Summary

In Part Three, Noor attends her creative nonfiction workshop. She is joined by her instructor and classmates, Minnie, Alex, Laura, Tim, Jacques, and Candice. Noor’s piece is up for discussion. Noor submitted the first two sections of her manuscript in previous workshops. Her classmates will now discuss the third and final section.

The instructor invites Noor “to read an excerpt” (159).

In the chosen excerpt, after the boy’s death, Noor put her “phone in airplane mode, permanently” (159). Only then did she realize “there was no one left” for her in Cairo (159). She turned her phone off because she could not deal with the barrage of calls she was receiving. The only people she could talk to “were halfway across the world” (160). She was comforted hearing about their lives, and saying nothing of hers. In the wake of the boy’s death, she...