He looked at the sparkly tree in the corner, smiling again at the joy Ash had gotten out of it. Sighing as it marked another year without . . .

Well. He had driven himself crazy for so long. And she now . . . Had she had the baby? She must have. Or perhaps that photograph had been old, perhaps that child was growing up. Did he look like her other children? he wondered.

After the boys were finally asleep, he sat downstairs, feeling the silence weighing heavily on him.

He held Lorna’s parcel in his hands, found himself opening it, his heart heavy. He wished, more than anything . . . Well, what did he wish for? He was in love with two different people: one who was there, one who was not, and could never be again, but was still his wife, his legal wife. Sworn to him before God. Mother of his children.

At first he couldn’t quite believe what he was looking at. It wasn’t possible.

It was the same—the exact same edition—of the book he had looked up online, for the message that may or may not have come from Amena.

This couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be real. How could she know? Could she have sent it? No, of course not, how could she have known about the crocodile? How could she have known? And Nizar Qabbani was a very famous poet, of course he was. Of course.

It was a coincidence, that was all.

The volume was beautiful, gold and bright blue. There was a bookmark in it, placed as if it could have been almost put in at random. But he knew, of course, that it had not been.

إذا كنت صديقي

ساعدني لأتركك

أو إذا كنت حبيبتي

ساعدني حتى أتمكن من الشفاء منك

لو كنت اعلم

أن المحيط عميق جدا . . . لن أسبح

If you are my friend

Help me to leave you

Or if you are my lover

Help me so I can be healed of you

If I knew

That the ocean is very deep . . . I would not have swam.

Saif sighed heavily. He got up and stared out the window. Just at the very edge of his vision he could see the beam of the angel statue light up the sky. He looked at it for a very long time.

Then he picked up the phone.

IN THE DEEP quiet of Christmas Eve, there were clusters of drinkers in the Harbour’s Rest still, mostly the young people home from the mainland to see their families, laughing loudly and boasting madly about their new lives in Inverness and Aberdeen, London and Edinburgh, while in homes mums and dads wrapped and lost Sellotape and begged excited children to sleep and cursed themselves for hiding gifts months ago and forgetting exactly where, and checked anxiously again to make sure they had enough roasted potatoes and tried to make their mothers-in-law comfortable in their beds while they arranged themselves on pullout sofas, and tried to hide the sherry from Auntie Morag, who got a bit maudlin this time of year, which was completely understandable, what with everything she’d been through, but even so, for the sixth year on the trot it was really bringing everybody down, and oh my God, did you see that thing in the Post online, what on earth were the MacKenzies going to do? And families rolled on with Christmas, some with the mixture of the sad and the sublime, and several hardy fellows made it to midnight mass and the Reverend Janey gave a lovely low sermon about never making the perfect the enemy of the good, which wasn’t strictly speaking in the Bible, but she always found it a very useful sentiment anyway at this time of year.