Answer: third person limited, staying close to Noor's thoughts

The narration uses 'she' and 'Noor' but gives us only Noor's perceptions and thoughts ('Noor knew what that was like'); we never enter the father's or the woman's minds.

Answer: The purchases are an excuse for contact: the roadhouse offers company, light and a brief human exchange on a long, dark highway, not goods. It establishes early that people stop here for reasons they do not state.

Answer: The rule ('If they don't come in, you don't go out') shows he is protective and practical. Saying it 'once, flatly, as though it were a fact about weather' suggests a man of few words who treats danger as unarguable and routine, and who does not discuss feelings or exceptions. It also hints at emotional withdrawal.

Model answer: Both are background sounds that mark time without changing anything, so they stretch the ten minutes of waiting. The pie warmer that 'clicked off and on' and the commentator noting 'a change of bowling' are trivial and repetitive, which makes the silence of the parked ute more threatening by contrast. The sentence fragment 'Ten minutes.' isolates the wait, and the father's failure to 'stir' leaves Noor alone with the decision.

Model answer: The glass both separates and connects the two characters. Seeing each other 'through their own reflections' suggests that each woman recognises something of herself in the other: both are alone in the dark, waiting, unsure whether to ask for or offer help. The image prepares the reader for Noor's decision, which is based on recognition ('Noor knew what that was like') rather than on the shoe or the woman's face.

Answer: Her mother has died, probably in February of that year. Evidence: the woman is 'older than Noor's mother would have been' (the conditional implies the mother is no longer alive), Noor has been deciding whether to ask for help 'since February', and the father has slept by the phone 'every night since the funeral'.

Model answer: The paragraph moves by elimination: 'It was not the shoe, exactly, or the woman's face', and each rejected reason is a visible, obvious one. The sentence that finally supplies the reason, 'It was that the woman had waited', is short and plain, which gives it the weight of a discovery. The reason is then deepened by the comparison with Noor's own months of hesitation 'since February'. The structure reveals that Noor's choice is driven by empathy she has not yet put into words: she recognises her own grief in a stranger's hesitation. The contradiction between 'would not be able to say why' and the explanation that follows shows the gap between what a person understands and what they can articulate.

Answer: It shows Noor taking on the adult role her father has withdrawn from, quietly and without blame. Letting him sleep is an act of care as well as independence; she breaks his rule but protects him from having to know. The understated ending leaves the reader with the sense that the household's roles have shifted.

Answer: Noor goes to the window and chooses to be seen standing there

Noor's decision to stand in the window is her first active choice; everything before it is waiting, and everything after follows from it. The later moments are consequences of this one.

Model answer: The writer uses a close third-person perspective and a pattern of small, concrete details to suggest that Noor's decision to help the stranger grows out of her own unspoken grief. Because the narration stays with Noor's perceptions, the reader shares her watchfulness: the ute 'did not park under the lights', the 'engine ticking as it cooled', the father who 'did not stir'. Detail stands in for feeling throughout, so that grief is never named but is present in the chemistry textbook 'open to the same page' for an hour and in the father's hand resting 'near the phone ... as if waiting for it to ring'. The single child's shoe the woman carries works the same way: an object that implies a loss the text never explains. When Noor recognises that the woman 'had waited', the perspective allows the reader to understand the link before Noor can state it, since she 'would not be able to say why'. The image of the two women looking at each other 'through their own reflections' makes the connection visible: in helping the stranger, Noor is also answering her own months of hesitation 'since February'. The ending, in which she 'did not wake him', completes the shift: grief has made her the one who opens the door.