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Karim came home with a split lip, two scraped knuckles and the stiff, offended silence of a fourteen-year-old who had already decided the adults were going to misunderstand him. Nadia noticed all three things before he had finished closing the door. She was sitting at the dining table with Ghalia beside her, helping the three-year-old sort buttons into colour groups for no reason beyond Ghalia's current conviction that buttons were important. Nadia looked up once, took in Karim's face, his right hand and the way his school bag hung from one shoulder instead of being dropped carelessly as usual, and said, "Bathroom. Wash your hands. Then come back." Karim opened his mouth. "Bathroom." He went. Ghalia selected a blue button and held it up. "Pretty." "Very," Nadia said, although her attention was on the water running down the hall. "Do not put it in your mouth." Ghalia looked at the button, looked at Nadia and put both hands flat on the table with theatrical innocence. Karim returned carrying the smell of soap and irritation. The blood had been washed from his knuckles but not from the small cut on his lip. Nadia pointed to the chair opposite her. He sat. Ghalia immediately abandoned the buttons and climbed down to inspect him.
"You hurt?" she asked. "I'm fine." "You bleeding." "A little." Ghalia touched her own lip in sympathy. Nadia lifted her onto her lap before she could poke the injury. "Go get the small cloth from the kitchen," she told her. Ghalia trotted away, delighted to have a mission. Nadia waited until she was out of earshot. "Who?" "It doesn't matter." "Then I can assume you walked into a wall and save us both time." Karim stared at the table. "A boy from school." "Name?" "Sameh." "Did he hit you first?" A pause. "Karim." "He said something." "I asked whether he hit you first." "No." Nadia leaned back. The answer mattered more than the injury. "What did you do?" "I hit him." "Once?" Karim's silence answered. Ghalia returned carrying not the small cloth but a dish towel nearly as long as she was. Nadia accepted it solemnly, folded one corner and handed it to Karim. "Hold that to your lip." Ghalia climbed back onto Nadia's lap and announced, "Karim fight." "Apparently." Karim glared at both of them. "Can she go play?"
"She lives here too." "Mama." Nadia looked at Ghalia. "Take the buttons to the rug. Keep the red ones separate." Ghalia slid down, scooped buttons into a bowl and went to the other side of the room. Nadia turned back to her son. "Now. What did Sameh say?" Karim's face hardened again. "About you." "I gathered that from the heroic atmosphere." "I'm serious." "So am I. What did he say?" "He called you fat." Nadia waited. Karim waited too. "And?" she asked. His eyes widened. "And what?" "What was the insult?" "Mama." "I heard the word. What else did he say?" "He said you're fat." "Yes. I am." Karim stared at her as though she had deliberately stepped outside the rules of language. "You know how he meant it." "That is a different sentence." "He meant it as an insult." "I believe you." "Then why are you acting like it wasn't one?" "Because the fact that he intended cruelty does not require me to agree that the word itself is cruel." Karim threw the cloth onto the table. "That's not the point."
"Then explain the point." "He was talking about you." "Again, I have grasped the basic geography of the argument." "He was laughing. His friends were laughing. He said he saw your picture and that you looked like -" Karim stopped. Nadia's expression changed. "Like what?" He looked away. "If you punched him for words, you can at least repeat the words." Karim muttered a comparison to a piece of furniture. Nadia was quiet for a moment. Not because the insult wounded her deeply, but because it was uglier than the single word Karim had offered first. Sameh had intended humiliation. He had reduced her body to an object and done it loudly in front of boys whose laughter made it communal. Nadia understood why her son had seen red. "All right," she said. "That was cruel." Karim looked vindicated. "Exactly." "You still should not have hit him." The vindication vanished. "What was I supposed to do?" "Many things." "He insulted you." "Yes." "In front of everyone." "Yes." "And I was supposed to just stand there?" Nadia folded the blood-marked corner of the towel inward. "You are going to have to stop saying the same facts as though one of them eventually becomes permission."
