The smell of Jia’s own son as he had been lowered into her arms still lived in her memory, as did the overwhelming need to protect him, and with that, of course, the overwhelming fear that she would somehow fail to. ‘He will teach you what love is in its purest form,’ her mother had said. Jia had held on to him tightly, tormented by the fear that she would lose him the way she had lost Zan, that he would disappoint her the way her father had disappointed her, petrified at the thought that love like this was fleeting. She was convinced that love was no longer something she did well.

So when they told her he’d died, she’d been oddly relieved. The doctors had blamed MRSA. She knew it to be a lie – that wasn’t how he had died, or how she thought he’d died – but she had stayed silent, worried they might blame her. Then, of course, years later her father told her Ahad had survived and that he had taken him, as he had taken all that was good in her life.

She wondered what kind of man Ahad was becoming. Was he kind, like Elyas, able to forgive? Was he whole, intact, or had the world damaged him the way it had her? She felt a pang of regret, wishing she’d held on to the letters Elyas had sent. She wished she’d opened them, had a taste of her son’s life, experienced his childhood. But she hadn’t. She’d sent them back, one by one. She’d blamed Elyas for Zan’s death as much as her father, and she had wanted him to suffer as much as she did. But meeting Ahad now, seeing how much he reminded her of her brother, she wished she hadn’t. He would have helped fill the void Zan had left. What kind of a mother was she? How cold? How disinterested must she have seemed to him?

He was waiting for answers but she didn’t have any to give, not yet. As she stood under the street lights with these young men, contemplating her takeover of Akbar Khan’s world, she realised her father had done the right thing. Elyas was a better parent than she could ever have been.

Idris, on the other hand, was like her. Broken, unflinching and unforgiving. His past had stolen away the privilege of forgetting; that was for other people. He believed in little, but he believed in Jia Khan, and he made her want to be the mother the city needed.