"He's got a hearing tomorrow," Soltan told the caller, as she hurried inside the house. "He plans to speak to the judge."
From the outside, Soltan looks like the typical American super-mom, juggling work, two kids, an ailing mother, and younger siblings who need her care.
But what her neighbors probably don't know about the cheerful 29-year-old is that she is also the de facto head of a family in peril.
Soltan's father, an opposition politician from the Muslim Brotherhood, was arrested a year and a half ago in his native Egypt and was sentenced to death last month. Meanwhile, her brother Mohamed, a 27-year-old U.S. citizen and Ohio State University graduate, is in the same Egyptian jail, wasting away on a hunger strike.
As the oldest of five siblings, Soltan has assumed the role of lead advocate: writing press statements, monitoring her brother's and father's trials, and lobbying the U.S. government in a quest to get her loved ones back.
Soltan said her friends and acquaintances, many of them also Muslims or Arabs, have been supportive. But while the children of other immigrants may know what it's like to have one foot in suburbia and the other thousands of miles away, few know how it feels to have loved ones facing death in a foreign jail.
"It's funny seeing people being really kind, but also trying to figure out how to navigate it," she said. "People want to be sensitive, but they also want to not have every dinner revolve around it because they think it makes me upset."
Soltan says it doesn't. The former social worker, who describes herself as "practical" and — with a laugh — "not very emotionally present," said her mission is to do "what needs to be done" and stay focused.
She serves as a liaison between lawyers, family members, officials and activists in Egypt and the United States. She translates news and information and passes it between legal teams on both sides of the Atlantic, and among friends of Mohamed who have volunteered to run the "Free Soltan" Facebook and Twitter pages. In Washington, she helps lawyers try to make sense of an opaque and often corrupt Egyptian justice system.
The State Department says it has appealed to Egypt "at the highest level," calling for Mohamed Soltan's release "on humanitarian grounds."
But there are some, such as Robert McCaw at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based advocacy group for Muslim rights, who argue that the U.S. government isn't doing enough — because Mohamed Soltan is Muslim and a dual national.
"The U.S. public — according to a survey conducted by the Pew in 2014 — ranked Muslims dead last, under all other religions and atheists," McCaw said. "This can definitely affect our foreign policy and how far we're willing to go for Muslims detained overseas."
What makes Hanaa Soltan's mission all the more difficult is that Egypt is a critical U.S. ally. And the Muslim Brotherhood, now a banned political party, has few friends in Washington.
For the sake of sanity, Soltan and her husband, Waleed Nassar, try to maintain a semblance of normality at home. They play with their 3-year-old and 9-month-old boys. They go out to dinner. They schedule family portraits.
Soltan works out almost every day — part of a concerted effort to lose some extra baby weight, she said. She keeps up with her consulting work for local and international businesses and organizations — she's now helping one group launch a project to mentor inner-city youth. And she volunteers her social-work skills to counsel local imams on their approach to domestic violence in the Muslim community.
But the responsibilities can be overwhelming.
On a recent morning, Soltan fretted over the imminent arrival of her in-laws and the scheduling of haircuts for her boys, before grabbing a protein bar and heading out the door to meet with a White House staffer about her brother's case.
"I would not have imagined myself capable of managing everything that has been tossed at me," she said. "I was a clinical social worker, working on foster care. That was my career track."
Soltan laughs easily — even when discussing heritage and hardship. She jokes that her toddler considers Arabic to be "baby talk," because only his grandmother speaks it to him. And she breaks into a wry smile when she talks about the outpouring of support that her brother's case has gotten from people she has never met.
She and her siblings grew up in a close-knit, religiously conservative household. Her parents moved the family to the United States when the children were young, and later moved from Massachusetts to Kansas, Michigan and Ohio.
Her father, Salah Soltan, was a prominent Islamic scholar and community leader who often took his work home with him, said Nassar, who met his wife in college. The Soltan household was a place where social and religious issues were openly discussed around the children and where the elder Soltan offered counseling to people who were dealing with divorces or more generally "down on their luck," Nassar said.
"From a young age she was exposed to that," he said. "I think they kind of inculcated in her a sense of what needs to be done and how to do it when crap hits the fan."
Sometimes it did. Right-wing groups accused Salah Soltan of being sympathetic to terrorists. Three years ago in Ohio, her brother's car and parents' home were defaced with anti-Muslim slurs; later, the house was set on fire in what investigators labeled a possible hate crime.
Hanaa Soltan, who says she believes most Americans are tolerant, dismissed the attacks as the work of deviants.
"I thought it was an alarming escalation," she said. "But the level of ignorance that it takes to do that is almost one you pity — you don't really get angry about it."
Soltan's parents moved back to Egypt in 2012 to participate in the newly elected Muslim Brotherhood government. But when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer several months later, Soltan quit her job, and she and her brother flew to Cairo to help out.
Soltan returned to Virginia after a short stay but her brother, then 25 and newly enamored with Egypt's political transformation, found a job and moved in with his parents.
It was early Aug. 14, 2013, when the family's fortunes took another turn for the worse.
Omar Soltan burst into his older sister's bedroom in Falls Church and told her and her husband that Egyptian police had launched a violent raid on a Cairo protest camp.
Egypt's military had forced the country's Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, from office several weeks before, setting off protests across the country. Hanaa and Omar knew their father and brother were at the camp.
The siblings raced downstairs and switched on their laptops in the family's darkened living room. Unable to reach their relatives abroad, Hanaa Soltan said she began scrolling through pictures and videos on social media.
"I would recognize their clothing in a second," she remembers thinking, as she saw one bloody image after another. "I can even recognize the wash of jeans that Mohamed likes."
She eventually managed to confirm that her father and brother were alive.
But in the chaotic aftermath of the raid, the family would scatter: Her mother and teenage sister, who had been visiting her parents, boarded a flight to the United States and moved in with Soltan and her husband. Her father went into hiding, only to be apprehended, along with other Brotherhood leaders, a month later. And her brother, who was shot amid the mayhem, was arrested when police raided the family's Cairo home.
Mohamed Soltan, who had assumed the role of citizen journalist and unofficial spokesman at the protest camp, faces several terrorism- and conspiracy-related charges — all of which his family says are bogus. In January 2014, he launched a hunger strike to protest his detention.
In recent weeks, Hanaa Soltan has urged him — in messages delivered through attorneys — to give it up. He has lost consciousness several times and is so weak that he has to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher for hearings.
On a recent afternoon, she admitted that the stress was getting to her.
"There are a lot of decisions to make in the next week or so," she said. Her brother's sentencing is set for Saturday.
"I have to decide whether we want to appeal or what," she said, weighing an appeal vs. a push for presidential clemency.
A promised blog post for Amnesty International hovered in the back of her mind, and her laptop sat open on the couch in front of her, a consulting project also awaiting her attention.
"I couldn't focus," she said. So she Googled her symptoms. "There's something called 'analysis paralysis' — when you just feel like you don't have all the facts to be able to make a decision, and you're stuck," she explained with an embarrassed laugh.
Outside her window, a light spring rain was coming down, and her 3-year-old was splashing around with his scooter.
She laughed again, and then sighed: "According to him, it's not raining."
