“MET MY DAUGHTER?” Rahman says. “You’re talking to the wrong person. I don’t have any daughters. They died a long time ago.”

I stare at him. For two years, we’ve been meeting each other in the same cafe in Amman and speaking about the same story. For two years, I’ve looked him in the eyes and listened to his thoughts about honor killing, faith, and tradition. I’ve lied to him, and he’s lying to me—now that I’m finally telling him the truth.

“I’ve spoken with your daughter,” I repeat. “Her name is Amina. Her sister was named Aisha. Your name is Rahman Abd Al-Nasir. You killed your mother when you were eleven years old, and shot your daughters when they were sixteen and eighteen.”

He gets up and starts swaying from side to side with his eyes shut. He holds onto the table tightly with both hands like he’s about to lose his balance.

“Are you all right?” I ask, getting up and putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” he hisses, pushing me away. He slams his hand on the table so hard that everyone in the cafe turns to look at us. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got the wrong person. Who do you think you are?”

He raises his voice and waves his index finger in my face. It swings from side to side so aggressively that it looks like a fan before my eyes. I ask him to sit down again, to give me the chance to explain. If he disappears from the cafe now, I’ll lose the story again—just as quickly as I lost Amina.

“I know the scar on the right side of your face is from when you killed your mother. Sit down, Rahman Abd Al-Nasir. I know you’re the right person.”

He looks around nervously and leans across the table. “Be quiet!” he snarls. “I have no daughters. You’re speaking to the wrong person.”

I look at him and understand what’s about to happen: he’s going to leave. He’s going to disappear into the busy streets outside the cafe, hurry up the narrow alleys, through a gate, a door . . . and I’ll never be able to find him again. The story will end here. In this cafe, with this familiar scent of Arabic coffee and apple tobacco. The search for information has turned; he and I have switched sides now. He’s going to find out where I live, who I’ve been in contact with, and the names of everyone who has worked with me.

I try to apologize, to explain the confrontation. I say that there are many people with the same name here in Jordan, and that it’s easy to make a mistake, that maybe he’s right. I try to make him feel safe again, but none of what I say seems to have any effect. He straightens up, tosses a few coins on the table, and shows signs of being on his way out. I beg him to take my Norwegian phone number. “In case you change your mind,” I say. “You can always call.” I take out a scrap of paper and I write down my number, but he refuses to take it.

“Jordan is small,” he says, full of disdain, and turns his back to me. “I’ll find what I want. Who I want,” he mumbles, and walks away.

I sit at the table as he disappears out the door. I want to follow him and find out where he lives, but I know I’ve already crossed a dangerous line. I see the top of his head bobbing up and down among the other people out there. Up through the alleys, into the dark streets, all the way to a place he calls home. Perhaps it’s even the same home where Amina and Aisha grew up.

I sit in the cafe, wondering whether we’re ever going to meet again, and whether I can still use what he’s told me even though he’s now denying parts of the story.

I pull out my list with the 139 names of women in Jordan who were killed in the name of honor between 1995 and 2014. Aisha is represented in one of the 139 rows on the sheet. “Killed for immoral behavior,” it reads on the blurry pages I found in the archives of The Jordan Times. The official story was of course different from what Amina told me. In the papers it said that Aisha was killed for adultery—a reason for killing so obvious, so excusable, that most Jordanians wouldn’t even react to it. In contrast, no one has ever been officially killed for homosexuality in Jordan. Such a shame would never be mentioned to the general public. Such numbers can’t even be found in the statistics. Immoral behavior such as adultery, pregnancy outside of marriage, rape, or just a bad reputation, however, are all causes for killing that are well represented on my list.

I sit, musing over what Rahman thinks about what he did. I wonder whether a father who killed his own child is even still in touch with his feelings, and whether he feels remorse.

Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s never needed to accept responsibility for the lives he’s taken. And what is a crime without punishment? What is a criminal who never gets judged?

I REALIZE THAT I have revealed and confronted Rahman with everything I know and that this will have to be my last evening in Amman. I’m not safe here anymore. A killer who walks free is undoubtedly dangerous to have any association with. I pack up my things, leave the little cafe, and start down the long road back to the hotel. I walk quickly through the hectic streets in downtown Amman, squeezing among the spice and fruit stalls with their good deals and loud voices. The women smile at me when our eyes meet. After many years in the street scene, I’ve been allowed to take part in a kind of silent community of women. I don’t know them and they don’t know me, but we see each other, smile, and wink like we’re old friends. It wasn’t like that the first times I lived here, I think, and feel a bit melancholy now that I have to go home and may never return.

