As if to protect herself, Faheema entered the room with a veil covering her whole face.

First her mother said to the mediator: “My daughter wants to go with us. Her father is now in the hospital.”

She turned to Faheema and said, “We will get you divorced from that guy,” referring to the man Faheema ran away with. Her fiancé’s brother and her mother said they would support her marrying someone else.

Ms. Kohistan, the mediator, said in an aside, “They’re saying these things, but as soon as they get custody of her, they will kill her.”

Heaping on the guilt and reminding Faheema of her shame, her mother said, “We have two houses in Ghazni, but we will sell them, because we can’t live in Ghazni anymore.”

The mediator pleaded: “Please talk about this in a way that this problem could be solved.”

Faheema put her head in her hands. Her 3-year-old brother knelt on the floor with his head under his mother’s long skirt as if he were trying to block out the sound of the warring grown-ups.

As it became clear that the shelter was not going to turn Faheema over to her family, her mother tried offering the mediator a bribe. “Please help us, and we will give you a gift,” she said, her voice pleading, tears in her eyes. Then she turned, almost spitting, to Faheema.

“You know your father, you know the character of your father,” she said. Gripping Faheema, she dragged her up from the chair. “He will kill me. You can come to my grave tomorrow.”

Finally, Faheema summoned her courage. “Why don’t you understand?” she said. “I already got married.”

And then she appeared to resign herself to the future. “This thing I did, I did. I cannot go with you, even if I lose everyone in my family,” she said and added, half speaking to them and half to the mediator, “I cannot go back home, because they will kill me.”

She pried her arm away from her mother’s grip and ran into the main building’s basement rooms. There, her mother could not reach her — she was kept out, and Faheema locked in, by a heavy metal gate. Her shoulders heaving, Faheema sank to her knees and wept hopelessly.

Never Going Home

The women in the long-term shelter try to cheat sleep by huddling together in the dark, their voices a way to ward off nightmares. The torments they endured at the hands of their families are written on their bodies. Knife scars traverse their faces and necks. Beatings with chains mark their backs. Some limp from broken bones that were never properly set. Several have faces eroded by acid, a favorite weapon here.

Daily life is an endless effort to escape the haunted precincts of memory; images of pummeling hands, the thumping sound of wood hitting their legs, of their bodies falling to the floor, the taste of blood in their mouths.

There are 26 women in the long-term shelter run by Women for Afghan Women in Kabul. If Faheema’s family continued its threats, this shelter would become her home.

That these women are still standing, and that some are trying to piece together complete lives, is a cause for wonder and a testament to their strength. In the safety of the halfway house, the women offer a glimpse into the worlds they have fled: muddy courtyards strung with laundry; screaming children and squawking chickens; cramped rooms for women and often not enough food. Women in Afghanistan are the last to eat, the last to bed and the first to rise.

Gul Meena, 16, survived a brutal attack by her brother after she fled an older husband, who had beaten her, and ran away with another man. She had been just 8 or 9 in her home in Kunar Province on the Pakistan border when a man in the next village offered money to her unemployed father for her.

In her innocence, she was thrilled to be given a white dress and makeup for the wedding ceremony. “I was thinking, this is the future, my husband would be buying me new clothes every day,” she said. In the car on the bumpy ride to her new home she remembers addressing her new husband as “uncle.”

“Uncle, please take care of me. I’m afraid I will fall,” she said as she bounced on his knee in the car.

From the moment she arrived in his house, she was a servant. The only grace was that he was not allowed to have sex with her before she had her first period. Two years after they wed, the moment came and he forced himself on her. “I was like a thing and they sold me,” she said. “He was beating me with everything near to him. With his glasses, with his mobile phone, with wood, with stones, and with his hands.”

Lonely and bewildered, she tried at least twice to return to her father’s house, but the family sent her back to her husband and finally she went to a neighbor’s home. The husband of the family ran away with her to Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan.

When her brother caught up with them, he slit the man’s throat and slashed Gul Meena 15 times with an ax, nearly blinding her and leaving her for dead. When she woke up in the hospital, she looked in the mirror. “I was very damaged,” she said. “Before, I was beautiful and young.”

