I never saw her face. That was the design, and by the eleventh day it was also the obsession.

I am Samira. I am thirty-four. It started as a wrong number that wasn't wrong for long, a woman with a low voice and a laugh that arrived half a second late, as if she checked it at the door. We were both awake at one in the morning in a city that doesn't sleep so much as change shifts. No names, at first. Then she…