I haven’t seen Amina in three years, and will probably never see her again—if she’s even still alive. I have tried to recreate what little she told me and confirm the various leads I’ve gotten, but just a couple of hours of recording have given me little to go off. The police won’t give me any answers. The Public Security Directorate wants me out of the country. The various organizations I have worked with can’t give me any more information than I already have. And now Rahman has disappeared.

The story ends here, I think.

***

THAT SAME NIGHT, I’m lying awake in the dark with my eyes wide open. I can’t sleep. Thoughts are whirring around my head. I’ve spent three years looking for guilty people in a country where no one seems to want to admit guilt or take responsibility for what they’ve done. I’ve spoken with men who were forced to kill their mothers when they were only children, boys who were pressured to take their sisters’ lives, and husbands who tortured their own wives to death. What they all have in common is the feeling that they—just like the women they killed—were themselves victims of honor killing, and therefore blameless.

I think about Rahman. He also denies all accountability for what he’s done. He denied it all and ran away. It hadn’t been the confrontation I’d been hoping for. It felt like he’d escaped—once again.

Why has it been so important for me to hold him responsible? I wonder. Do I have some subconscious need to punish him on Amina’s behalf? Or is it remorse I’m looking for? The remains of some kind of humanity. Something you could grab onto to effect change.

The calls to prayer resound over the towers of the closest mosque and mingle with the cold night air. I turn on my side and stare out into the pitch-black room. My gaze lands on a strange shadow at the door. I squint to make my vision clearer. In the crack between the door and the floor, I can see an undeniable shadow. It looks like someone is standing there, right outside my door, with both feet pointing in toward the room. I stare at the shadow, trying to figure out if someone is actually standing there, as I frantically try to find the phone without turning on the light.

Someone knocks on the door, and suddenly I feel like I’m back in the hotel room in Aqaba in 2013.

“Open up,” says a familiar voice, then adds my name.

It’s Rahman. He must have followed me back here from the cafe.

He knocks on the door again as I sit in the dark, terrified. He’s going to kill me, I think, feeling for the hotel phone on the nightstand with shaking hands. I lift the handset and repeatedly press the operator button at the top. The beeping fills the room. I feel like he can hear me. He knows I’m in here. He knows that I can’t come out.

“Someone’s trying to break into my room,” I whisper when someone at the reception desk answers.

“Should I call the police?” the receptionist asks. I immediately reply yes, but then change my mind the next second. It’s going to take too long to summon the police—and they have no right to arrest him. “Is there someone who can help me now?”

“I’m sending up security,” says the receptionist.

I put the phone down, get up, and tiptoe silently to my purse, which is sitting next to the door. I search for my pepper spray, find it quickly, and stand there with my finger on the trigger in the dark, prepared for him to break in.

We stand that way for a while, he and I. Just a foot and a half apart. Separated only by a door.

“I have more to say,” he says. “I’m going down to reception. You can come if you want to talk to me.”

I see the shadow outside move and hear the sound of steps disappearing down the hallway. I stand there, confused. I’ve almost stopped breathing entirely. It’s impossible to know what he wants. If he had wanted to harm me, he would’ve done so here, not sat down in the reception area where other people could see us, right? The adrenaline is pumping through my veins and my hands are shaking. I fall down on my knees and try to think clearly. Maybe he really did just want to talk. I think about the situation. The confession I’ve been looking for all these years might be moments away, but how much am I willing to risk? My thoughts are interrupted by someone hammering loudly at my door and pulling at the doorknob.

“Everything okay in there?” says the security guard, who must have sprinted from reception.

I stand up again and put on the jacket that’s hanging over a chair by the door. “It’s okay, I think,” I say, opening the door to see a man who looks like an Arab boxing champion standing on the other side. He looks around the room to make sure I’m alone, then asks what happened. I explain that an acquaintance tried to break in, but that he eventually left without doing anything. He looks at me in surprise.

“Do you have a weapon?” I ask.

The man holds out his hands, shakes his head, and says he doesn’t need one. He has these, after all, and flexes his muscles.

I think for a moment. Maybe I can go down to reception and see what Rahman wants if this giant of a man comes along and protects me? I ask him if he saw an older man on his way up, but he just shakes his head and says he hasn’t seen anyone at all. I explain that the man who was outside my room is waiting in the reception area, and that I want to speak with him, but he may want to harm me.

“Can you protect me if something goes wrong?” I ask.

The man answers yes. Of course he can. It’s his job, after all.