Karim pushed back from the table. "You don't understand." "That is a dangerous opening with your mother." "You weren't there." "True. Tell me what I am missing." He struggled to put it into words. At fourteen, Karim had begun to encounter an idea of manhood larger than anything Nadia or Michael had taught him. It came from school corridors, older boys, films, football crowds, uncles who meant well and strangers who did not. A man protected his mother. A man defended his sisters. A man did not allow another man to speak disrespectfully about the women connected to him. Those phrases had arrived separately until they formed something that felt like law. "If I let him say it," Karim said, "then everybody thinks he can say whatever he wants about you." "Everybody?" "The boys there." "And after you hit him?" Karim hesitated. "What do they think now?" "That he shouldn't have said it." "Or that saying it gets a fight." "Same thing." "Not at all." Nadia leaned forward. "You think you defended my dignity. I think you let a foolish boy decide what you did with your hands."
Karim scoffed. "That's easy to say." "It is easy to say. It is harder to live. That is why we are discussing it." "So I should have done nothing." "I did not say nothing." "What, tell a teacher?" He said it with such contempt that Nadia almost laughed. "You say that as if teachers are a species of defeat." "Everyone would know." "They already know you fought." "That's different." "Yes. One version makes you look brave to boys whose judgement you apparently value more than mine." That hit. Karim looked down. Nadia softened her voice. "I understand why you were angry. I am not asking you to become indifferent when somebody tries to humiliate someone you love. I am asking what you think love requires from you." Karim rubbed his thumb over one scraped knuckle. "Not letting people talk about you like that." "You cannot control every mouth in Cairo." "I can control one." "For how long?" He looked up. "One punch? Two? A week? Does Sameh now admire fat women? Has he changed his mind about me?"
Karim's mouth tightened. "Or did you simply prove that insulting your mother is a reliable way to make you lose control?" That was the first point that visibly unsettled him. The front door opened. Michael came in carrying his work bag and stopped at the sight of the towel, Karim's face and Nadia's posture. "What happened?" "Karim defended my honour," Nadia said. Michael put down the bag slowly. "Should I be afraid?" "Only if you plan to call me furniture." Karim groaned. "Mama." Michael looked between them. Nadia gave him the short version. She deliberately included Sameh's full insult and the fact that Karim had struck first. Michael's face darkened at the insult, then hardened further at the second fact. "School knows?" he asked. "Probably," Karim said. "Probably?" "A teacher came after." "And?" "We were sent to the office." "And?" Karim reached into his bag and produced a folded note. Nadia closed her eyes. "You had paperwork." "I was going to show you." "After what? Retirement?" Michael took the note. Karim had a meeting with the deputy head the following morning. Sameh had one too. The school had not decided punishment because accounts differed over how the fight began. Nadia read the note and said, "Good. We will go."
"You don't have to." "My name appears to have participated. I am curious." "That's worse." "For whom?" "Me." "Then perhaps you should have considered administrative consequences before punching on my behalf." Michael sat beside Karim and examined his hand. "Can you move everything?" "Yes." "Any pain here?" "No." "You got lucky. Hands break." Karim looked at him, perhaps hoping for masculine solidarity. "Wouldn't you have hit him?" Michael did not answer immediately. Nadia watched carefully. She did not want Michael to perform sainthood after the fact. He had been seventeen once. He had fought as a teenager. He knew exactly what Karim was reaching for. "At fourteen?" Michael said. "Possibly." Karim looked triumphant. "And that would not make it wise." The triumph disappeared again. Michael continued, "When I was your age, I thought anger was proof. If I was angry enough, then whatever I did next belonged to the person who caused it. Convenient arrangement." "So if someone insulted Mama now?" Michael glanced at Nadia. "Your mother is usually more frightening than the insult." "Michael."
"I am answering honestly." "Badly." He smiled faintly, then looked back at Karim. "If someone threatened her, that is different. If someone tried to hurt her, different. Words? I might be angry. I might tell him exactly what I think. But Nadia does not belong to me in a way that makes her honour my property to guard." Karim looked embarrassed by the phrase. "I didn't say she belongs to me." "No. But think about the idea underneath. A man insults your mother, so you as a man answer him physically. Where is she in that exchange?" Karim looked toward Nadia. "Sitting at home sorting buttons," she said. Ghalia, from the rug, held up a red one. "Red." "Excellent," Nadia told her. The absurdity cracked the tension. Karim almost smiled. After Karim went to wash again, Michael remained at the table with Nadia. Ghalia had returned to the buttons and was now arranging them in a line that ignored colour entirely. Michael watched the hallway until Karim's door closed, then said, "He was waiting for me to tell him he did the right thing."
