Amal opened the door before he knocked and walked away from it before he was in, so that he followed her down the hall of the house on Calhoun Street still taking off his gloves. She went past the front room with its gold sofas under plastic and kept going.
"In here," she said. "You're not a guest now."
She meant the kitchen.
It had been scrubbed again since January, or scrubbed so often that it no longer mattered when. The grout in front of the stove was whiter than the rest. The drawer by the sink was shut. Amal pulled out a chair at the table for him, the one with its back to the counter, and he sat in it, and was grateful, and disliked himself for being grateful.
There was a tin on the table with a picture of a Swiss mountain on the lid. She opened it. Date cookies, the round ones pressed in a wooden mould, a little broken at the edges.
"From Eid," she said. "Eid was Tuesday. I made them for Daoud. I took them to the jail and the guard said no food from outside." She pushed the tin toward him. "So you eat them."
It was Sunday, the fourteenth of March. Ramadan had come and gone through Dearborn without Omar noticing it except as traffic, the restaurants on Warren full at eight at night, the lights strung over the bakeries. Somewhere on Schaefer Road his father had stood at the front of the night prayers thirty nights running, in the same brown cardigan. Omar had not gone once. He had not been asked.
He ate a cookie. It was very good. He said so, and she nodded as if he had confirmed a fact.
He had a legal pad with the questions in the order he would ask them. He did not show it to her. Witnesses who saw the questions learned the answers, and the jury could always tell.
"I'm going to ask you when Danny changed," he said. "Just tell me, the way you'd tell your sister."
"After his father," Amal said at once. "After Marwan died, everybody changed. But Daoud more. After the will, when they read it, in June, he came home and he went upstairs and he didn't come down for dinner. And after that. . ."
"After that, in the summer."
"In the summer."
"Tell me what you saw in the summer."
She told him. She told it well, because it was true and because she had been telling it to herself for eight months. The talking behind his bedroom door at two and three in the morning, low, the way you talk to someone in the next pillow. She had thought it was his phone. She had stood in the hall in her nightdress and listened, and there had been gaps in it, as if somebody was answering. Then she had opened the door, and the phone had been on the dresser, face down, charging.
"He was sitting on the bed," she said. "Looking at the wall. Like this." She turned her head and looked at the wall by the fridge, three feet from her face, with her lips a little apart. "I said, 'Daoud, who are you talking to?' He said, 'Nobody, Mama, go to sleep.'"
Omar wrote "wall" and drew a box round it.
"And the prayer," she said. "He prayed with his father always, since he was seven. Side by side. Even when he was at the university and came home late, he prayed the night prayer with his father in the front room. After the summer, nothing. I put his rug out. He walked round it."
That was good. Omar knew it was good while she was still saying it. A jury in Wayne County would have Dearborn faces on it, and some of those faces would know exactly what a mother meant when she said she put the rug out and her son walked round it. He did not have to say any of this to himself. It was already said, and he was already writing "rug, walked round" and underlining it.
"Do I say about the sheikh?"
"Yes." He didn't have to think. "You say you were frightened, and you took him to someone you thought could help. You say Sami was against it. You don't have to say whether you believe in it."
"I believe in it."
"Then say that too, if she asks."
She nodded. The idea of Farran in a witness box, with his drawn-on beard and his phone full of video, sat in Omar's head beside the rug and the wall and did not look as ridiculous there as it had on Warren Avenue.
"Because of the will," Amal said. "He was angry about the will, about Sami being. . ."
"Let's stay with what you saw," Omar said.
He heard it come out of his mouth, pleasant and low, the voice he used with frightened people in corridors. It had arrived in his mouth the way the cookie had arrived in his hand, and he could not find the place where he had decided on either.
"The jury doesn't need the will," he said. "The will is paperwork. The jury needs to see your son in his room in the summer, talking to a wall. You saw that. Nobody else saw that. That's what they'll remember."
Amal looked at him. She folded her hands on the table.
"All right."
"When the prosecutor asks you questions," he said, "and she will, she'll be polite, you answer exactly what she asks. Short. If she asks a yes or no question, you say yes or no. You don't explain. You don't help her. If she asks about the house, you tell her who the house went to and you stop."
"I stop."
"You stop. If she wants more, she has to ask for more, and every time she asks, the jury watches her ask a grieving mother about property."
None of it was a trick. It was what every defence lawyer in the building told every witness the week before trial, and the thought came smooth behind it, agreeing: nothing you've told her is a lie, and nothing she'll say will be one. She will stand up and tell the truth about the summer, and the jury will decide what the summer means.
He tore off the top sheet of the pad, folded it, and put it in his inside pocket, so that it would not be left on her table.
She got up when they were finished and took the tea glasses to the sink. He stood to put his coat on. Through the window over the sink the yard was grey with old snow, and there was a child's plastic slide on its side by the fence that nobody had used in twenty years.
Amal turned the tap on and off again without wetting anything. She stood with both hands on the edge of the counter. Her right hip was against the drawer.
"Sami took the house," she said.
She said it to the window. Omar stopped with one arm in his coat.
"His father said, 'Keep it for your mother.' Everybody heard. In the lawyer's office, everybody heard it. And then in August Sami brought a man to measure the rooms. A man from a company, with a laser. He said it was for the insurance." Her voice did not shake. It went on in the flat way she had told him about the wall. "In October the man came back with another man. I asked Sami, and Sami said, 'Mama, you can't manage two floors. We'll find you something nice. A flat with a lift.' A flat with a lift." She turned the tap on, and off. "My husband built the porch on this house with his hands. Sami took the house. He was my son, and he took it, and he was going to sell it under me."
She turned round. Her face was dry.
"I never told anyone that," she said. "Not Daoud. Not anyone."
The fridge hummed. Omar finished putting on his coat, the left arm, then the collar, then the buttons, and he did each of them slowly, and when he had done the last button the answer was buttoned up too, and waiting.
"Then don't tell anyone now," he said.