Zan Khan had been fiercely loyal, with his mother’s charm and his father’s intelligence, but he had been a lot less carefree than Benyamin was. The absence of her eldest sibling was a constant knot in her stomach. She wished he was here, to pick over food and family gossip with, and to help her make peace with her father, because she couldn’t bring herself to do it. But Zan wasn’t here, and he never would be. Akbar Khan had seen to that. Time unrolled and wrapped like a ribbon around her and she could almost feel his presence; there he was taking his mother by the arm, laughing, making her smile in that way only he could. He was eighteen again, captain of the debate team, playing cricket at county level and getting straight As. She remembered how he’d argued with his school when they’d asked a student to remove her hijab. He’d won, and his name appeared in all the national press, making him a celebrity for a while. Girls her age worshipped popstars, but Jia worshipped Zan; in her eyes, he was matchless and fearless. But Zan was not quite fearless enough to tell his father about his own plans. Maybe if he had, things would have been different. She was deep in thought when Benyamin walked by. Caught up in the past, she instinctively reached out to stop him.

But he answered her abruptly. ‘What do you want, Sis?’ He was annoyed, and his gaze kept drifting towards the girl in the emerald green. ‘I’ve got things to do.’ This wasn’t the right time to talk. The right time had been aeons ago. She let him go.

‘I just wanted to make sure you’d be here for the rukhsati.’

‘I’ll be here,’ he said. ‘Some of us have always been here.’ He walked away, his words stinging gently, like antiseptic on a cut. Is this what healing felt like?

Jia turned and walked towards the house, making her way up the stairs to her parents’ bedroom. She remembered how she and her siblings would hide in here when extended family overstayed their welcome. She stopped by her mother’s dressing table: a picture of the Khan children stood beside the perfumes and powders. She ran her fingers over their faces. Zan would never have spoken to her like that.

He was full of practicalities, but he knew about the power of kindness. He had been a budding astrophysicist, drawing constellations and carrying out calculations on scraps of paper, on napkins, notebooks – and then on walls, after his sister asked him to. Tall, tanned and sociable, to Jia’s pale and introverted, everything came easy to Zan, including grades and girls. Nothing came easy to Jia. Except, of course, her father’s love.