She took a deep breath, taking in the warmth of the household, and for a moment she was gripped by a doubt that she had done the right thing by jumping into a ministerial role. There was no getting away from the fact that it would mean less time at home, less energy to devote to the children, less time for Nonni. There would be less time for her own emotional recovery. But it was only for a year, the twelve remaining months of the parliamentary term.

‘Pizza!’ the children chorused the moment she stepped into the kitchen. They were busy arranging toppings on pizza bases, and she could see Nonni was preparing a seafood pizza just for the two of them. There was an open bottle of white wine on the worktop, a glass had been poured for her, and the dining table was set with candles.

‘You’re a dream,’ she sighed, kissing the children’s heads and wrapping her arms around Nonni. He was warm to the touch, freshly shaved and sweet-smelling, and she felt her heart soften with gratitude, blended with doubt that she genuinely deserved such a perfect man. This was how it had been for more than a year. Every time she felt a surge of warmth and affection towards him, it was accompanied by an immediate surge of bad feeling. There was guilt, regret and self-loathing. Why couldn’t she simply love him as she had loved him before? 21

‘So how’s it looking?’ he whispered and handed her a glass of wine.

She sat on a barstool and sipped. She’d tell him tonight, when the children had taken themselves off to bed. She would tell him how the day had begun, how she had been prepared for the first interview of the day, expecting to be getting to grips with complex and demanding issues, only to be faced with such a painful and difficult personal case.

The face of the mother who had sat opposite her that morning, rigid with anger and sorrow, remained vividly in her mind. As she watched her own daughter arrange strips of pepper to form a pattern on a pizza, she felt a stab of pain in her heart: she was only two years younger than the girl who had been raped.

22

Saturday

8

The report was so powerful that Úrsúla couldn’t be sure if it was the sheer loudness of it or the wave of air pressure generated by the explosion that pushed her eardrums in, leaving them numb, so that she lay face down on the ground in absolute silence. In her peripheral vision she could see some movement in the distance, but it was difficult to tell through the cloud of dust, so she lay still in the sand that now seemed to fill her whole consciousness, revelling in the joy at being alive that swept through her. She wanted to stay there and make the most of this feeling for as long as she could, because before long she would have to get to her feet and face the fact that the bomb must have gone off very close to the camp, perhaps right inside it, and there would be casualties. She would feel guilt at being alive and from there it would be a short stop to the deadness inside that had plagued her ever since Liberia.