“No, I help!”

She made a grab for the red container, and Ash instinctively jerked his hand back, which meant he shook the lid off the container and the glitter went in the air. A huge “Ohhhhhh” went up from the other children streaming back into the classroom, in awe and excitement, sensing a row in the offing.

“I did not do that,” yelled Agot immediately. “That was Ash!”

And Ash’s face screwed up, ready to cry, and Lorna had to dash forward to sort it out, and, well, it was an effective distraction. She supposed.

Chapter 40

I t was the same wet day in Glasgow—did it ever stop raining here? Seriously? In Mure, high up and east, the rain blew in and it blew out again. Glasgow was undeniably beautiful and vibrant and noisy and fun. But it felt like it was in a sunken valley forever under a gray cloud. He suspected if you ever asked a Glaswegian, they would defiantly declare that they liked it that way.

But also he had never been there for anything other than fairly rotten news. So that probably colored things too.

“How is it going?” said Neda in her usual no-nonsense way. She had a heavy caseload—well, who didn’t in social care. But Saif was a bit of a special case. She’d managed to place many refugees with other Syrians or people who spoke Arabic at least. Saif had had to manage entirely on his own, at first without even knowing whether his children were alive. The fact that he had not only done so but was patently thriving (even if he would not call it that, his patients adored him and he was a more treasured member of the community than he knew) made him one of her successes and she was proud of him. Therefore this was harder than ever.

“You need a haircut,” she added.

“I know, I know,” said Saif. There was a female hairdresser, not a barber, in the village, and Saif had been somewhat reluctant. It was just habit, he knew, but even so. Neda had a neat flattop that always looked tidy.

“There’s a Turkish barber just down the road,” she said. “You could pop in afterward.”

Saif nodded numbly. After what? he wanted to ask, but he knew Neda couldn’t tell him, even if she knew herself. It had to be done under the proper circumstances.

IT WAS THE same secure, dull, ugly low building, the same signing in and military personnel. The same grave expressions and long corridors and bad coffee, and the same tedious administration of the state, of inconvenient persons and complicated caseloads and tired human beings trying to work out a way to be fair to one another, to live with one another, when they weren’t given enough money or political support always to be kind.

Saif knew he should be grateful to his adoptive country—and he was, he absolutely was, of course; he and his children could be in a horrible refugee camp, or conscripted, or dead by now. But the very act of having to feel constantly grateful could also feel like a burden, and he wasn’t sure how he could express that. A rich country trying to be parsimonious and magnanimous at the same time was a painful thing to witness.