As each day passes over the summer of 2011, he checks in on Amina's Web History and discovers a new piece of information.  A new request shows up like clockwork.  It seems that Amina uses her laptop each night at around midnight and make a single solitary request to a page.  These requests become the breadcrumbs by which he will soon discover that Amina is his sister.  He will discover that his mother fled the US and decided to live with an Egyptian when she was 24 years old.  She returned to the US without her newborn daughter, who was taken from her, and decided to remarry.  She was actually married (by Egyptian law) when she married his father (need a name) who is now the manager of the Waste Control Specialists facility in Andrews, TX.  

He's has a rocky relationship with his father, who threatens to end financial support of his studies should he choose to no longer be an engineering student.  His father keeps many secrets from him about his mother including the fact that she came back from Egypt after a failed relationship with a man (who was her pen pal for 12 years) to whom she bore a daughter, that she was an English teacher, that she was class salutatorian, that she fled after narrowly avoiding a bullet from her mother's gun when she tried to kill herself.