In 1996, Mrs. Sabet discovered she was pregnant again. This time, she went into hiding. She slept some nights at a Muslim religious shrine, of all places, with the complicity of its caretakers. Then she used what little money she had to take buses from city to city, staying a handful of days with Bahai families in each. On June 14, 1997, back in Tehran at the home of a Bahai gynecologist, she gave birth to Nica.

When Nica was 3 months old, her father, Mr. Arash, was imprisoned again. On the day he was released a year later, a putative act of mercy marking Ayatollah Khomeini’s birthday, he and Mrs. Sabet decided to flee the country. With a passport identifying him as a Muslim, and listing his wife and daughter, the three crossed into Turkey — and freedom.

Nica’s childhood memories start at age 3 or 4, in the family’s home as refugees in Houston, with the recollection of taking the cushions off a sofa to make a play fortress. Her next memory, from 2002, is of her father shooting himself as he stood next to her. Doctors had given him a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and Mrs. Sabet, then and now, laid that illness at the hands of the mullahs and the torturers.

At times in Houston — after Mr. Arash’s suicide and then the collapse of a second marriage — Mrs. Sabet was living almost as tenuously as she had in Iran. She and Nica stayed for months in a family shelter. Between menial jobs, the only kind she could land with her fractured English, she supported herself and Nica by selling watermelon balls in the park, a dollar apiece.

Then, in 2007, while attending night school to become a shampoo assistant, she was sent to a temporary job at the K. Renee Salon. The owner, Karen Renee Gilmore, found her “very soft and very scared.” Little bits of Mrs. Sabet’s story came out — the recurring toothaches that were a result of beatings in Iran, the way her own mother would turn away from her, those three sundered pregnancies.

Having broken at 16 from her own parents, zealous members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Ms. Gilmore understood much beyond words. When Mrs. Sabet, 55, had to relinquish the temporary job because she had not yet passed the state license exam, Ms. Gilmore hired her as a nanny.