"I know." "Part of me wanted to." Nadia looked at him. Michael rubbed his face. "Not because he was right. Because I know that feeling. Someone says something disgusting about the woman you love and suddenly restraint feels like cowardice." "You were raised around the same nonsense." "Some of it was not nonsense to the men saying it." "That does not improve it." "No." They spoke quietly so Karim would not hear from the hall. Michael told her about being fifteen and getting into a fight after another boy made a sexual remark about his older cousin. At the time every adult man who heard the story had reacted differently: his father punished him for fighting, an uncle privately congratulated him, a neighbour told him any decent boy would have done the same, and the cousin herself became furious because nobody had bothered asking what she wanted. "She said we had turned her embarrassment into a tournament," Michael remembered. "I thought she was ungrateful. I had a swollen eye and she was angry at me. It took years before I understood why."
Nadia looked toward Karim's closed door. "That is exactly what I do not want." "Then tell him that story." "You tell him. It belongs to you." Michael nodded. Later that night he did. Nadia heard only pieces from the bedroom while she put Ghalia to sleep: the cousin's name, the uncle's approval, Michael's admission that the fight had made him feel older and stronger for perhaps an hour. He did not turn himself into a cautionary saint. When Karim asked if he regretted it, Michael said he regretted believing that getting hurt proved he respected a woman. The distinction mattered. When Michael came back to the bedroom, Nadia was sitting against the headboard reading. "How did it go?" "He thinks we have formed an alliance against him." "Excellent. Marriage is working." Michael changed into his nightshirt. "He also asked whether I would fight someone who insulted Ghalia when she's older." "And?" "I told him I hope Ghalia will be terrifying enough to handle most of her own insults." Nadia laughed. "She is three and already wins arguments by refusing trousers. Promising trajectory."
Michael lay beside her. "He will learn." "I know." "You sound unconvinced." "I am not worried about one fight. I am worried about the story behind it. Boys get handed stories before they know they are stories. Protect your mother. Guard your sister. Defend your woman. Half of it sounds noble until you ask where the women are supposed to stand while all this defending occurs." Michael was quiet. "Sometimes protection is real." "Of course. If someone is in danger, help them. I would throw a chair at somebody for you if necessary." "A comforting image." "But that is not honour. That is danger. I do not want Karim confusing wounded pride with danger." Michael nodded. "Then keep annoying him." "I intend to." At dinner the subject disappeared for nearly an hour. Nadia did not believe in turning every family meal into court. Ghalia refused lentils, then ate them after Michael put them on his own plate. Karim complained about homework. Michael described a wiring problem at a construction site. The fight sat among them without occupying every chair.
Later, when Ghalia was asleep and Michael had gone to review Karim's school note again, Nadia found her son on the balcony. Cairo's evening noise rose from the street below. Radios, car horns, voices, dishes, a distant call of a vendor. Karim leaned on the rail with his injured hand tucked against his chest. Nadia stood beside him. "Does it hurt now?" "A little." "Good. Pain is educational." He gave her a sideways look. "You keep making jokes." "Would you prefer a sermon?" "No." "Then appreciate your blessings." They stood quietly. After a while Karim said, "You really don't care if someone calls you fat?" Nadia considered the question. "Care is too simple. I care about why they are saying it. I care if somebody is trying to make another person feel ashamed. I care if fat people are treated as stupid, lazy, ugly or less deserving because of their bodies. I care if chairs do not fit, doctors do not listen, employers decide things before an interview. Those things have consequences. The word itself? No. It describes me."
"But you didn't always like being fat." "I did not always know what I thought about it. That is different." He had seen old photographs. He knew his mother had been thin before his birth and much larger afterward. Family comments had taught him there was supposed to be a before and after story in which the first body was the proper one. Nadia had never accepted that story, but he had heard its grammar from other people all his life. "Sameh said it like it was the worst thing he could think of," Karim said. "That tells you something about Sameh." "It made me angry." "That tells you something about you." He frowned. "What?" "That you knew he wanted me diminished and you wanted to stop him. That part is not shameful." Karim looked down at the street. "But you chose the battlefield he offered," Nadia said. "He says a word. You hit him. Now the story becomes two boys fighting. His stupidity disappears into your violence." "So what would you have done?" Nadia smiled. "At fourteen? Probably something much more elaborate and unhelpful."
