‘But say if he’s gone home?’ she asks Purity now. ‘Decided he’s had enough and gone back to the UK?’ She rubs her eyes and her head thumps from the whisky, from the stress.

‘Why would he run?’ Purity asks, her attention half on Yvonne, half on picking the seam from a piece of clothing.

‘Kiama’s angry with me. Last night, he found out something I didn’t want him to know. Something about his dad and me, something that happened a long time ago.’

Purity lifts the material up and Yvonne sees now that it’s a skirt. ‘A secret?’

‘Yes.’

She shakes her head. ‘Secrets are not good.’

‘I know. But this trip was meant to be about his mum, about Emma, not about me and his dad. Not about something stupid we did a decade ago. Though now, that’s probably all Kiama is thinking about. It’s probably all he’ll remember from being here.’

‘Do you think this will fit Alice?’ Purity asks. ‘The girl is so thin. I said I would make her a skirt. She wanted traditional Kenyan, but I do not know where she bought this material. From China maybe.’

Purity’s lack of concern is almost reassuring, it reminds Yvonne that there’s nothing really that terrible about an eighteen-year-old boy going AWOL for a few hours.

But then the afternoon slides away and the evening creeps in.

She sits on the ledge in the yard, listening to local voices as they pass by on the other side of the gate. Delia and Alice return from work, and as if sensing the strain of the situation, ask few questions about what has happened and lend Yvonne their phones to try and get through to Kiama. His phone is switched off but the girls encourage her to leave messages on each of his social channels.

Eventually, an hour past curfew, Joe is given leave and the gate is locked. Purity shrugs apologetically as she puts the padlock on the door. ‘Here,’ she says to Yvonne as she presses the bunch of keys into her hand. ‘You can open it when he comes back.’ The unspoken assumption being that Yvonne will not move from this spot until Kiama shows up.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Forgiveness

October 2020

Kiama

He doesn’t want to deal with this; he wants to be somewhere else entirely. He wants to be drunk at a bar in Barcelona, listening to some local girl warble on about Post Malone and the politics of Catalonia which he can nod along with and pretend like he understands. He wants to be home in Harrow, being dragged out of bed to help his nana do the garden. But most of all he wants to be eight years old and back at that beach bar in Mombasa, eating masala chips and drinking tamarind juice with Mum.