She heard him chatting with the receptionist, Ray, before entering her office in his usual jeans, T-shirt, and baker’s apron. He was one of those twenty-eight-year-olds, full of vigor and optimism, who reminded you of the best moments of being twenty-eight.

  “Thank you,” he said, extending his arm across Zahra’s desk and unfurling his fingers to reveal a small offering, beautifully wrapped.

  “For what?” she said.

  “Your help with my application.” Azam had recently applied to the Home Office for indefinite leave to remain, the penultimate step on his road to English personhood. All the complicated checks had taken place when his wife sponsored him for a marriage visa, so it was a fairly straightforward application—but she knew from Ray how nervous Azam was about the process, given all the news articles about applicants rejected by a Home Office increasingly hostile to migrants, so she’d offered to look over his paperwork.

  “There’s no need,” she said. His application had been so perfectly assembled she’d joked that his baker’s skills were showing—the precision, the attention to detail. He’d said it wasn’t down to his baker’s skills but to his pharmacist wife’s clinical thoroughness. Now he made a sound to say her statement was so absurd he couldn’t think of the words to rebuff it. The present was a bracelet with an angel charm dangling from it, silver, not just silver-plated. She’d seen his financial disclosure statements and knew he couldn’t afford gifts like this, but she couldn’t embarrass him by doing anything other than accept.

  He didn’t stay beyond the one minute he’d asked for, and Zahra returned to work, reading a briefing paper about the Anti-Protest Bill that her team had put together for members of the House of Lords—the unelected chamber was the only place where there was any hope of the government’s will being tempered, if not overturned, an irony that was almost unbearable to think about.

  This reminded me of you

  She swiped the notification off her screen without even looking at the attached image Hammad had sent. He knew better than to expect a response from her during working hours. He was her last thing at night, she was his first thing in the morning. His unmentioned wife probably asleep in bed the whole while.

  Campaign focus? she wrote next to a paragraph about the bill’s targeting of climate activists. The angel dangling from her wrist cast a shadow on the page. She held it between thumb and finger; it felt unexpectedly heavy.

  There was a shout from the reception area, Ray’s and Azam’s voices combined. Zahra stood up and strode to the door of her office, but now the shouting was coming from outside. She turned toward her window just in time to see a man lying supine on the pavement, Azam with his knee on the man’s chest, fist driving into his face.

  And then Ray pulling Azam back, arms tight around him, pinning his arms in place.

  Zahra ran out into reception, the smell of what had happened hitting her before she saw the bag of excrement where it had landed and split open, on the floor between Ray’s desk and the front door. An unpleasant squelch and stink as her heel landed in the splatter. She continued on out through the door to the street, Rose and Alex the intern a few paces ahead of her.

  Outside, Ray had let go of Azam, who was standing up, one palm covering the knuckles of his hand, Rose’s hand on his shoulder. The other man was standing too, nose bloodied, arms behind his back, one wrist gripped by Ray, the other held by the Bangladeshi cook from the Thai kiosk. A line of men—the baker who employed Azam, the trans man from the charity shop, several of the kiosk chefs and cashiers—stood watching with arms crossed, shoulder to shoulder, letting the man with the bloodied nose know they wanted him to break free and run so that they could have the pleasure of knocking him down again.

  “You smell like shit,” the man with the still-bleeding nose said as Zahra came closer to him. He was dipping his head forward so the blood fell to the pavement rather than dripping onto his mouth and down his shirt. Ray did something to his grip to make the man cry out in pain.

  The sound of police sirens nearby. “That’s for you,” Alex said.

  “Me?” the man said. “I accidentally dropped a bag. Your friend there, he’s the one who’s going to be charged with assault. Hey, Taliban, you legal?”

  Azam pivoted to look at her. He couldn’t afford to have a court conviction with an application pending at the Home Office.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “I promise.”

  She saw the look Rose gave her: Don’t promise, never promise. But the fear slid right off Azam’s face, replaced by trust. She moved toward him, and Rose and Alex both took a step away from her; the stench from her shoe was revolting.

  Zahra said she was fine, there was no need for Maryam to cancel any meetings to come and hold her hand.

  “How could you let him get away with it?” Maryam said, while texting Layla to instruct her to go get Zahra out of the shit-filled office that she seemed insistent on hanging around.

  “Have to go,” Zahra said. “Layla’s calling.”

  Two pitch meetings later, the Karachi Classmates chat group had 168 new messages, all about the events at Zahra’s office. Everyone who had settled in America and England was outraged; the Americans particularly likely to use the word trauma. The ones who had stayed in Karachi, racism only relevant to their lives when they applied for visas to travel to Europe or North America, treated it primarily as a cleaning-up issue. Did it land on carpet or bare floor? said one. Is there good ventilation? asked another.

  Lucky to live in a country where it’s manure they deliver rather than severed hands or bombs, wrote a journalist in Karachi who’d survived an assassination attempt. Zahra was typing a response that came through a few moments later: Yes, a bagful of shit is the heightened level of civilization we’re at here. A severed hand would have been easier to clean up (not carpet, thank god). Maryam laughed, even as she started writing a private message for Zahra. Someone could screenshot that and get you in trouble, idiot. Before she had a chance to send it, Zahra had deleted the message, resulting in an Ok who here did you think would leak that? message from Babar. Maryam wrote, Saba! in the group chat she had with Zahra and Babar at the very instant that Zahra wrote, 100% Saba.

