Jacob’s voice echoes in the tunnel, and Yassim doesn’t answer, just pushes them further through the tunnel, and then out into the drizzle coming down on the concrete and cliffs.

The locker rooms are empty, the showers are turned off. It’s abandoned down here by the water in the autumn. A breeze cools them, and the sea is grey-green and choppy in the twilight. Yassim grabs his shoulders and turns him around, stares deeply into his eyes.

‘This is how it is,’ he says. ‘You knew that from the beginning.’

‘I knew I couldn’t be your boyfriend,’ Jacob says. ‘Not that you’d disappear without telling me whether or not you were coming back.’

He realizes he’s almost shouting; he must be more upset than he thought. Maybe he’s being dramatic, but it’s bubbled up inside him now. His worry that Yassim might have left him mingles with a vague, now dashed, and completely contradictory hope that he would never come back. Jacob doesn’t want to feel this happiness pulsing inside him now, doesn’t want to be helpless in Yassim’s hands any more. The photographs from Syria, the gun, the lies. But it doesn’t matter, with Yassim he has no defences.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘But I can’t do anything about that. When someone needs my camera, I have to go. It’s not easy to call from the front, darling.’

Jacob looks at him. ‘Aleppo again?’ he asks and receives a calm nod in reply.

‘Where else?’

Jacob wants to grab Yassim’s shoulders and shake him. Were you really there? he wants to scream at the top of his lungs. Or: Who are you? But he says nothing, just nods back calmly.

‘But forget it,’ Yassim says. ‘I’m going to Europe soon. I have to get away. And you are coming with me.’

Jacob’s face is becoming wet in the drizzle, and he turns into the strengthening wind. It won’t be hard to get away; no one will miss him at the embassy. Right now, here at the pier by the sea, he doesn’t care about any of it.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I will come with you.’

*

It’s dark by the time they leave the beach club; the headlights of taxis and SUVs glitter in the rain. Jacob’s shirt is damp, and he’s freezing for the first time since he got to Beirut, but Yassim doesn’t take them directly to the apartment. Instead, he takes them down side streets and winds through packed parking lots. Yassim looks at him, and they chat, but Jacob feels like there’s something off, as if his friend is more cautious than usual.

‘This way,’ he says, leading Jacob past a sleepy security guard, down a ramp into a parking garage. ‘A shortcut.’