“Actually, who am I kidding? None of us would draw the line at joining something like that if we could get such high returns from it.” He nudged her shoulder with his, a confidential lean-in to let her know that she could tell him truths she wouldn’t otherwise admit. “If you could write a check to the government and in return they’d back down on—what are you campaigning about these days? state surveillance?—you wouldn’t do it?”

  “No.” She joined in the applause as a fast bowler returned to the pitch and his first delivery, though wayward, showed venom.

  Babar kissed her cheek. “None of us has changed since we were fifteen, have we? I don’t know if it’s depressing or reassuring.”

  “Fifteen? Try eight.” It was both true, and not. Meeting school friends—Babar, Saba—after a gap of many years was a constant interplay between familiarity and strangeness.

  “You know I envy your friendship with Maryam. Always have.” He turned to look toward Maryam, which made Zahra turn as well. She was standing at the boundary of indoors and outdoors, one hand in a pocket, the other hand gesturing as she told a story about taking Zola to the Pakistan Embassy to get her a visa for a trip to Karachi—everyone listening was almost doubled up with laughter at Maryam’s recounting of the official’s refusal to issue a visa until Maryam produced a father for Zola and a marriage license for herself; finally, of course, her father had to make a call and the High Commissioner stepped in to sort it out while pretending to have no knowledge whatsoever of the domestic situation that lay behind the problem. There was no shortage of homophobia or racism in this crowd, Zahra was certain, but it didn’t touch Maryam, who viewed her own generosity as a sort of noblesse oblige that didn’t concern itself with the thoughts or opinions of those on whom she bestowed it. It was so easy to imagine her at a High Table gathering, seducing the powerful with her absolute certainty that she belonged among them.

  So letting that other bastard walk free to protect this one was all for nothing, Maryam had said when Zahra had told her about Azam. And, Do you think? when Zahra said she couldn’t shake the feeling the Home Office had done it out of spite, directed at her. Even then Zahra hadn’t stopped to consider she might see Maryam on the other side of the battlefield if she looked hard enough.

  The door to the box opened and Saba walked in, saying, “Look who I found!” her tone triumphant.

  On the field, the batsman struck a boundary—the first in a long while—and the ground broke into loud cheers at the same moment that Hammad entered the box. Zahra removed the magazine from her head. Hammad held up both arms victoriously, a little self-conscious, a little awkward, trying not to appear either. Someone in the box—Saba’s brother—stepped forward with enthusiastic words of greeting, and Zahra looked toward Maryam, watching good manners rising like bile in her throat, forcing out the words, “Hammad, what would you like to drink?”

  “Saba said I should come and say hello,” Hammad said. “Thought I should give you the chance to have the pleasure of throwing me out.”

  “One expulsion was enough,” Maryam said, so cool it was possible only Zahra saw the burning fury beneath.

  The roar of the crowd signaled an English wicket falling and everyone’s attention turned to the TV to watch the replay. Babar hurried inside so he could see it too. Zahra was alone on the balcony for just a moment before Hammad saw her there and stepped out. She registered the physicality of him, not only with her eyes.

  He was looking very directly at her even while placing a hand on a chair back and swinging his body over rather than moving a few paces to the side and walking down the aisle that bisected the rows of seats.

  “Hello,” she said, to break the incredible tension of waiting for him to come even closer.

  “Hello.” He vaulted the next rows of seats, so that there was only one bolted-in seat between them. No linen or straw hat for Hammad; he was in black jeans and a Pakistan cricket shirt from the 2017 Champions Trophy. “I didn’t cancel that train ticket after all.”

  “Zahra!” Maryam called out to her. “Come watch the replay.”

  “It seems you need rescuing from me,” Hammad said. He was holding a chilled glass of rosé in his hand and he extended his arm to press it against her neck. The cold of it a sharp pleasure against her overheated skin. He grinned at her, taking in everything the halter dress revealed, unapologetic about the clarity of his intent. She felt the pleasure deepen, a reminder and foretaste of the give-and-take of desire, too long held at a distance from her life.

  In the urgency of getting onto the bed, Zahra hadn’t closed the slats of the blinds, and this meant there were gaps through which she could watch the willow tree, the shifting patterns of sunlight on its leaves and branches, while Hammad did what Hammad was taking a very long time to do. The foreplay had been exhilarating but too brief, and now there was this.

