Nefyn shook her head. Efa followed her up the stairs and watched as she pushed open the door. He was lying on his side, his breathing laboured, but when he saw her, his face became illuminated, not with light but with joy. He held his breath. Smiled at her. His whole body suddenly relaxing.

‘Arianell!’ he said. She was so similar to her mother. Nefyn smiled. Efa moved to follow her, but Nefyn shook her head and shut the door.

Hamza tried to sleep once they had left, but he couldn’t. He got up, drank coffee in the dark, reread the letters he had written, ghostly in the gloom. Efa’s face had unsettled him. The fact that she had come for Nefyn a worrying testament to her husband’s condition. He thought for a moment what Nefyn would do. What things she would whisper. His grandmother was from Houran and when he was ill as a child, she would be summoned with garden cress and he would be forced to drink it with honey. She would practise cupping, too, when his mother complained of a headache. Her strength, though, was in her care, her own knowledge of pain. The way her strong hands dissipated it in others. Her unwavering eyes. Knowing nods. The way she would wring out cloths in water to wash the faces of feverish children and dying relatives.

It had been warmer today; the fire remaining unlit meant it was cold now in the cottage. He watched as his breaths haunted the air. Thought of Emrys, his steady hands, his unsteady words.

His grandmother had spoken to him of a strange but beautiful woman when he was a boy, too. The same kind of wavering words as Emrys. He remembered lying in bed, watching her stitch gold geometric patterns on to the gown his grandfather would wear on a Friday. She would talk as she pierced and drew the needle over and over, turning the material under her thumb as she went. She had talked of how a young woman in an old folk tale had fallen in love with a shepherd, and how they had a beautiful daughter and lived together happily until the woman accidentally killed her lover. Hamza would listen immersed, his eyes closed, a frown forming on his forehead occasionally when his grandmother would stop to break the thread with her teeth or to re-thread the needle before continuing.