Chapter Five
Sumaya wasn’t there. She’d abandoned me. She’d abandoned me, leaving only a blue sheet of her letter paper, on which she’d written three lines begging me not to worry about her because she’d left me of her own accord. Worry about her! The world had collapsed in ruins around me by the time I contacted her parents. They didn’t know anything about what she’d done, and it occurred to me that a nefarious connection existed between the events of the day before: my friend as he conjured up my past, the pouring rain in the Old City, the flood, the drowned children in my old home – then Sumaya’s disappearance, for which I found no justification.
My mind was ajumble. It appeared to me that my life had suddenly exploded, and fragments of it had been hurled against one another in the ai