“Great,” I say, sticking my feet into a pair of sneakers and finding my notepad. The enormous man turns and I scurry after him down the corridor, simultaneously terrified and high on adrenaline. Part of me wants to just barricade myself in my room for the rest of the night, book tickets home, and get out of the country as fast as possible—never to return. Another part, however, simply has to meet Rahman one last time.

“Can you check if he has a gun?” I ask the man, and he looks at me skeptically.

“Do you think he’s armed?” he asks. “Then I have to check. We can’t have people with weapons inside the hotel.”

We walk down the stairs and enter the reception area.

I stop when I see Rahman’s familiar posture. He leans forward, with a slight bend in his back, as though he can’t fully manage to bear his own weight. He is wearing the same clothes as when we met in the cafe earlier that day. The dark green jacket hangs like a tent over his narrow shoulders.

“That’s him,” I say to the guard, pointing, and meet Rahman’s eyes. They are red, and it looks like he’s been crying.

The guard strides toward him and says something to him in Arabic. Rahman lifts his arms over his head and holds my gaze as the guard searches him. He looks weary. Tormented.

The guard stops the search and speaks calmly to Rahman. Then he turns to me, nods, and signals that he isn’t armed and that I can talk to him now. I cross the room, still maintaining steady eye contact with Rahman.

“How did you know where I’m staying?” I ask when we’re facing each other.

The guard stands a few yards behind us, following the situation closely.

“I followed you,” Rahman answers, and apologizes. He was set off by the question in the cafe, he explains. He didn’t know that I’d spoken with Amina. He didn’t even know that she was out of prison, or that she was still alive.

“You were lying to me!” he says, shaking his head. “The whole time.”

We sit down at one of the tables in the nearly empty room. I apologize, and try to explain that the only thing I lied about was the fact that I had met Amina. I tell him I hadn’t dared to tell him the truth right away because I was afraid he would do precisely what he did—run away.

He looks down and fiddles with my pen, which I’ve set on the table. “How is she?” he asks and exhales heavily.

I’m a bit taken aback by the question. “I don’t know,” I reply honestly. “It’s been three years since I saw her.”

He sits in silence, staring into space. Then he rests his head in his hands and says he doesn’t want me to write a book about him after all. He doesn’t want to be portrayed as a murderer. That wasn’t why he shared all this information with me.

I tell him that we’ve made an agreement and that his identity will remain anonymous. I emphasize that he voluntarily met up with me all these times and chose to speak about all the topics we’ve been discussing.

“You can’t take back what you’ve told me,” I say.

He seems irritated by this, and leans forward and asks me what right I have to steal his story. The story of his life.

“It’s not just your story. It’s also Amina’s.”

He narrows his eyes. “You have no respect,” he says coldly.

I ask him if he can give me the pen he’s fiddling with. I want to write down the last things he has to say about the matter. I flip to a blank page in the notepad, stretch out my hand, and add that he has one last chance to explain himself.

He drops the pen onto the table and puts his hand on top of mine. We sit like that for a moment, in a kind of strange gesture I don’t fully understand. I look at his fist, rough and calloused, and the scar on his face. We sit there for a long time, without either of us saying anything at all.

“I have no explanation,” he says at last.

I pull my hand back, discouraged. The first thing I think is that three years of research and interviews can’t end like this. He has to have an explanation. There must be a reason. Then I realize that maybe he’s right, because maybe there isn’t any logical justification. No excuse, no remorse. Perhaps his conscience has been taken over by vindictiveness, just as it was the first time he was beaten by Baba and learned that everything that was painful and difficult, complicated and intangible, could be replaced with honor. Perhaps Halabaya was right in that I couldn’t expect to find remorse in someone who doesn’t feel any guilt for what they’ve done. Perhaps he has his own logic and rationale that he relates to. Because there was a reason that he did this, after all.

“How did you restore your family’s honor?”

“I killed my daughter,” he says, and tells me the little he can remember from the day that changed everything.

As he speaks, I notice that something about him has shifted. His gaze is turned downwards the whole time, and he sits in thoughtful silence for long periods, as though we are avoiding talking about what he really wants to say and he’s waiting for some kind of decisive judgment to be passed upon him.

I listen, but never ask Rahman if he regrets what he did. For remorse requires recognition and the ability to be open to forgiveness. Not just from yourself but also from Allah. But Rahman has never acknowledged or forgiven himself for what he believes he was forced to do—and Allah is a hope for forgiveness I’m sure he does not believe in.

“I am a victim,” he repeats several times as he tells me what he did to his own children that morning.