"Seriously." "If he said it to me now? I might ask him why he thought I had failed to notice my own body." Karim snorted. "Or I might tell him he was boring. Or ignore him. Or, if he was harassing someone weaker, I might make sure there were consequences. The response depends on what I am trying to accomplish." "And if what I wanted was for him to shut up?" "Did punching him achieve permanent silence?" "No." "Then even by your own goal, poor strategy." He sighed. "You make everything strategy." "Not everything. Sometimes I make tea." That finally made him laugh. The school meeting the next morning was less dramatic than Karim had feared and more embarrassing. The deputy head, Mr. Ghali, had the weary manner of a man who had seen boys discover honour every year for three decades. Sameh sat with his father on the other side of the office. He had a bruise near one eye and looked angrier than injured. Karim's shoulders tightened as soon as he saw him.
Nadia sat beside her son, not between the boys. Mr. Ghali asked for each account. Sameh said he had made a joke and Karim attacked him. Karim said it had not been a joke. Sameh said everybody jokes. Karim said comparing his mother to furniture was not funny. Sameh shrugged and muttered that she was fat anyway. Karim moved before he seemed to know he was moving. Not forward, exactly, but upright and tense. Nadia touched two fingers to his wrist. He stopped. The pause was tiny. Nobody else in the room may have understood it. Nadia did. "Yes," she said calmly to Sameh. "I am." The boy looked at her for the first time. Nadia continued, "You used that fact because you thought it would embarrass my son and because you expected me to be ashamed of it. That was unkind. It was also unimaginative. Neither justified him hitting you." Sameh's father shifted, visibly uncomfortable. "He should not have spoken about you." "He is fourteen," Nadia said. "Fourteen-year-olds say foolish things. Mine then did a foolish thing with his fist. I am not interested in pretending one boy is wicked and the other noble."
Mr. Ghali looked relieved. Karim did not. Both boys received school consequences: several days without sports privileges, written apologies and an after-school session helping reorganise storeroom materials. Mr. Ghali did not dismiss them immediately. He asked both boys to remain while their parents stepped into the corridor. Sameh's father looked mortified and began apologising to Nadia before the office door had closed. Nadia stopped him gently. "You did not say it." "He learned something somewhere." "All children do. That does not mean every ugly idea can be traced to one guilty household." The man sighed. "His mother will be furious." "Mine would have been too." Michael, who had joined them before work, leaned against the wall and said, "The question is what they do after furious." Sameh's father looked at him. "And you? Your son hit mine." "Yes. We are not proud of that either." For a moment the two fathers regarded one another with the awkwardness of men expected by custom to take opposing sides. Neither did. Sameh's father admitted that when the school telephoned he had first wanted to know who had won. He looked embarrassed saying it aloud. Michael laughed without mockery and said, "That was my first thought when I was fourteen too."
Nadia appreciated the honesty more than a perfect response. The boys were not inventing their scripts alone. Inside the office, Mr. Ghali had apparently asked Karim and Sameh what they believed should happen next. When the parents returned, both boys looked irritated enough that the conversation must have gone usefully. Mr. Ghali told them he had asked whether each boy wanted revenge, justice or simply the incident to end. Sameh wanted it to end. Karim said he did too, but then admitted he also wanted Sameh to understand why the insult mattered. Mr. Ghali had told them punishment could require behaviour; understanding could not be ordered. That sentence followed Karim home. He complained about it twice. Nadia suspected this meant it had lodged somewhere important. The storeroom punishment began the next afternoon. Karim returned dusty, bored and offended by cardboard. On the second day he said Sameh had tried to apologise but made it worse by saying, "I didn't know your mother didn't mind being fat." Nadia nearly choked on her tea. "What did you say?"
"I said that's not what you mean." "Good." "Then he asked what you do mean." "And?" Karim looked betrayed. "I don't know. That's why I'm asking you." Nadia laughed until he became offended. Then she explained the distinction again, this time without the pressure of the original fight. Not minding a word was not the same as being immune to contempt. She could be hurt by cruelty without accepting the cruel person's values. Karim listened more closely now because he needed the idea for a conversation with someone his own age rather than a lecture from his mother. "So if he says, 'Your mother's fat,' I could say, 'Yes, and?'" "You could." "That would annoy him." "Do not build your ethics entirely around annoyance." "But it helps." "Occasionally." On the third day, Karim came home and said Sameh had used the same phrase on another boy who mocked a teacher's stutter. "He said, 'Yes, she stutters, and?' Then the other boy didn't know what to say." Nadia raised her eyebrows. "Ideas travel quickly." "He stole it."
