“Same as always. What else can you expect? I came back a year early. My old firm was after me. I started as a manager. It was a good job and I made good money. Moved into a villa in one of those new satellite towns outside of Ankara. I would come home late, mainly drunk, fall asleep under a blanket on the couch, and in the morning I’d quietly leave for work. I hadn’t seen Figen for some time, no news from her. I’d heard that she married someone from her paper. The guy was one of the new rising stars. Had his own program on TV or something like that. One of those ‘new world’ types, the kind that makes you want to reach out and touch them to see if they’re real but then a shiver runs down your spine and you pull back in fear …

One night I woke up to the sound of my cell, ringing and ringing. I looked and it was her, Figen. In tears she asked me to come see her. There was such fear and panic in her voice. I hurried out of the house. As I drove down that highway in the dead of night I tried to figure out what was wrong. When I got there all the lights were out and she was crouched beside a radiator, looking fearfully around the room in shock. She’d had a fight with her husband. The guy had punched her up. People in the apartment building had broken in the door. He attacked them, too. Standing there in the middle of the room, I looked at her in that state, my heart sinking. I put her in my car and we went back to my place. She quietly went into the bathroom. Spent some time washing up. Beside the window I had a cigarette as I waited for her without a thought in my mind. A little later she came into the room. First she sat down on the corner of the couch. Later she got up, turned to me and said:

“Oh, could you just give me a hug?”

I went over and gave her one … Biting down on my tongue so that she wouldn’t know I was crying. And I looked helplessly at my lost life, seeking a resolution.

After a long stretch of silence, Eren looked up at me.

“Hocam, hugging is actually really important. I wish we could have held each other like that before, I wish we could have given each other a proper hug. We never knew how much we meant to each other.”

I don’t remember how much more was said.