  Officially, of course, Zahra had taken a different tone with the BBC reporter—a friend of Zahra’s—who had been on the scene in minutes. “An attack on civil liberties,” “a symptom of a much wider malaise,” “the finger of blame must point at those in power who use dog-whistle politics and then claim to be appalled when things like this happen.”

  Zahra so clearly loved it all. Not the attack on the office, certainly, but the persona she inhabited as director of CCL—poised and brave and replete with moral certainty. Funny to recall how timid she’d been as a young girl, always afraid that something awful was going to happen. Maryam softened, remembered how proud she was of her best friend even when she didn’t agree with her. Zahra had made herself exactly what she’d always wanted to be—Someone.

  Maryam placed the phone on her desk, which was maple and stainless steel and had its own model name—the Zieg 2000, an apparently long-awaited successor to the Zieg 1500. The Zieg 2000 ran the cables from her monitors invisibly through its structure, which was the closest she’d get to buying furniture with “features.” She didn’t approve of show-off tech and could barely glance without shuddering at her partner Connor’s desk, with its integrated touch screen.

  “And they call you tech guru,” he’d teased her one day, and she was startled to remember that even someone like Connor, who had worked alongside her since her earliest days in VC, didn’t know that there were generations of classical design in her blood, which brought with it a disdain for “faddishness.” Her office furniture was all clean lines, the sage-green walls hung with watercolor reproductions of vintage ads from Pakistan that she’d commissioned from a Karachi artist just graduated from the National College of Arts who was now showing at Tate and MoMA. The watercolors included a Khan Leather ad from the 1950s, when the company had first branched out from suitcases. live a khan leather lifestyle without leaving home!

  She put on her headset and dialed in to an update call with a Venture Further founder whose biotech company used AI for early breast cancer detection. While he talked, she clicked on the link Babar had posted on the class group. CCTV footage had made its way online from a camera on the street where Zahra had her office. It caught the man opening the door to CCL and throwing a bag inside, his arm slinging back and hurling. Before the door had swung closed, a second man in a baker’s apron ran out and tackled the first man, dropping him to the pavement. There the footage ended.

  She said, How much cash are you burning on that? to the founder, and scrolled down to the comments. Someone had identified the man, he worked at a hardware store not far from the CCL offices. There was a pile-on of comments directed to his employers asking how they could have someone like this on staff. Other people called him a hero, someone offered to put together a GoFundMe page if the woke brigade succeeded in getting him fired. This was what happened when you tried to control a narrative on social media.

  She stood, stretched her arms over her head. If it doesn’t work, you’re going to have to sell your user data. And then, So make sure no one finds out.

  She ended the call, did a few more stretches. Golden Boy had wanted the pictures of the Nation’s Favorite Dad to go public, but she knew that was dangerous. People would want to know where the picture came from, and even if nothing could be proved, enough could be guessed. So instead she made a phone call. Not to a Billoo—she didn’t need anyone like that—but to an investigation company that had often brought her information on people it was necessary to know more about before she could make responsible decisions about how to use her investors’ money. They valued her as a client well enough to take on what was an almost amateur job: stand outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House, waiting for the Nation’s Favorite Dad to show up for his Today interview, and hand him an envelope with a photograph inside.

  The interview never took place. A social media account linked to the #JusticeForTahera campaign said the family was asking for privacy and that Tahera’s father would be making no more media appearances; his first duty was to be at home and look after his daughter. Without his caramel-skinned, long-lashed face of decency, the campaign foundered and fell off the front pages. Maryam was glad for how quietly she’d allowed him to retreat. There’d never been any question of letting him win, but she hadn’t wanted him destroyed, only defeated. Her grandfather would have been proud of her.

  “How do you feel?”

  There it was. Zahra had wondered how long Layla would be able to keep from saying it. It wasn’t the tone she’d struck to begin with. “You can’t stay in that stinky office. Send everyone home and let’s go buy you some new shoes,” she’d said. That had been a while ago. Now they were sitting at a pavement table outside a fish-and-chip restaurant on Marylebone Lane, making their way through a large plate of chips doused in vinegar. Zahra’s new gray ankle boots were on her feet; her old gray ankle boots were in a bin outside the CCL premises.

  “I’m fine,” Zahra said.

  She really was. It had been a shock, yes, but the shock had quickly been overtaken by concern for Azam, and she was still lifted by the glow of making sure he was okay. Victories were hard to come by these days.

  Both matters had been dealt with via community resolution, no criminal record arising from either offense. “Are you sure that’s what you want?” the police officer—Asian—had said to Zahra, when she suggested it. The man with the bloodied nose accepted his guilt, Azam did the same. They were both required to say they were sorry, which they each did without clarifying what they were apologizing for. The police officer didn’t object or linger; she’d heard Azam’s accent, had seen his terror, knew the country she was living in.

