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the day, in a women’s-only shopping mall. Her coworkers were as mysterious to him as any stranger in a
niqab
. Her family was in Indonesia, or maybe they’d moved back to the Philippines by now. She never talked about them, only about her mother, who was dead.
    His mind tore through the possibilities, cutting intersections, ignoring pedestrians, hitting wide-open freeways that circled himback around a whole metropolis of problems that hadn’t existed before last night. Had she grown sick of him? Had she left for someone else? Why not a good-bye note? Had someone taken her? She was anonymous. Who even knew she was there?
    He could think of a few people who might want to hurt her. Her old employer, the bastard who had raped her when she was working as his housemaid. But the bastard had fallen into dark history, was never mentioned anymore. And why would he come after her? If there was a reason, or even the hint of a threat, she would have told Ibrahim first thing.
    Maybe someone from one of her Undercover jobs might be looking for revenge. She had been hired for Undercover five years ago, which was how they had met. She’d done a number of assignments with Ubayy al-Warra before being transferred to Ibrahim. He’d been working a female shoplifting network and needed an infiltrator. It was hard enough finding a woman for such a task, let alone a proficient one. Sabria had been excellent.
    She’d eventually decided that the job was too taxing for her. He knew all the cases she’d worked on with him, but there were dozens more she’d done in the two years with al-Warra that he knew very little about. She hadn’t talked about them much except to say that they were uninteresting.
    The house began to stir. He leaned his head against the wall and checked his phone. No calls. Few people would have understood that he was sleeping with a woman he hadn’t married, and those who would have understood were too close to his family. He couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t say something, and he didn’t like people carrying dangerous secrets around. Only Sabria had ever had that privilege.
    They weren’t married because Sabria was already married. She’d been forced into it by her former employer, the same man who had raped her, neglected her, and who was no doubt brutalizing some new young housemaid at this very moment. MahmoudHalifi. He had disappeared over five years ago, shortly after Sabria had fled his house. It occurred to Ibrahim that if she ever saw Halifi again, she might do something rash. She carried pepper spray and was proficient at kung fu, but Halifi was twice her size, all raw muscle and fury and animal brutality. He could easily overpower her.
    Halifi had raped her multiple times, but it wasn’t until Sabria became pregnant that he forced her to marry him. They conducted a two-minute ceremony in his living room, and the bastard had actually notified the records office, making it completely official. She had miscarried a week later. In order to divorce him, she would have to find him, and she hadn’t put any energy into that over the past five years.
    The fact that she and Ibrahim couldn’t marry didn’t bother her as much as it bothered him, but when he really thought it through, the conclusion ended somewhere with his wife having him killed quietly in his sleep or arranging for him to be ostracized by his family and friends for the rest of his life.
    He got up, got dressed, and managed to leave the house without having to talk to Jamila, even though it meant missing breakfast with the twins, who were ten. He sent them each a text telling them he’d see them after dinner and would they please remember that it was Thursday—they had a date for ice cream? They both replied with happy emoticons.
    He reached Sabria’s apartment and did another sweep. Still empty. He went back to the neighbors, who said she hadn’t come home the night before. So he returned to her apartment, sat at the kitchen table, and began