Colophon

Nasreen Khalil sells other people's stories for a living. She has never had time for her own.

At thirty-six, she runs a quiet antiquarian bookshop in Lower Manhattan, fluent in five dead languages and one very much alive: the language her mother speaks when she says have you called Faris back yet. Nasreen has built a life out of vellum and provenance precisely so no one can ask her to explain the parts that don't fit. It works, mostly. Until an estate auction hands her a water-damaged Ottoman manuscript that isn't what it pretends to be.

Nasreen starts translating it after the shop closes. She tells herself it's professional curiosity. But the text is too warm, the arguments too intimate, and by the sixth night she is no longer alone.

Whatever is trapped inside has been waiting a long time for her.