She looked into his eyes, eyes she’d last seen on her eldest brother the day he’d died. ‘Well, we’ll have to do something about that,’ she said, leaning forward and touching his arm.

‘You can’t say things like that to him,’ said Elyas.

‘Like what?’

‘He’s a teenager and you were offering to solve his problems the way your father would have done.’

‘I was just talking.’

‘He’s a kid. He believes everything.’

‘He’s nearly legally old enough to leave home or get married. I think you’re being a bit overprotective.’

Elyas realised Jia hadn’t been around children since she was one herself, and as a result she was ill-equipped to speak to anyone who wasn’t an adult. He had expected too much of her. But her words forced him to recognise that, though he disagreed with her method, she might be right about some things. He was overprotective. He had told himself it was because he was doing the work of two parents, but maybe his approach had been wrong, and maybe, despite his best efforts, he had let his son down.

Although the conversation between mother and son was strange, their interaction awkward, Jia knew that there was no other way it could have played out. She knew that the strained circumstances and her reluctant honesty made it difficult for Ahad to like her, but she hoped that her trust in him and her obvious loyalty to her bloodline would go some way to calm the waters.

Her mother asked her about it later that evening, once Elyas and Ahad had left. ‘A woman is incomplete without her child,’ she told Jia.

‘Will I ever forgive myself?’ Jia replied. She thought about the things she couldn’t talk openly about with her mother, the darkness that had once consumed her, and that was again knocking at the door – things they both knew but could never quite bring themselves to admit. She pushed the thoughts aside and shook her head.

‘It is what mothers do, feel guilty,’ said Sanam Khan.

***

On the other side of the city, Benyamin waited in his car, hiding behind its tinted windows, the night drawing in around him. The funeral had been even harder than he had anticipated. The morphine Malik had prescribed was wearing off and he knocked back a couple more tablets, followed by a glug of water. Thanks to Malik’s contacts, he’d been seen last night by medics at the private hospital nearby, and received the best ‘off the books’ medical treatment possible. The scans had shown he’d been lucky: there was no internal damage to his organs. His face was still swollen, and his body badly bruised, but by some trick of fate, he hadn’t broken any bones. He couldn’t stand for long periods of time, but he’d managed the drive OK – he was glad his Beamer was an automatic.