  “Are you close?” he said.

  Oh god.

  She had said what felt like an eternity ago that this felt nice, but it wasn’t the right angle to get her where she needed to go. He’d said, “All my angles are right angles,” which she understood to mean this was how he liked to do it, so she said fine, meaning not everyone’s preferences aligned perfectly and he could do other things for her after. Now it was occurring to her that “All my angles are right angles” was a deeply held belief.

  “Very close,” she said, the response drawn from whatever part of her couldn’t ever walk out of a theater during intermission, no matter how awful the play was.

  “And that’s how it’s done,” Hammad said, a little later, propping himself up on one elbow, an arm around her, one leg thrown over hers. The pedestal fan in the corner animated different sections of the bedroom as it rotated—a shiver in the bands of sunlight streaming through the slats, a little dance of tulips on her dressing table, a movement in the bedsheets.

  Her phone pinged, not for the first time in the afternoon, with the custom tone that Zola had set so that she could always know when it was Maryam. Hammad hadn’t stayed long in the Venture Further box, and Zahra had slipped out a few minutes later, at the lunch interval, when Maryam was busy handing out plates. She’d told Babar she had some work to take care of, and could he let Maryam know. Whatever she might choose to say to Maryam—about Hammad, about the High Table—would come later.

  Hammad bent to kiss her breast and she thought, Perhaps the next act will be better. But then he straightened again and it was clear the kiss was meant as an end-stop, not a comma.

  “Should have had you get in the backseat with me,” he said.

  That made no sense. In the backseat of the taxi on the way over, he’d stroked her leg, his hand electrifying through the thin fabric of her dress.

  He touched the place above her hip, which he’d discovered—more by accident than intuition—to be an erogenous zone. “I should have known that day about Maryam. What she is.”

  “What she is?” Zahra said, realizing which backseat he actually meant, suspecting she knew what else he was talking about.

  “Yeah,” he said, missing her tone. “Tell me the truth: Has she ever come on to you?”

  She sat up, pulled the sheet with her, held it in place just above her breasts. “Why was I there at all? In Jimmy’s car. Why did you ask me to come along?”

  “I saw the way you looked at me. I knew there was more going on with Ms. Zahra Ali than you wanted to let on. So I thought, Let’s give her a chance to reveal the panther within.” He laughed, enormously satisfied with himself.

  “So I was a treat for Jimmy? How old was he?”

  “There’s no need to phrase it like that.” His hand was making little circles on her thigh, but her body had shut down to him now. “You girls got lucky that we were both such good guys. The last gentlemen in Karachi.”

  “How?” she said, reaching under the sheet and lifting his hand off her. “In what universe?”

  “Oh come on.” He was the one to sit up now, looking affronted. “If anyone should hold a grudge about that day, it’s me. I got expelled. It messed up my university applications. Even now there are people in Karachi who look at me funny because they think I kidnapped two schoolgirls and did all kinds of things with them that maybe they didn’t want me to do. When actually the truth is—”

  “The truth is, you were terrified. I don’t know who scared you more, Jimmy or Maryam.” She saw that find its target, pressed on. If he wasn’t going to give her one kind of pleasure, she’d seek out another. “I should have known about you that day. What you are.”

  He couldn’t help himself. “And what am I?”

  “An absolute waste of time.”

  “Fuck you.” He was clearly attempting some kind of dramatic exit from the bed, but his feet were tangled in the sheets, and for some satisfyingly long moments he looked very foolish trying to extricate himself.

  “Please god, not ever again.”

  He slammed not just the bedroom door but the front door too on his way out. She stood up, belted on her dressing gown, raised the blinds, and opened the window to let out the smell of him, of them, astonished by her own capacity for idiocy. A new low, this one. Her proclivities had always involved some kind of subterfuge, but they’d never been this sleazy. A judge in her days as a barrister. An old-school gay rights activist who felt his reputation would be ruined if he was outed as bisexual. An MP with an awful voting record. Yes, there were—or used to be—random encounters, those nightclub bathrooms, but you never had to know anything about each other beyond the immediacy of half-clothed sex. She couldn’t stop replaying his smile, the self-satisfied way he’d said last gentlemen in Karachi. That had crawled right under her skin, was still working its way through her. How often she’d told herself she and Maryam had got lucky that night, but to hear it from him . . .