"You stole it from me." "Family doesn't count." "An impressive legal principle." The punishment lasted a week. By the end, the storeroom was actually organised. Mr. Ghali made both boys label shelves together and then thanked them without sarcasm. Karim came home on the final afternoon with intact knuckles, a dusty shirt and the reluctant admission that Sameh was not an idiot all the time. "Dangerous discovery," Nadia said. "It is easier when enemies cooperate by being stupid continuously." Karim regarded the storeroom as a punishment beneath human dignity. Nadia thought it excellent. Outside the office, he said, "You made it sound like we were the same." "I said his insult was wrong and your violence was wrong. That does not make the acts identical." "He started it." "With words. You escalated it." "You defended him." Nadia stopped walking. "No. I refused to turn you into a hero because I love you." Karim's face closed. She let the silence sit. Then she said, "If I wanted the easy version, I would tell you my brave son protected me and Sameh got what he deserved. You would feel good for an afternoon. Next time somebody insults your sister, a girlfriend, a wife, any woman you love, you might believe your masculinity requires violence. I would rather annoy you now."
He looked away. "Women do not need men building identities around defending our honour," Nadia said. "We need men who can tell the difference between protection and possession, between courage and performance, between anger and usefulness." "I'm not trying to possess anyone." "I know. That is why I am teaching you before the habit grows teeth." Karim did not answer for the rest of the walk home. For two days he remained polite and distant, which Nadia found more exhausting than open argument. Michael told her to leave him space. She did. On the third day, Karim came into the kitchen while she was making lunch and asked whether he could invite Sameh over. Nadia nearly dropped the spoon. "Why?" "Not because we're friends." "That was not my question." Karim leaned against the counter. "We had to work in the storeroom together. He said his father was furious because he embarrassed the family. I told him you were more angry at me than at him. He didn't believe me." "Sensibly." "Then he said he didn't understand why you said you were fat like it didn't matter."
Nadia turned off the burner. "And?" "I tried to explain." "How did that go?" "Badly." "Also sensibly." Karim rolled his eyes. "Can he come?" "If you both want him to." Sameh came the following Saturday. Nadia had half expected the visit to be cancelled. At two minutes past the agreed time she heard two boys arguing quietly on the landing about who should knock. Karim insisted it was his house and therefore Sameh should. Sameh said that made no sense. Nadia opened the door before either won and found them both looking guilty. "You survived school punishment but not a door?" she asked. Sameh held out the pastry box as if it were a passport. "My mother sent these." "Then your mother is welcome even if you are not. Come in." He looked alarmed until Karim laughed, which told Nadia the boys had advanced enough to recognise teasing together. During the first half hour Sameh kept glancing at Nadia as if trying to reconcile the woman in front of him with the body he had turned into an insult. That irritated her less than it might have. Fourteen-year-olds were often astonished to discover adults continued existing outside whatever sentence had been spoken about them. Nadia was not interested in making herself small enough to ease his embarrassment.
She wore an ordinary dark blue house dress Salma had made years earlier, sleeves rolled slightly while she worked on Ghalia's hem. She did not sit straighter, hide her stomach or perform confidence. Her body occupied the chair as it always did. The normality of it was its own argument. He arrived carrying pastries his mother had sent, which embarrassed him almost as much as the visit itself. Nadia did not stage a reconciliation. She offered tea, told the boys to sit wherever they liked and continued mending a loose seam on Ghalia's dress. For ten minutes nobody mentioned the fight. Sameh asked Michael about a radio on the shelf. Karim showed him a football magazine. Ghalia demanded that both boys admire a drawing consisting mostly of green scribble. Finally Sameh said, "I'm sorry, Mrs. El-Zahara." Nadia looked up. "For what?" He flushed. "What I said." "Thank you." He seemed startled that she did not make him suffer through a speech. Karim looked at her as though she had skipped an important step. Nadia returned to the seam.
