Excerpt from In the Time of Our History by Susanne Pari, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Mitra had said her belly would not look like that. Just a small incision that would fade to a nearly imperceptible line, like a kitten scratch. The golden-haired doctor at the institute in Manhattan had said so, his smile made stupid by the lie Mitra told him about an inheritable disease and by his guilelessness about young women who say they do not ever want children anyway.

Over the last weeks, Olga had begged Mitra: Don't do this. Run away, just run away. But Mitra always did what she wanted with the single-mindedness and impatience of a teenage boy with an erection. From the moment Olga set eyes on her at the New Jersey house just over ten years ago, she knew that this girl—then just thirteen years old—was a force: rebellious, stubborn, determined. Takes one to know one, Mitra later taught her. Yes, Olga had seen herself in Mitra; herself as she once was.

"Are you hungry?" Olga asked, sitting like a Buddha (America had made her fat), hungry herself, but not wanting to eat.

Mitra shook her head, eyes opening and closing. "No." She blinked slowly. "What time is it?"

"Night."

Mitra's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Go back to the hotel now, Olga-joon. Call Maman at eleven o'clock and tell her that the show was wonderful and we're safe in the room. You remember the name of the show?"

"The one about the cats."

"Cats, that's what it's called. Cats. Remember."

Olga nodded and wrung her hands like a murderer about to confess. "I don't want to leave you," she said.

"Tell Maman I'm in the bathroom. Tell her I'm tired and we're going to bed. She won't need to talk to me."

"But you will be alone here."

"Olga," Mitra said sharply. "Have I ever minded being alone?"

Olga jerked her chin up and smacked her tongue against the roof of her mouth: a forthright Persian no.

"Go then," Mitra said. "You have money for the cab, right?"

Olga rose and pulled a crumpled wad of dollars out of her raincoat pocket. "I am going," she said, but she stood still, her vision suddenly blurring.

Mitra smiled through her discomfort. "Don't look like that. Everything is good. I am satisfied."

"You are strong, azizam. Too strong."

Mitra shook her head. "No," she said in English. "I'm free."

CHAPTER 1

September 1998

She came to the East Coast for the first anniversary of her sister's death. It was the Shia way, to mark the Death Day—first at seven days, then at forty, and finally at one year. Not that Mitra was a believer. She came because she felt sorry for her mother, still crestfallen and clutching tightly to the traditions she'd been trying to instill in her two daughters since they were born at Bergen County Hospital. Mitra had fought hardest against those rituals—Persian New Year parties, Zoroastrian festivals, Ramadan fasting—but now Mitra was her mother's only child.

Dawn at Kennedy Airport. Round-edged melamine furniture, miles of burgundy carpet, burnt coffee smell—the air of a banquet hall the morning after a raucous party. A janitor harpooned candy wrappers and dirty napkins from the floor. Mitra heard the drone of a vacuum cleaner as she ordered an espresso from a café cart, then took a seat at the end of a bank of bucket chairs facing the windows.

She was in no hurry to escape the boundaries of transit. On the tarmac sat a gaggle of airplanes tinged pink in the daybreak.

From a distance, say, from the point of view of the logy barista who had served her espresso, Mitra looked unapproachable. This was not only because the barista was a young twentysomething and Mitra just over the cusp of forty. Despite her jeans, plain white shirt, and tight-fitting leather jacket, Mitra exuded the self-assuredness of a power-suited executive. And there was strength in her face: the olive skin, chocolate eyes, long arched eyebrows, and especially the angular nose—not exactly hooked, not exactly humped, but definitely a feature that would have inclined most girls to opt for a slight surgical correction.

Excerpted from In the Time of Our History by Susanne Pari. Copyright © 2023 by Susanne Pari. Excerpted by permission of Kensington Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.