No one attempts to stop her: there’s no stopping her, she flings her arms after each accusation as if to block any response from getting through to her, the flared sleeves of her jilbab her shields. “I’m sure that’s why she married Bill, too—so Abba would take her back. You’re a user, Seema. You use and throw people away, you don’t care who you hurt—”

Every shaft finds its target. But Seema has something new to worry about: Leigh has pulled away and grown still.

“Is she right, Seema?” Leigh says. Her lips seem to hardly move, but Seema feels the burn in her words. “Is that all you want from me? A babysitter for Ishraaq?”

It’s an assault from both sides: a thwarted sister, an anguished lover. Who is Seema to respond to first? And how to deny the half-truths on both sides?

You’re a user, Seema.

How to speak when the truth is not simple, when everything she says will need qualifications, and those qualifications will need further qualifications, and so on. How to explain in a moment what has taken a lifetime to accrue?

And here’s something else, working from inside my mother’s body, undermining her further: a rift is opening up between the placenta and her uterine walls. A trickle of blood—an embryonic spring—is welling into the uterus and pooling around my amniotic sac. She registers it as a discomfort in her abdomen—she shouldn’t have gorged on the biryani, or is this perhaps the beginning of labor? An invading languor, an apathy almost, renders her unequal to the task of facing her sister and her lover. I register the reduced supply of oxygen and glucose as an irregular heartbeat, a climbing chill, a fickle tipsy consciousness.

Can my mother sense my distress? Her mind is elsewhere, grappling with what to say to the two women confronting her. She finds nothing that can heal the rifts, has little energy for it now. The two women continue waiting.

Leigh gives up first. “I should leave.”

Nafeesa, harassed, depressed, says, “Look what you’ve done now, Tahera.”

She gestures to Seema to do something to stop Leigh, but what is Seema to do?

There’s not much time anyway: Leigh moves quickly, stooping to collect her jacket and bag. Without even pausing to put on her jacket, she gives a thin smile to Nafeesa, whose hand is extended out toward her, and letting herself out of the apartment, clatters down the stairs. The door to the building opens and shuts.

The silence is broken by Tahera: “I didn’t ask her to leave. I asked nobody to leave. I said I was leaving.”

“Then leave,” Seema says. “Everybody leave. I don’t need anyone’s help, I don’t need anyone. I didn’t ask you all to come here. Just go. Please go.”

She turns toward her bedroom, without a glance at her mother or sister. Fiaz makes a movement toward her, but she stalls him. “You too, Fiaz. I’m tired. I’ll call if I have use for you.”