Although she does not see herself that way, she is still a stunning young woman. She has never gone to school but speaks with a simple eloquence. Now she fears that she is ugly and no one will marry her. “Men are always interested in the beauty of a woman,” she said. “They are never interested in the heart.”

In the long-term shelter, most women feel a deep relief. No one is beaten. There is enough food. Chores are shared and, above all, there are choices: Some girls decide to go to school and try to make up for the years they were kept as virtual slaves. Others go to classes at beauty school in the hope of learning a skill that they will be able to use. One has a job as a house cleaner, and another is a skilled tailor and makes clothes while caring for her 6-year-old daughter.

“We try to find a solution,” Ms. Naderi said, but she admitted there were few options in Afghanistan. It is exceedingly rare for a woman to live alone here, and so the staff tries to help women recreate families when their own have shunned them. “Sometimes we can find husbands,” she said. “We’ve married maybe 10 or 11, but it’s difficult.”

While traditional attitudes remain deeply ingrained, women’s advocates do see changes. “Now women are finding a voice,” said Soraya Sobrang, a member of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. “And also they want to have some rights and have some decision-making. If you want to marry my daughter, you have to ask me as well. The men think the women want to deprive them of rights. This touches their pride. And this creates violence in the family.”

The battle between tradition and a fragile new sense of women’s rights continues. A government committee investigated the shelters after a television program accused them of forcing battered women into prostitution. The committee found that most of the shelters were well run.

The committee members recognized that most of the women were at risk of beatings or death if the shelters were closed or their capacities diminished, but no one wanted to defend the shelters publicly. The outcome relieved the women who ran the shelters and Western aid organizations: The government would not close the safe houses but, at the same time, there was little public support for spending money from the Afghan budget on them.

However, Ms. Sobrang said: “The international community has promised to continue support.” Such funding is essential if the shelters are to survive. Ms. Naderi relies on generous funding from the United States government, which accounts for close to 90 percent of her budget. The balance is raised from private, mostly foreign donors.

The women inside the halfway house understand the risks they would face if they had to leave. “I cannot go anywhere alone,” said Mariam, 22 who escaped an abusive Taliban husband and fled to the shelter. “Everybody likes to have their freedom, but I cannot have mine.”

Inescapable Fear

In the end, Faheema was able to leave the shelter, with the help of a lawyer provided by Women for Afghan Women. After four or five months, a court recognized her marriage to her husband, Ajmal, and the attorney general ordered her to live with him in Kabul.

But it is not exactly a happy ending.

Although they are in love, they live in terror of being cornered by a member of Faheema’s family and being beaten or killed. They live in poverty because Ajmal had to shutter his shop in their hometown, Ghazni, and cannot go there for fear of being killed. He has no money to start a new business.

A thin young man who wears Western clothes and, in keeping with more modern Afghan ways, does not have a beard, Ajmal comes across as serious and anxious.

“We live in fear and in hiding,” he said. Three times a day, when he goes out to buy a long loaf of Afghan bread, he finds himself looking around nervously to see if any of Faheema’s family is lying in wait for him.

He worries all the time about his widowed mother and two sisters, who still live in Ghazni. When he had his small cosmetics shop there, he contributed to supporting the family. But now, only his widowed mother’s meager income as a tailor helps feed the family.

None of this has weakened the couple’s resolve to be together, but it weighs on them because in Afghanistan, to not be able to go home is to be an outcast, almost an orphan.

Faheema tried to make peace between their two families and braved a phone call with her angry father to beg him to meet with elders from Ajmal’s clan. But her father refused to see them and said the only thing that would satisfy him is if they gave him a daughter to marry off to his son or nephew in exchange for Ajmal’s taking Faheema.

Despite the hardship, Faheema hopes her sisters and cousins will have the courage to demand that their families ask permission before making plans to marry them off. She wishes that her father had respected her enough to ask her. “My message to my father is that he should ask his children first before making any decision for their lives,” she said, wistfully.

In the cold Kabul winter, as they prepared to return to their small, damp apartment, which is all they can afford, Faheema said she had one more wish.

“Take us out of Afghanistan,” she said, “because we won’t be able to have a quiet life here.”