A surveillance agent watches a Muslim family day in and day out, mainly the father. He begins to pay close attention to their daily activities, if at first just because it is his job, eventually because he grows attached. “If his wife, code-named Habibi, is in the kitchen, and if she isn’t already chatting with one of her many friends, most of whom you know Hajji despises, [the father] will request a cup of tea and ask about his mother’s health, which is never very good, but Hajji’s wife doesn’t tell him this, because his mother, code-named Bibi, is sitting just a few feet away, and though she doesn’t acknowledge her son’s presence, Bibi is always listening.” The agent takes note of the children’s activities: Lily, who is secretly a vegetarian after seeing a mother duck get hit by a car, “her little ducklings…crying out.” Her mother warns her that “vegetarianism was a slippery slope toward feminism, Marxism, Communism, atheism, hedonism, and, eventually, cannibalism,” but Lily swears that her vegetarianism is temporary, that it is just until she is no longer repulsed by meat. There’s Mo, who is secretly “in love with a girl at Sac State,” even as his parents talk about his marriage prospects. The surveillance agent hopes that this love will save him. There’s Marvin, who works hard and does the right thing, but doesn’t pray as much as his parents want him to and doesn’t defend himself when his parents chastise him, but does pray in the middle of the night “away from the approving eyes of his mother and father and brother and grandmother, reciting verse after verse from the Quran, in a voice so soft and melodic that it almost brings tears to [the surveillance agent’s] eyes.” There’s Mary, who has secretly hacked into her brother Mo’s Facebook page and her sister Lily’s Instagram. The surveillance agent watches them too. “In the course of the next few weeks, [he] search[es] for clues, signs, evidence of evil intentions. But to no avail. Life merely goes on.” Mary finds her parents’ overdue bills and secretly pays some of them. Marvin stops playing his video game to listen to his mother vent: “He pretends to pause his video game, even though he is playing online, in real time. He sets his controller aside and listens to his mother’s fears without responding. He is killed over and over again.” It’s been six months since the surveillance agent started watching them, and he has come to the conclusion that the father of this family “is no threat at all.” He knows he should tell his superiors, but he chooses not to. “Not now. Not when Mary is about to apply to colleges, not when Mo is planning to propose, not when Marvin is making new friends on campus, not when Habibi’s parents are applying for a visa to the States, not when Hajji is deciding whether or not he will go through with the surgery, not when Bibi is losing touch with her brother, not when Lily is on the brink of an artistic breakthrough. There’s too much to learn.” Then one night, when the rest of the family is out of the house, the father falls off a ladder in the attic and breaks his leg. He’s too far to grab his cell phone and call 911, but there’s blood pooling under his head. The father “pleads to God, and [the surveillance agent] hear[s] him.” He calls 911 for him. When he gets home from the hospital the next day, the father is certain he’s being watched. He looks everywhere for evidence. “He searches for [the surveillance agent] on the phone, in the streets, in unmarked white vans, in the face of policemen, detectives in street clothes, military personnel, and his own neighbors. He searches for you at the hospital, at the bank, on his computer, his sons’ laptops, in Webcams, phone cameras, and on television…And, even as his family protests, Hajji searches for you in shattered glass, in broken tile, in the strips of his wallpaper, the splinters of his doors, his tattered flesh, his warped nerves, and in his own beating heart, where, through it all, the voice whispering that he is loved is yours.”