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Then, suddenly, the weeds begin to recede, as if something is pulling them by the roots from beneath the ground. They sink lower and lower until the earth in the kolba has swallowed the last of their spiny leaves. The spi-derwebs magically unspin themselves. The bird’s nest self-disassembles, the twigs snapping loose one by one, flying out of the kolba end over end. An invisible eraser wipes the Russian graffiti off the wall.

The floorboards are back. Laila sees a pair of sleeping cots now, a wooden table, two chairs, a cast-iron stove in the corner, shelves along the walls, on which sit clay pots and pans, a blackened teakettle, cups and spoons. She hears chickens clucking outside, the distant gurgling of the stream.

A young Mariam is sitting at the table making a doll by the glow of an oil lamp. She’s humming something. Her face is smooth and youthful, her hair washed, combed back. She has all her teeth.

Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll’s head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too has had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her. Already Laila sees something behind this young girl’s eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. Something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila’s salvation.

The little girl looks up. Puts down the doll. Smiles.

Laila jo?

Laila’s eyes snap open. She gasps, and her body pitches forward. She startles the bat, which zips from one end of the kolba to the other, its beating wings like the fluttering pages of a book, before it flies out the window.

Laila gets to her feet, beats the dead leaves from the seat of her trousers. She steps out of the kolba. Outside, the light has shifted slightly. A wind is blowing, making the grass ripple and the willow branches click.

Before she leaves the clearing, Laila takes one last look at the kolba where Mariam had slept, eaten, dreamed, held her breath for Jalil. On sagging walls, the willows cast crooked patterns that shift with each gust of wind. A crow has landed on the flat roof. It pecks at something, squawks, flies off.

“Good-bye, Mariam.”

And, with that, unaware that she is weeping, Laila begins to run through the grass.

She finds Hamza still sitting on the rock. When he spots her, he stands up.

“Let’s go back,” he says. Then, “I have something to give you.”

LAILA WAITS FOR Hamza in the garden by the front door. The boy who had served them tea earlier is standing beneath one of the fig trees holding a chicken, watching her impassively. Laila spies two faces, an old woman and a young girl in hijabs, observing her demurely from a window.

The door to the house opens and Hamza emerges. He is carrying a box.

He gives it to Laila.

“Jalil Khan gave this to my father a month or so before he died,” Hamza says. “He asked my father to safeguard it for Mariam until she came to claim it. My father kept it for two years. Then, just before he passed away, he gave it to me, and asked me to save it for Mariam. But she . . . you know, she never came.”

Laila looks down at the oval-shaped tin box. It looks like an old chocolate box. It’s olive green, with fading gilt scrolls all around the hinged lid. There is a little rust on the sides, and two tiny dents on the front rim of the lid. Laila tries to open the box, but the latch is locked.

“What’s in it?” she asks.

Hamza puts a key in her palm. “My father never unlocked it. Neither did I. I suppose it was God’s will that it be you.”

BACK AT THE HOTEL, Tariq and the children are not back yet.

Laila sits on the bed, the box on her lap. Part of her wants to leave it unopened, let whatever Jalil had intended remain a secret. But, in