“Yes, don’t worry. We will get our own place as soon as we can.” My mother told me many, many lies over the years, but this one still hurts the most. I cannot understand, now that I’m a mother, how a woman could make a decision that terrified all three of her children so intensely. She knew we hated him and why. She knew she was lying to us. She just didn’t care. In Egypt, she had had the support of her sisters and her extended family. She wasn’t alone. But they were all married, and she felt inferior. She could have saved us from Mounir’s wrath. We could have stayed in Egypt. But she was
...more
