summer. But it wasn’t a lie—or at least not a malicious one. And it did not count as a lie if he simply withheld information. Like the nights he still snuck out to go to parties at his friends’ houses. She would be hurt if she knew. She never judged him or admonished him but she did express wanting a future in which he wouldn’t, and she had begun to assume, and he allowed her to continue to believe, that since they had become more serious he did not really drink and did not smoke anymore either. In some ways that was true. In the months after Abbas died, before he and Amira acknowledged what
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