‘It’s harder than it looks,’ he whispered. In the space of a few hours, Ahad had been arrested, and then rescued by the woman who had abandoned him, the woman he hated; he’d let her rile him and had spewed venom at her. He had wanted so desperately for her to be impressed and instead he felt like a fool. ‘I am clearly a loser of gargantuan proportions,’ he said. ‘You can’t even bear to look at me. Can you? Do you still dislike me that much?’

She didn’t answer. Her mind was back at the police station, running through the things he’d said. The police chief had called to give her a heads-up. ‘I hope now we can be friends, Ms Khan?’ he’d said on the phone. Ahad had been caught up in a routine raid, a small fish in a big net. ‘If my tiddler was mixed up in this kind of thing I’d want a friend looking out for him. Probably just needs his mother to set him straight. Most of these young men do. But then, you know him better than I.’

But she didn’t know Ahad. And sitting next to him, trying to make sense of things, she realised that in protecting herself she had inadvertently damaged her son. Something she had never intended. She reached into her handbag and pulled out her lipstick. There were certain things that simply shouldn’t be said without lipstick, and times where its application gave a woman the space to gather her thoughts.

‘You know…when they handed you to me you were so tiny, so helpless,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to let you go, and I kept you on me, on my chest, all night… Before, when I was pregnant, they told me there was something wrong with you, and I went to have a termination. But I couldn’t do it. By the time I found out I was pregnant, you were kicking…and I was afraid.’

‘You were scared? But nothing scares you.’