‘OK,’ was all he’d managed to say, his face reddening. He’d spent months saving up to buy the perfume, and she’d rejected it in seconds. He got up to leave. ‘You really shouldn’t sit out here when it’s so cold,’ he said, and then left. He took the gift home and handed it to his mother, who wiped his tears and listened to his heartbreak and told him there was plenty of time for girls after studying and travelling. She nudged him towards other things, and after that Elyas stopped visiting Pukhtun House.

They’d run into each other by chance, years later. It was at a pro-Palestine demo in London. She was dressed in skinny black jeans and a fur-lined parka, placard in hand. He recognised her instantly. He’d just finished his journalism qualification and was looking for a story; she was an idealistic student. He spent the day following her, with her consent, to document the events. She had lost none of her fire and she still held tight the strings that tugged at his heart. When he found himself sharing the same train home with her, he convinced himself fate was contriving to show him his future.

She also thought fate had brought them together, but for very different reasons. The arrest, and university life, had made Zan distant. She missed him and she missed her old self. On the rare occasions they were in a room together, he was silent, his eyes full of thoughts to which she was not party. Seeing Elyas walk through the crowds towards her on that rainy November afternoon, was like finding some part of what she had lost.

The train journey home placed them in a sea of nostalgia. Like the foam that sits on the ocean, it lapped her up. Elyas was easy company. He entertained her with stories of Zan and their escapades, things she’d not known. She laughed at his tales of their ineptness and their failed attempts to ‘get girls’. He walked the length of the train and brought her back sandwiches and biscuits from the buffet bar. He surprised her with his memory of her favourite crisps, and he made her laugh in a way she realised she hadn’t for a long time. And as she listened to him talk she noticed all the ways in which he was like her brother. And all the ways he wasn’t. Zan before the arrest. Zan now. Zan happy and sad, good and bad.

Over the coming weeks they saw more and more of each other. Jia’s questions about her brother were incessant but Elyas stayed patient, waiting, hoping that she would see him, really see him. And then one day she did.