Chapter Two

Los Angeles, California — Present Day

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The second book was due to her committee in nine months, and Leah had written, in the fourteen months since they'd asked for it, exactly forty-one pages she was willing to let anyone read.

She sat with the manuscript open on one half of her office desk and the ledger photographs open on the other — a habit her department chair had gently suggested, twice now, was not how most junior faculty organized a workspace, and a habit Leah had stopped apologizing for sometime around the eighth month of trying to write a scholarly account of a family whose real history she was under three separate, overlapping obligations never to tell. The book her committee wanted was the Yonan family's documented chain of custody, footnoted, defensible, the kind of monograph that made a career. The book she could actually write around the edges of two governments' worth of classification was something considerably thinner and, she privately suspected, considerably less honest — true in every sentence and true to almost nothing that had actually happened.

She had told Karam, on their most recent call, that she felt like a woman describing a house fire by cataloguing which curtains had survived.

"Write the curtains, then," he'd said, in the particular dry register he used when he thought she was being too hard on herself and didn't want to say so directly. "Nobody outside the two of us needs to know there was ever a fire. The curtains were real. Let that be enough for one book."

It was not enough, most days, but it was the only version of enough currently available to her, and she had spent the morning trying, without much success, to make forty-one pages feel like more than a fraction of the truth wearing a fraction's clothes.

The email arrived a little after two, forwarded from a colleague in the comparative religion department three doors down — Dana Whitfield, whom Leah liked well enough and trusted mostly, and whose subject line read only: this is a strange one, thought of you immediately.

Leah — got this from an old contact at the Institute for Ismaili Studies, who got it from someone in Qom, of all places. Apparently a fairly senior Shia scholar there has been trying, through about four intermediaries, to track down the author of a dissertation on the Adam-garment custody legend — sounds like it might be you? Attached is what he sent along. I don't read Persian well enough to be sure I'm not missing something, but the citation on page one is definitely yours. Thought you'd want to see it before I wrote back and confirmed it was you. Let me know if you'd rather I just say I couldn't find anyone.

Leah opened the attachment expecting, at most, an interesting footnote to an otherwise ordinary Tuesday — a scholar somewhere finding her dissertation useful was not, in itself, remarkable; it had happened perhaps a dozen times since the defense, always from people whose names meant nothing to her, always a pleasant, forgettable ten minutes of feeling slightly less invisible than the job market had spent nine years insisting she was.

What loaded on her screen was forty-some pages of close, careful argument tracing the same legend she had spent her whole career tracing, written by someone who plainly knew the primary sources at least as well as she did and had clearly been racing something — a deadline, an instinct, his own mortality, she understood within a page and a half, though she didn't yet have the word for which — toward a conclusion he had not lived to finish reaching. The prose thinned and sharpened by turns the way a scholar's writing did when it was being drafted in stolen hours rather than a proper sabbatical. The citations ran deeper than anything she'd have expected from an outside field. And on page thirty-one, circled twice by whoever had scanned it, her own name.

L. Sarkisian, "Chains of Custody: The Adam Legend Across Late Antique Near Eastern Sources," unpublished doctoral dissertation. She is the only one who has read this material as if it might be true, and she was punished for it exactly the way I would have punished her for it, five years ago. Find her, if I never get the chance to.

The attribution line, when she finally made herself scroll back up to read it properly instead of around it, gave the author as the late Sheikh Ali Rostami, Qom, and Leah sat perfectly still at her desk for long enough that the office's motion-sensor light, which had never once in three years actually switched off on her before, dimmed to its standby amber and left her working by the gray afternoon coming through the blinds.

She knew the name. She had known the name for fourteen months, the way you know the name of someone you watched disappear through a door you were not fast enough to follow him through, and had spent most of those fourteen months in the specific, private discipline of not letting herself think about him more than the war itself required — a cleric, a true believer, a man who had come within ninety seconds of handing an unkillable regime to the worst possible people to hold it, and who had, in the last clear-eyed decision of his life, chosen to disappear into a mountain rather than let either side of that room keep what he'd been carrying.

She had not known — had had, until this exact moment, absolutely no reason to imagine — that the same man had spent his last eighteen months also quietly building, in whatever hours the war and the ceremony and his own grief left him, an argument that ran, page for careful page, directly alongside her own life's work. That he had read her. That he had believed her, in the specific, professionally starved way she had spent nine years wanting one credentialed stranger to believe her, and that he had wanted, before whatever ending he must already have sensed coming for him, to find her and say so.

Find her, if I never get the chance to.

He had not gotten the chance to. She had gotten it instead, fourteen months late, forwarded through four intermediaries and a colleague three doors down who was still, Leah realized, waiting on a reply she hadn't sent yet.

She thought of Rostami's face in the half-second before he'd gone through that narrow door — not the frightening stillness of the eighteen months before it, but the tired, almost young thing that had crossed it at the very end, a man setting down something he'd carried too long. She thought about the specific, unbearable geometry of grief this represented: a scholar who had died believing himself alone in an unfashionable conviction, never knowing that the one other person on earth who would have simply nodded and kept reading had been standing, at that exact moment, close enough to hear him breathing.

Find her, he had written, not knowing she already had him, in every sense that mattered except the one that would have let either of them say so out loud.

She typed a reply to Dana with hands that were, she noted with mild professional embarrassment, not entirely steady. It's me. Please tell them yes — I'd like very much to see the rest of what he was working on, and I'd like to know who I'd be corresponding with in Qom before I say anything more specific than that.

She sent it before she could talk herself into the more careful version, and sat afterward with the forty-one curtain pages open and unedited on the other half of her screen, and understood, with the particular clarity that arrived maybe twice in a career like hers, that whatever this actually turned out to be, it was not going to let her keep pretending the house fire had never happened.

She called Katz that evening, and did not, for the first three minutes of the call, manage to explain why her voice sounded the way it did.