When did it go wrong? Shona asked herself. Perhaps it went wrong the moment she took this photo off their mantelpiece and replaced it with … with what? She couldn’t imagine what she could have possibly replaced this picture with. Then she remembered; it had been the first picture of Parvez and herself holding their scrunch-faced newborn boys, taken in the hospital after they had given them their names. She looked for the photo and, finding it, was surprised to see that this time she was looking adoringly at her children instead of at Parvez, her myopic blind adulation reassigned instantly, whilst Parvez looked directly at the camera again, a studied beam on his face instead of a spontaneous laugh. ‘See what happened, Goldie? I didn’t change, you did. You cared more for them than you did for us.’

So what? she argued back to him. So what if I cared more for them? I went through hell for them. I blackmailed my own father for the money to have them, I went through the most painful, invasive treatments you can imagine again and again until it worked, I carried them with fear every day until they were born, afraid that we’d lose them and have to start again, I spun them from my flesh and knitted them from my own blood and bones. They were my blood, my boys. I poured everything I was into them. You just masturbated into a tube, and were too busy with the business to come to the clinic with me all those times; you thought it happened like magic, with the effortlessness of the gods. Of course I changed! And you should have changed too, but you didn’t. You stayed the happy-go-lucky twenty-something I married; you left all the changing, all the coping and the managing to me, while you kept cracking your silly jokes and doing your silly work to keep us in not quite the manner we’d been accustomed to back home.

‘So that’s it!’ said another photo of Parvez triumphantly, standing with his hand on Shona’s shoulder, while she posed with her mortar board and her MA diploma. ‘You resent me. You’ve resented me for not suffering like you did, for not being as rich and successful as the family I took you from. Don’t you think I’d have taken every little bit of pain from you, if I could have, every bitter disappointment month after month when you cried and mourned every time you bled? I loved you, Shona. It wouldn’t have mattered to me if we’d never had kids, as long as we had each other. Everything I did here - starting the restaurant business, expanding it, buying the house - I did for you.’