It never ceases to amaze me how little honor and pride was left in his eyes when he said that.

***

“WHAT KIND OF a man are you?” Noora had said repeatedly for the last month. “Your son is going to grow up in disgrace. Your daughters are mocking you. You have to do something.”

In the end, Rahman simply couldn’t stand any more nagging. It was either his wife or his daughters, he thought as he lay in bed one night, exhausted but unable to sleep. He’d had enough. He had been commanded his entire life, controlled by expectations, pressured by his family, his clan, or society. What kind of honor was there even left to defend? He had been a broken man from the start.

Yet he wondered how his children could betray him this way. What had he done to deserve such daughters? Aisha had lied to him, been sneaking out at night, meeting someone before she was married. Amina had known it the whole time and had not said anything. She’d helped Aisha cover up the lies. Both of them were just as guilty. Both of them deserved the same punishment.

He asked himself whether there was a way out, whether there was another solution—but he couldn’t see any other alternative. The community would shun the entire family if he didn’t act now. They would get evil looks and comments from the neighbors. Everyone he knew would think that he had failed as a father and that he hadn’t managed to protect the most precious thing he had: his daughters and his honor. They would view him as a man without the ability to defend himself. And only by punishing those who had taken his honor could he prove that he was able to defend his interests again.

He was broken by the whole situation. He’d been terrified of having daughters from the day he found out he was going to be a father, always afraid that something would go wrong. Because if something goes wrong with a woman, it’s always the men who have to pay the price, the men who have to act. He had feared that a day like this would come, that he would be pushed into a situation where the only thing to do was to kill his own children.

Had it not been for society’s expectations, he wouldn’t have needed to do this, he thought. Then he might have been able to just lock them up in the house until someone married them or they eventually died alone. That wasn’t really a fair choice, though; killing them was the only thing he could do. It was better to sacrifice two daughters than the whole family. It was just as his father used to say: a drop of dirty blood is enough to destroy a whole bottle of good milk.

It had been easy to get hold of a weapon. He’d spoken with Nasir and asked him what he would do, and he’d gotten the handgun the next day. Didn’t he want a bigger weapon? Nasir wondered, but no, he was sure that a .45 caliber was enough.

Nasir said that he would’ve shot both Aisha and whomever she was with, but Rahman disagreed. It wasn’t his job to clean up other families’ messes. Whomever she was meeting wasn’t his problem. He only cared about his own daughters. His own son. Akram, who was completely innocent in all of this, shouldn’t have to go through exactly the same thing he had as a child. It couldn’t happen again. It was enough now. He couldn’t fail Akram as he’d been failed by his own father.

“I’ll do it,” he’d said to Noora when he woke up that morning. Her eyes filled with tears. For a few moments, he was unsure of whether it was from grief or relief. Perhaps it was both. They held each other and cried together before he got dressed and went down to the kitchen. He made coffee and went out into the garden, where he spent the end of the early morning beneath his fig tree.

Then he decided to chop it down. It would only remind him of his mother and daughters, he thought. All these women. All the betrayal. He fetched his ax and hacked with all his might at the thick trunk until it broke in two, and the tree fell to the ground with a crack.

Afterwards, he stood in the kitchen and stared out of the window at the piles of branches that now lay heaped around the courtyard. The calls to prayer flooded from the towers. The traffic, car horns, and people’s voices in the streets formed a deafening mass of sound that blended with the whirring of the fan spinning from the ceiling. He looked at his reflection in the window, exhausted. There had been too little sleep over the last few nights. He had been lying awake wondering what to do. But now he had decided.

For a brief moment, he wondered what his mother would think of him now if she knew what he was about to do. Just the thought of her made him furious.

He doesn’t remember any more than that, he’d told the police when they had come after it was all over. From the time the first reports of screams coming from a house in Amman were reported on the police network to the time the police officers stood outside the house, over an hour had passed. The shots had showered through his children. He doesn’t know how many bullets he fired in total, but one hit Aisha in the head before it burst the artery in her throat. That was what had killed her, the autopsy report concluded.

The bullets had also pierced through Amina’s pink nightdress. Blood dripped from the holes, and parts of her face were gone. But she was still alive. Her eyes were wide open. And she was staring at him. As though it were his fault that he had to kill them.

The police took Rahman with them while Aisha and Amina were taken away in an ambulance.

For one of them, life was already over.

For him, all three of them were already dead.

