Words continued to fire out of him like nails, hitting her hard. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he said. ‘You’re picking me up from a police station. The first time you’re picking me up ever, not from school, not from football, but from a police station! Does that not affect you at all? Where were you when all the other kids’ mothers were making them packed lunches and crappy Halloween costumes? Or when I lost my first tooth, spoke at my first assembly, learnt to kick a football? Where were you all those nights I was too scared to sleep in case Dad died and they put him in the ground? Where were you, Jia Khan?’

Jia watched him shouting at her, the vein on his forehead pulsing the way her father’s and brother’s had, when the blood was still flowing through them. Ahad’s words didn’t hurt her in the way he hoped; the pain she had inflicted on herself was far worse than anything he could say. But her heart did break for him. It cracked inside her chest, the pain spreading into her limbs. This was what she had been running from.

She wanted to go to him but she didn’t know how. She hadn’t held him since he was a few days old. And he kept shouting without pause, the angry tears running down his face as he pleaded with her for answers. ‘What kind of woman shuts her husband and kid out of her life? And he, Dad, brings me here to see you, and you have no explanation! Nothing! You talk to me about shitty family crap and history and Khans and Pathans! What about me? How about we talk about me for a fucking second? Remember me, the kid you gave birth to? You fucking waltz around like the queen of fucking everything and you couldn’t even call your own son? Because you know what I think? You’re a liar. It was all bullshit. I think you knew I was alive. Because if you really thought I was dead, why didn’t you call my dad to talk to him about it? To share your grief? Or is that it? You didn’t feel anything? Your old man may have been a crim but at least he was honest about it! You, you’re just a lying cunt of a bitch.’

The word snapped her back to the here and now. She remembered all the things she had done and all the things she was about to do for family, and the emotion in her drained away. ‘Yes. I am,’ she said. ‘And that makes you a son of a bitch.’