  “You’re not fine. You don’t need to say you’re fine.”

  Well, what were you supposed to say to a thing like that?

  She didn’t say anything, just concentrated on following a trail of salt around the plate with a half-eaten chip. Layla sat back in the bistro chair, arms crossed, waiting for Zahra to admit to some feeling of—what?—violation, terror, hatred? Hard to feel any of that about a spindly man with all that rage and no way to express it except via a bag of his own excrement. He had the look of someone to whom the world had never done a single favor, and she suspected seeing him handcuffed and put in the back of a police car might have made her feel she was part of a cruel system.

  “Who did the cleanup?” Layla said, relenting.

  “Oh god,” Zahra said. “That was awkward. A good proportion of the office were united in the opinion that Ray and I and Goldie in Legal couldn’t possibly be allowed anywhere near it because, you know . . .”

  “Only three non-whites in the office?”

  “I’m not sure if they thought the optics would look bad or that our assumed childhood traumas were being triggered.” She stepped down on the heel of a boot, which made barely a sound against the pavement—with the old pair you could hear her striding through the office. “You never had anything like that happen, did you?”

  “When you’re achingly middle class, the racist shit of your childhood is largely metaphorical.”

  Layla ripped open a paper packet with her teeth, shook more salt onto the chips. When they’d first met as nineteen-year-olds—each reaching at the same moment for a bell hooks paperback at a used book stall in Cambridge Market Square—Zahra had known immediately that this striking woman in an electric-blue jumpsuit was someone she wanted as a friend, and it was for this reason only that she’d said perhaps they could split the cost of the book (it was fifty pence) and each read it in turn. And perhaps meet sometime to discuss it? Layla had relinquished her hold on the book. “I was buying that for a friend. I get my wisdom from Nina Simone, the Clash, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. How do you feel about chips?” Zahra had already found her tribe in Cambridge but was beginning to tire of staying up until dawn arguing about whether the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a cop-out or an elevated form of justice with people to whom questions of democratic transitions or even basic injustice were purely abstract. In Layla she found a friend with whom she could eat over-salted chips and who would take her to galleries to introduce her to contemporary art and tell her off for the limitations of her musical preferences. (“Bryan Adams? Can we blame dictatorship for this too?”) Zahra hadn’t known someone could be so unimpressed by your tastes and reference points in such an uplifting way.

  Layla looked at her phone and whooped. “They think it’s all over; it is now.”

  The shop where the attacker worked had posted a statement to say they operated a zero-tolerance policy on racism and had fired the man effective immediately.

  “How do we feel about trial by social media?” Zahra said. Cameras watching, people judging, forms of punishment being demanded that improved nothing at all. The Home Secretary was as secure in her position as ever, standing up in Parliament to say how appalled she was by the attack on CCL, while the Opposition listened in collegial silence instead of shouting, Hypocrite.

  Layla threw a chip at her. It bounced off her nose, and she caught it as it fell. “It’s a terrible thing except when it’s a wonderful thing. Admit you’re pleased.”

  “You sound like Maryam.” It was an entirely Maryam move to sweep aside anything that sounded like a value and ask what, deep down, in the most animal places of your heart, you felt. As if your basest emotions trumped everything else; as if only they were truth and all else was just posturing. Sometimes Zahra wanted to say that was the kind of thinking that had led the teenage Maryam to want to send a thug to beat up Jimmy, but that would get them into a conversation about that night in the FX, which she wasn’t keen to pursue. She wondered how Maryam thought about her demands of her grandfather now. Was she horrified by herself? Or still felt justified? The problem with childhood friendship was that you could sometimes fail to see the adult in front of you because you had such a fixed idea of the teenager she once was, and other times you were unable to see the teenager still alive and kicking within the adult.

  “People do rub off on each other after twenty years,” Layla said genially, wiping her fingers on a napkin and immediately reaching for another chip. “But you are pleased.”

  Yes, she was pleased. So what? She hated the undue attention given to every individual’s feelings that was so much a marker of the present moment. Be bigger than yourself—that was one of her father’s lines.

  “Speaking of rubbing off on each other, did you know she has some refugee food delivery company in her investment portfolio? She told me this last week, as if she’d done it as a gift to me.”

  “Delivering food to refugees?”

  “Of course not. Getting refugees to cook and deliver food around London. She’s already had to talk the founders into focusing on the cooks and not advertising the fact that the delivery drivers are refugees too. She said, once the British welcomed refugees but didn’t much care for world cuisine, and now they’ll eat their way around the globe, but spare them the asylum-seeker at their doorstep.”

  They both laughed at that, their laughter taking in Maryam’s ability to deliver a critique that might be considered left-wing if she weren’t so interested in how to profit from it.

  Both the chips and the evening had turned too cold to countenance, so they set off together toward Regent’s Park. It was just dark enough when they emerged from the park to make a walk through Primrose Hill feel unappealing—Zahra registered a background thrum of envy for the man in running clothes who charged in without thinking twice about the rapidly failing light. She and Layla said their goodbyes and continued along well-lit streets in their separate directions—Zahra heading for the bus to Swiss Cottage, Layla on her way to pick up Zola from Mark’s house.