Summary

Following Cyrus’s meeting with Orkideh, he meets Zee at a café. He finds himself scrambling for explanations of how Orkideh could have known about the circumstances of his mother’s death. When Zee arrives, Cyrus relays the events of his conversation with Orkideh to him, and demands to know if Zee visited Orkideh without Cyrus’s knowledge. Zee insists that he did not, and Cyrus looks up information about Orkideh’s past to determine whether she might have known Cyrus’s family in some way. In the process of doing this, he comes across a painting of Orkideh’s that depicts a man in a black robe on horseback walking through a battlefield. The painting is titled “Dudusch,” which a bewildered Cyrus explains to Zee is Farsi for “brother.”

That night, Cyrus and Zee relax in their hotel room rather than going...