***

ONE EARLY WINTER morning, Amina saw Baba fetch the ax and chop down the huge fig tree in the garden. He chopped at the thick trunk with his powerful upper body. His face was somber and his eyes were red. The sharp blade hit the juicy meat of the trunk so chips flew in all directions. With each swing, a cloud of leaves fell to the muddy ground. He chopped deeper and harder until the tree wobbled on a narrow twig in the middle. Then he cast the ax away, pushed his fingers through his hair, and dried his forehead. The old tree wobbled in the air, leaned to one side, and fell with a bang.

Amina looked at Baba’s strong arms, at his angry face and his red eyes. She grew anxious again. The atmosphere in the house was tense. It felt like they were waiting for an inevitable punishment that could strike at any time. She sat down on her bed and stroked her fingers over the smooth silk sheets. On the wall hung the drawing that Aisha had made for Amina when she turned seven. It showed the two of them together under the big oak tree with the view over Amman. Two stick figures holding each other’s hands.

Why had she snitched to her mother that morning in Aqaba, when she knew deep down what the consequences could be? She had been so hurt, so afraid that her own life would be destroyed. She had taken on the shame as if it were her own. It wasn’t because she wanted to help Aisha that she’d tattled to their mother; no, she wanted to get rid of the problem, not to have to deal with it, to put responsibility on someone else and make sure she kept her own honor intact. But now, she thought there wasn’t any honor in the choice she’d made. She had chosen to save herself for the price of her own sister. The worst thing was that she knew Aisha would never have done the same.

She smelled the scent of Baba’s strong morning coffee spread across the house. She heard the sounds of Aisha washing up in the bathroom. She peered out the window again down at the garden where the enormous tree lay with sap dripping from its open wounds. Then she heard another man’s voice. Perhaps Uncle Nasir? Or was it Akram she heard down there? She heard the sound of quick steps on the stairs that first scurried up, then down. Then her door flew open, and Uncle Nasir stormed into her room. She met his stern gaze and felt the powerful hands that grabbed her and dragged her out of the room.

She could hear Aisha screaming, but she herself was numb. Paralyzed. She had no questions and needed no answers. She knew what was about to happen. It felt like she was sleeping. Like this was just a bad dream, and that she would wake up tomorrow in her own bed after a nightmare. She wished she had the courage to scream, but she couldn’t.

She looked Aisha in the eyes as she was dragged into the living room. She could see how she fought with her arms and legs as Baba and his brother tied her to a chair that stood back to back with another chair. They were the dining chairs Baba had bought in Syria. The ones Aisha had painted white.

She looked down at the pink lace nightdress she was wearing. She’d gotten it as a birthday gift the day she turned fourteen. She looked at the kitchen knife. The handgun. And Baba. Her dear Baba, who was now stuffing the towel they used to dry the dishes with into Aisha’s mouth. She gurgled. Retched. Thrust her head from side to side and spat the towel out. She howled that Baba had said he would always forgive her, that it was Allah she should fear. Not him.

“You’re my father!” she screamed.

Amina was pushed down into the other chair. Her hands were pulled backwards and tied to Aisha’s. She tried to twist away but was stuck. Her body had no power, and the shock had rendered her virtually immobile. She started to panic. She screamed with all her might, but only a wheeze of air came out. She wanted to shout so the neighbors would hear it, so someone could save them, but she had no voice. She opened her mouth again and again, pushing as hard as she could to make a sound, but her breath just went inward. She was hyperventilating, and it felt like she was drowning.

Suddenly, she felt a thump on her head. Everything disappeared, and for a long time everything was dark and quiet. Then, a glittering appeared before her eyes. She woke up again, sat there confused, swaying from side to side. She couldn’t quite understand what had happened. She opened her eyes and saw Baba through a stripe of her own blood. She could see the drops hit her thigh.

Baba picked up the knife and came over to her. He slashed the knife into her somewhere between her breast and stomach. She felt it break through skin and tissue when he pushed it in and pulled it back out. Her whole body twitched. Her throat, lungs, and mouth filled with blood, but she could still breathe. She could still feel. It was an indescribable pain.

Baba turned his back. Now he’ll stop, she thought. Now they’ve gotten their punishment. For a moment, she sat up and thought, look, now you see, she was right, he wouldn’t dare, he just wanted to scare us. She tried to straighten up to show she wasn’t afraid. She knew he wouldn’t go any further now. Only a blind man is innocent of the things he cannot see. And Baba knew that it was wrong to kill them.

Then, she felt her sister let go of her hands, and she heard the crushing sound of her sister’s body falling to one side.

She stared up at Baba, who stared back at her.

He was holding the pistol. Aiming it at her.

Then he closed his eyes.