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A few hours later, I paced the cell—back and forth, as quickly as I could—waiting for what was going to happen next. Rosewater wanted names, but what names? Reporters? Politicians? Friends? The noise of the air-conditioning unit was so loud, I had trouble staying focused on my thoughts.

I remembered Maryam telling me about the time they took her to the torture room and beat her without reason. “It was toward the end of my sentence,” she said. “I think they just wanted to teach me a lesson before releasing me so I would never forget what prison was like.” I tried to convince myself that Rosewater was doing the same.

But a voice inside me suspected otherwise: that they’d never had any intention of keeping to our agreement. What had happened last night was, I somehow knew, just the beginning. But how far would they go? I’d heard too many stories, and I couldn’t block the horrifying thoughts from my mind: Fingernails pulled out. Electric shocks to the testicles. “The first thing he did with the pliers was squeeze my earlobe,” my father would say. “If you think that’s painful, just wait. Nothing hurts more than when they use those pliers to pull out your nails. The man who tortured me pulled out each of the nails on my right hand slowly, one by one. He told me that he had all the time in the world.” My father related this story many times throughout my life. As a child, I would study his hand, trying to picture it disfigured. I was in awe of him. How could he resist such pain? I didn’t know if I had his strength, but remembering my father’s words gave me hope: “They thought that by exerting maximum pressure, they could force me to reveal all the information I had about my comrades. But I never did.”

The metal slots of the other cell doors started to open and close, startling me. It was time for breakfast. I had always looked forward to the click-clack sound of the slots opening and closing. This meant it was time to eat and, especially, for tea. But that morning, the sounds of metal against metal made the panic I felt more intense. I waited for the lower slot to open and my breakfast to appear, but it didn’t. Instead, Blue-Eyed Seyyed opened the door. For some reason, he was the only guard who didn’t mind showing his face to the prisoners. He placed a blindfold on the floor along with my food and poured me a cup of tea. “Have your breakfast as soon as you can. Your specialist wants to see you right away,” he said as he closed the door. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

I stared at my nails as I held the cup of tea. Would I still have them at the end of the day? I felt Maryam sitting in the corner of my cell, watching me. Dropping to the floor, I started to do push-ups. What if they pull my nails and lash my feet, how many push-ups will I be able to do then? I thought.

“None,” Maryam answered. She had told me about a friend of hers in prison who’d lost her toe after a bad beating. “She had lied to them about her husband’s whereabouts, and when the prison guards found out, they punished her by lashing her feet for almost an hour,” Maryam had related with tears in her eyes. She’d said that when they brought the woman back to their shared cell, the soles of her feet were so badly damaged that she couldn’t walk for days.

The thought of Maryam getting knocked around by an animal like Rosewater brought forth the tears that I’d been holding back since the beating. As I did my push-ups, I watched the carpet under my face grow dark with my tears. “Maryam joon, I will be strong,” I said. “But how will I survive this? How much worse will it get?”

“Who are you talking to?” Blue-Eyed Seyyed was standing at the door to my cell. I ignored him, sat up, and took a sip of tea. “Come on, it’s time to go,” he ordered.

Rosewater didn’t say anything when Blue-Eyed Seyyed handed me to him. He silently took my arm, as if leading a lamb to the slaughter. I could sense his anger in the force of his breaths and his grip on my flesh. He sat me in the chair in the interrogation room and removed my blindfold. From this corner of the room,