Zara drank two strong cups of coffee, having drunk too much brandy earlier. She wasn’t used to it, and tonight she had to be clear-headed. As much as she thought she was in control, she still trembled. She looked around her father’s bedroom and smiled to herself. He loved his hideaways, and he should have been an architect. The tall cabinet, which stood alongside his wardrobes, had a false front on it. For a moment, she wondered if Ismail had known about that hiding place too. As she pressed the far-right corner of the top panel, it unleashed the lock and popped open sufficiently for her to reveal another secret storage place. She sighed. There on a hanger was her father’s bulletproof vest and behind it there was a smaller one. Just once, she recalled, she wore it when she was a teenager. He’d had it made specially for her. A pang of sadness crept over her when she thought back to the day she’d worn it. He was at war with someone, and she was unsafe. He was terrified that the firm who had tried to take him down would hurt her. That was the day he sent her away. She begged and pleaded, but she remembered his words to her: ‘Zara, you will get me killed, if I’m worrying about you. I will take my eye off the ball, and that will be the end of me.’ So, of course, she acquiesced. Her father was the love of her life.

Her heart was broken that day because she couldn’t even tell Mike where she was going; in fact, she couldn’t even tell him she was leaving the country.

She pulled the jacket from the hanger and held it to her face. The smell reminded her of Mike, the pain, and the empty feeling she’d felt that day – from the fear of her father being killed and the dread of her unborn child being hurt. She’d planned to tell Mike that evening. She’d been so excited, so full of dreams of hope and happiness. They’d hidden their relationship from Izzy, or at least had tried to. As it turned out, it hadn’t done much good. Later, much later in her life, Izzy admitted he’d known about their affair all along.

A sudden hot tear pricked her eyelids. Her little boy, her precious baby, had never even met Mike. He’d died of a heart condition. She felt the chain around her neck on which hung the tiny ring and the cross. She was Jewish, and, really, wearing the cross was forbidden, yet it was the nurse who had given it to her the day little Michael had passed away, and she couldn’t bear to take it off. Instead, she had slipped her son’s ring on the same chain.