Who is She?

Yusra freely gives out two facts about herself.

First, she is a security specialist.

Second, she takes her work very seriously.

No further questions.

No one digs too deep, anyway. A genuine desire to know someone, to open-mindedly inquire about their thoughts, beliefs, experiences…requires a lack of preconceived notions and prejudices that Yusra rarely encounters.

People unlike her see a brown-skinned hijabi on a busy street or a crowded café and betray one of two emotions: pity and fear. They think this simple piece of cloth tucked around her head tells her entire story. Her hijab had become an invisibility cloak on one side and a giant red target on the other.

She was just another oppressed Middle Eastern woman. She was just another terrorist. She was just what people imagined and no more.

She’d been harassed, especially in her line of work. Was told untrue things about herself. Was asked again and again who she was, if she was American, where she was really from, if she believed in Jihad, if her husband was beating her, if…if…if she was everything they believed her to be.

She was not, but it was easier to leave them be. She’d learned the hard way that it was never worth the effort.

One day, feeling small in a crowded subway car, she found comfort in a familiar phone notification. Her sister had given birth just two months ago and had already managed to send at least a hundred videos and pictures of her son. This time, he was quietly sleeping until she gently tickled his chin, and a smile broke wide and sweet across his face. Yusra could faintly hear her sister cooing in the background, and it made her smile too.

There wasn’t much keeping Yusra from visiting her sister in D.C. It was just a train ride away. She could afford it. But a sense of danger prevented her.

No one in her family lived in New York. She kept herself off of social media, scrubbing even other people’s photos and references to her existence. Her online communications all traveled through secured apps and private networks. Openly boarding an Amtrak, walking the streets of an unfamiliar city, knocking on the door of the most precious person in her life in full view of the street…no, it would be too easy. She’d worked with men who would find that child’s play.

Yusra wasn’t some tech company’s in-house security, sweeping for viruses and maintaining firewalls. Yusra was a consultant. The kind of consultant you only call when lives are on the line — a very thin, digital line. A Harvard graduate with a decade of high-paying, often classified experience, she’d found herself across the keyboard from a wide variety of foes. Russian hackers, Chinese intelligence, the C.I.A. Yusra didn’t care whose government she was protecting her clients from — everyone had a right to privacy. She’d even worked a few pro-bono cases for watchdog groups.

It was this, her egalitarian approach, that made her afraid. That led to the double locks, the state-of-the-art home security, the German Shepherd she adopted despite being much more of a cat person — and the distance from her loved ones.

She was one-hundred-percent confident in her security online. In the real world, she was never sure. Five years ago, she’d started seeing dark, looming shapes in the shadows on her walks home from work, so she began taking the subway instead. This year was the first time she’d been certain she was followed home.

She hadn’t told anyone. This was her life, her work catching up with her. She needed to face it alone.

She wasn’t sure when that day would come. But as she stepped off the subway, she glanced back and saw a familiar face. A man whom she’d seen scowling at her across a coffee shop in an entirely different borough.

She wasn’t sure what day, but she knew it was coming soon.