closed her eyes and thanked her god. Despite all her misgivings, Sahar was safely on the plane. Nadia was sitting in her car with the engine running, her chai thermos empty and cold. She''d been firing the engine in three-­ to four-­minute intervals, just long enough to ward off the chill while still conserving gas, which had been rationed for the last eight months. She stared out at the orange line cresting the ridge and ran her hand through her hair, tension draining from her fingertips as she massaged her scalp. Her phone rang. It was her husband, Zana.

Though he''d also planned on.