“And?”

“Nothing. He either met his wife for drinks, or he went straight to the Tube. I didn’t follow him there. I recognized his wife from the photo of them he keeps on his bookshelf. I also met her once, very briefly, at his house.” Zelda was a super-recognizer—she never forgot a face—which was one reason why she worked as a consultant helping to build a database for facial recognition of sex traffickers. The other reason was that she had seen a lot of them to remember.

Mati had not been trafficked, Zelda knew, but she carried the history of her country in the lines of her face, lines Zelda was trying to render on paper: the Tito years, the Balkan wars of the ’90s, ethnic cleansing, mass murders and the war crimes trials that followed. Mati had been forced to watch as her daughter was gang-raped by soldiers after she had been raped by them herself. She had seen both her husband and her daughter shot and piled into a mass grave along with most of the population of the village where she lived. The only reason her sons had survived was because they had gone to visit her sister in Italy two days earlier. Mati said she had no idea why she had been allowed to survive. Perhaps the soldiers believed it would be more painful for her to live with what she had seen and what had been done to her. And perhaps they were right. Zelda thought there were times Mati wished she hadn’t survived.

“So, what are your plans for the future?” Mati asked.

“I don’t really know,” said Zelda. “Things just haven’t been the same in the UK since all that Brexit business started.”

“America?”

“Oh, no. Definitely not. Not while that dreadful man is in power. He reminds me of too many of my worst abusers.”

“Where, then?”

“I’ll probably go to live in France, if the worst comes to the worst. I have a French passport, after all.”

“Ah, yes. Your mysterious Parisian benefactor.”

Zelda smiled. “If only you knew.”

“But you would be able to stay if you wanted, wouldn’t you? In England? Isn’t there a form you can fill in, an application? Couldn’t you even apply for citizenship?”

“I suppose so. But I’m not sure I want to stay in a country that doesn’t want people like me.”

“Surely not all of them are like that?”

“No. Of course not. Only fifty-two percent. But apparently that’s all it takes. Still, I don’t think they can have all the foreigners kicked out of the country, no matter what the Leave voters believe. But Brexit has quite destroyed any faith I might have had in England and the English. I remember all those books I used to devour in the orphanage—the Brontës, Jane Austen, Beatrix Potter, John le Carré, Peter O’Donnell, Agatha Christie—and how it was always my dream to live there. But now it’s broken. England is broken. And I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to fix it. At least not in my lifetime. France would hardly be heaven on earth. After all, there’s Macron, but . . .”