The smoothness of her return to the everyday world was a bit of an anticlimax; she crossed the threshold with barely any sense of unevenness. She had adapted with surprising ease to life in Baghdad with its lack of this and that, and found less pleasure than she had anticipated in returning to Parisian abundance. She found rather that she needed time to adjust to the excess around her. But being in a place where from sunrise to sunset there was never the sound of bombs quietly eased the lingering tension inside her. As her own feelings settled, she thought with pain of those she had left
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