A minute later Sameh said, "Karim says you don't think fat is an insult." "Karim talks too much." "Mama." "He gets it from me." Sameh smiled uncertainly. Nadia set down the dress. "I think words can be used to hurt people even when the words describe real things. If someone says a person is short, dark, old, poor, disabled, fat, foreign, whatever else, and says it with contempt, the contempt is real. But I do not have to accept the speaker's belief that the trait itself is contemptible." Sameh nodded slowly. "You wanted my size to embarrass Karim because you believed a fat mother was something shameful. That is the part worth reconsidering. Not because I require your approval. I don't. Because one day you will speak to someone whose opinion of herself is still fragile, and you may do more damage than you intended." Sameh looked down at his hands. "Okay." Then, perhaps because the apology had been accepted without drama, he risked a question. "But if somebody doesn't want to be fat, does that mean they think it's bad?"
Karim made a sound of warning, as if Sameh had just approached a second minefield. Nadia held up one hand. "People are allowed to want different things for their own bodies. Wanting to change yourself is not automatically hatred of everyone who is different. It depends on what you believe and how you treat people." "My aunt is always dieting," Sameh said. "She says she hates being fat." "She is allowed to have complicated feelings about herself. I would hope nobody makes those feelings harder by treating her as a joke." "She makes jokes first." Nadia nodded. "Sometimes people do that because it feels safer to insult yourself before somebody else can. Sometimes they genuinely find something funny. You cannot always know from outside." Karim glanced at her. "Did you do that?" The question was more personal than Sameh's. Nadia considered refusing it, then decided he was old enough for an honest answer. "Sometimes when I was younger. Not much. Mostly I let other people talk as if my body were temporary. I did not argue because I was still deciding what I thought."
"Like after I was born?" "Especially then. Everyone had an opinion about when I would become the girl I had been before pregnancy. It took me years to notice that I was not actually waiting to become her again. Other people were." Sameh looked surprised. "People said that to you?" "Constantly. Adults can be very boring." Karim smiled. "You say that about everyone." "Because all ages contain talent." Sameh laughed. The tension in his shoulders loosened. Nadia was glad, but she refused to let the afternoon become a seminar devoted to her body. She pointed toward the football magazine and said, "Enough anthropology. You two came here to be fourteen, not to interview me." "What's anthropology?" Sameh asked. "Something you can learn after you stop punching each other," Nadia said. "I didn't punch him first," Sameh muttered. Karim opened his mouth. Nadia raised one eyebrow. Both boys shut up. That, more than the apology, felt like progress. Nadia believed that was enough for one afternoon. After Sameh left, Karim stood at the balcony door watching him cross the street below. Nadia gathered the empty tea glasses. "Well?" she asked.
"He's still annoying." "A devastating failure of diplomacy." "But less annoying." Nadia stacked the glasses. Karim turned toward her. "I thought you'd make him apologise more." "How many apologies does one insult require?" "I don't know." "Neither do I. That is why I stop when I believe the person understood what he was apologising for." Karim looked at his hand. The knuckles had nearly healed. "I still had to apologise to him too." "Yes." "That felt worse." "Good. Apologies are not meant to be recreational." He followed her into the kitchen. "I meant it, though." Nadia looked over her shoulder. "I know." She did not add that this mattered more to her than the original fight. He had not become less protective. He was learning that protection without judgement could turn the loved person into an excuse. That was slower work than healing a cut lip. The boys never became close friends. They did, however, stop fighting. Weeks later Karim came home irritated because another boy had made a joke about Ghalia's hair after seeing the family outside school. Nadia asked what he had done.
"Told him he was boring," Karim said. Nadia smiled. "And?" "He kept talking." "Tragedy." "So I left." "Did you survive?" "Barely." He opened the refrigerator and began searching for food. Nadia watched him without turning the moment into praise. The lesson was not that walking away was always right. It was that he had discovered choice existed between silence and violence. As he closed the refrigerator, Karim glanced at her. "I still think Sameh deserved one punch." "You are permitted incorrect opinions." "And I still think if someone actually threatened you, I'd hit him." "If someone actually threatens me, we will reassess the battlefield." He smiled. "So there is a battlefield." Nadia pointed the wooden spoon at him. "Do not become smug." Karim took an apple from the bowl. On his way out of the kitchen, he bent and kissed the top of Ghalia's head, then ducked before she could complain. Nadia listened to her daughter shout after him and her son laugh from the hall. Love, she thought, did not require harmlessness. It required judgement. The people one loved could make you furious, frightened, protective and proud. The difficult part was refusing to hand those feelings to the nearest idiot and let him decide what happened next. Karim was fourteen. There would be other idiots. Nadia intended him to choose his own battles.