For my blinding headache I take two aspirins and fall asleep, only waking up when Nadia comes home from her outing with Khalid. Her happy face lightens my spirits. She has been told the news and is eager to meet the new bride, asking if we will come from London for the wedding.

‘I hope their engagement breaks up,’ I say. ‘I hope he comes to his senses and marries you instead.’

‘In your dreams,’ she moves away from me.

Maybe she had said this before but I am now hearing her for the first time. Using that word ‘gross’ and making faces. This aversion to cousins marrying is something the English taught her, something a girl brought up in Egypt would not feel.

Once again we board the airplane that will take us back to London. Nadia sits next to me on the aisle seat and busies herself reading. What am I taking her back to? Her father and I took the decision to make London our home and now we will reap what we sowed. I feed on my fear as if it will protect me from what I dread most. In London I pass laments back and forth with other mothers. Flailing around in a maze, we swap stories of dead-ends. Someone’s son converted to Christianity, another’s daughter works in a bar and even that studious boy turned out to belong to a terrorist group. ‘Bad friends are the root,’ I am warned. ‘Marry her off,’ is a common piece of advice. Well, this summer was certainly a marriage scheme gone wrong!

I look down at the book Nadia is holding and I am surprised to see my first name written in English on the cover. She explains that she is reading an English translation of The Open Door. ‘I am going to spend my gap year in Cairo learning Arabic. Properly. Well enough to read a book,’ she says.

My immediate reaction is joy which I must hide lest she abandons the idea to spite me. ‘I could teach you to read and write Arabic,’ I say. ‘You don’t need to go anywhere.’

‘Yes, I do.’ She frowns. ‘No one spends their gap year sitting at home with their mother.’

‘What is this gab year anyway?’

‘Gap, gap with a p.’

‘Gabp’

‘No. Say ‘p’, like in pee pee! You can certainly say ‘pee’ properly and then in every other word change it to a ‘b’! It’s daft.’

I laugh because she cares about a stupid word, because maybe, after all, there is hope. We are ready to fly now. Nadia pushes her table up, puts her book away and fastens her seatbelt. She takes my hand and I am touched to tears by her gesture. I start to speak but the pilot is saying something as he begins the take-off. He says, ‘In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ as if to himself, under the roar of the engines.