The apartment in Bahrain’s Seef district was quiet at 9:17 p.m., the kind of quiet that comes after a long day of surgery—the scalpels laid down, the sutures tied—and the low, persistent hum of the air-conditioner struggling against the Gulf heat that seeped through the

The farmhouse lay an hour south of Lahore, past the last toll plaza where the Ravi’s flood-plain flattened into endless fields of sugarcane whispering in the hot wind, the air thick with the sweet rot of harvest and distant woodsmoke. Alice had come because her cousin Sana had begged—

The monsoon of 2015 had turned Karachi’s streets into black mirrors, reflecting the sodium lamps and the grief that clung to every wall of the old house in Clifton like a second skin. Alice was twenty-two, freshly graduated from Dow Medical College, her white coat still carrying the sharp