MARIAM: My baby had run down my legs, oozing into my shoes—

TRANSLATOR: I am telling you exactly what she says. Should I carry on?

JUDGE: Please.

MARIAM: I thought about this baby, this product of myself and my husband. I thought of how it is written that, We created you out of dust, then out of a sperm, then we fashioned you into something which clings into a chewed lump of flesh. Imam Jaffar al-Sadiq writes that there is no life until the fourth month. My little lentil was just a chewed lump of flesh. I thought about my husband, who had made this baby with me. I had asked for khula, the woman-initiated divorce, and after that you must do iddah, the waiting time, three menstrual cycles must pass, or if you are pregnant the baby must be delivered, for it is not lawful for them to hide what God has created in their wombs, before divorce can be granted. You must do iddah and then decide.

Mariam’s mind felt empty: she couldn’t decide. She read the Risalo. O full moon! Without my beloved I am in darkest night. She shook her head. He had never been her beloved. She knew that.

MARIAM: So my time in Eva’s house, that was iddah only. And then it was my time for deciding.

The day Sebastian Vane was due to arrive in the islands for his photoshoot, Lucija led Mariam down to the sitting room and showed her the piano. She was trying out many different ways of taking Mariam out of herself; she was getting desperate.

‘I was always quite good at the piano,’ Lucija said, a little boastfully. ‘My mother insisted that I took lessons and, really, I wasn’t bad. I used to play with Omer. Omer loves jazz. I always preferred Bach.’

Mariam didn’t know what Lucija was talking about. She watched as Lucija opened the piano lid.

‘After fifteen years, the notes will come out a bit rough, and raw,’ Lucija said, and played a line from a Bach sonata, to demonstrate. She glanced round to see if Mariam was enjoying it. ‘Have you ever seen a piano before, Mariam?’ Mariam shook her head. So Lucija played to bring her back to life; to bring her back to a remembering of all the good things. She stumbled at first. Her fingers seemed heavy. The music was inside her, a dim memory, a bubble pushing its way through the murky depths of everything that had happened since. She played the tune that Eva had been singing on the boat.

For a while, Mariam listened, and forgot about her lentil and her husband. But then the music changed, grew dissonant, and she grew restless. She wanted to go back to the church; to speak with Isa. But the church was no good either. Ri was right. She needed a shrine, a saint.

Lucija stopped playing. Mariam wasn’t listening.