She felt Ahad’s eyes examining her, hoping, no doubt, for some shred of understanding, remorse, something, anything. He must have wondered why she wouldn’t look at him. She couldn’t; he reminded her too much of her brother. His eyes, the shape of his brow, his expressions: it was a face that conjured up Zan Khan. Ahad had inherited none of his father except his name and his need to ask questions.

‘How could you not know I was alive?’ he said. ‘How does that even happen?’

‘I just didn’t,’ she said. The truth was that simple and that complicated. She wanted to hold him, to soak in his smell, the way one does with a baby, but he was no longer a baby. He was almost a man, with the beginnings of facial hair, and deep-set eyes filled with troubling questions.

Ahad fell silent. He had waited so long for this moment, and here she was, his mother, as cold as the body she had buried. ‘How does that even happen?’ he said again, more to himself than to her.

He hadn’t known his mother was missing from his life until he was four years old. It was only when he noticed his friends’ mums collecting them from school that he realised he should have had a mother too. Wide-eyed and ice-cream-covered, he’d asked his father, ‘Where’s my mummy?’ Elyas’s answer was to pack up their things and move closer to his parents, hoping that his own mother’s presence would make things easier. But the questions kept on coming and became more and more persistent. Elyas muddled through fatherhood, telling Ahad fantastical stories of his mother, in which she was a princess held captive by pirates or by a witch’s spell, but one day they would rescue her and bring her home.

The magic soon wore thin, partly because the lies began to grate on Elyas himself, and in the end he had to promise to explain Jia’s absence when the time was right. The letter from Akbar Khan had been that time. Elyas had told Ahad a little of the night Akbar Khan had arrived at his doorstep with a tiny bundle wrapped in a pale blue blanket. But not everything. So much of it was still a mystery to Elyas himself.

Akbar Khan had handed his grandson over to him. ‘Name him Ahad,’ he had said. ‘And do not let my family, especially my daughter, know he is alive. He is of your bloodline, and by bringing him to you I am absolved of responsibility.’

Akbar Khan’s face was lined; he had lost much sleep over his decision, but Elyas found it hard to have any sympathy for him. He was, after all, responsible for the demise of his marriage and the loss of so much more.