  Her phone pinged. She picked it up and read through all the afternoon’s messages.

  Sundays aren’t for being at your desk, even I know that (mostly). Are you coming back?

  Ugh, Hammad. Thank god he didn’t stay long. What was he talking to you about?

  It’s fantastic carnage out here. Don’t miss the highlights

  Babar said he talked to you about the High Table. Is that why you left?

  Zahra put the phone on silent, pulled the sheets off the bed, and took them to the washing machine. Closing the kitchen door to shut out the noise of the machine, she walked into the living room with a large mug of tea and called the only phone number in the world that she could still dial from memory.

  “What a day!” her father greeted her. Sometimes she watched old snippets of Three Slips and an Ali online, and it was always a little heartbreaking to speak to him afterward and hear the fissures of age in his voice. “And you were there!”

  “I left at lunch,” she said. Her parents were usually in London in time for the Lord’s Test, her father taking particular delight in his continuing welcome at the Media Stand despite having retired from broadcasting in 2010 when the spot-fixing scandal broke his heart. But this year they’d delayed the trip so her mother could recover fully from an ankle injury.

  “At lunch?” her father said. “But the ball had just started to reverse. Why would you leave?”

  “Let me hear outside,” she said.

  Her parents had long since moved from Sea View to a newer, more upscale block of flats less than a mile farther along Clifton Beach. She could hear the needs-oiling sound of the window opening, letting in the outdoor world. The waves broke furiously on shore; the seagulls cried out, nocturnal like the rest of Karachi; a motorcycle gunned past, doubtless leaving its tracks on the gray sand among the plastic and other debris that had been dragged in with the fishermen’s nets. The sounds of Zahra’s adolescence.

  “I was angry at Maryam, so I left,” she said, when her father returned to the phone.

  He made a disapproving noise. She could see him clearly, in his favorite chair by the window, the nearly twenty-year-old landline phone with the endless extension cord resting on his belly. “After you and Tom divorced, your mother and I had a conversation with Maryam. We told her that when one of us dies, the first phone call the other one makes will be to her. Do you know why?”

  “Because there’s no one else you’d want to break the news to me. What did Maryam say?”

  “She said she’d drop everything and book two plane tickets because she wouldn’t let you make the journey back alone. She also said she was insulted that it had taken the divorce for us to reach this conclusion—why had we ever thought Tom should take precedence over her in a situation like this?”

  She was standing at her bookshelf, looking at a framed photograph of Maryam and herself as children standing under the gulmohar tree in the Khan garden. The exact origins of their friendship were lost in a past that stretched back beyond memory. Had they sat next to each other in those first weeks of kindergarten? Did one drop a school badge onto a hopscotch square and invite the other to play? Her earliest recollection of the two of them was Maryam kneeling down to tie Zahra’s shoelaces in the schoolyard before Zahra had learned to get her fingers or her mind around the looping knottiness of the process.

  “No one’s dying yet,” her father said, misunderstanding her silence.

  “Do you want to know why I was angry with her?”

  “No, of course not. I love that girl. So spare me the knowledge of the Patriarch’s granddaughter at her worst.”

  After the call ended, Zahra looked around her flat—the tree-stump side table beside the gold-and-green chaise lounge, Maryam’s teenage painting of a Karachi seascape alongside a chalk-and-charcoal drawing given to Zahra by an admiring artist whose work she couldn’t afford, the books all along the length of one wall. Loneliness wasn’t something that was part of her experience of life—she was a woman who thought in terms of sanctuary and refuge when she stepped into the quietness of this flat at the end of a day busy with work and friends. And yet, right then, she found herself imagining a day—not soon, but eventually—when loneliness would stalk indoors and refuse to be evicted.

  This particular chill breeze had brushed against her a few times before, but she’d always called Maryam as soon as she felt it. “What you up to?” she’d say, and there’d be something in her voice that would make Maryam invite her over. She’d walk or take the C11 bus to Primrose Hill, tap in the security code to let herself unannounced into Maryam and Layla’s house. There’d often be a moment when she’d pause in the reception area that overlooked the floor below. From that vantage point she could smell whatever was cooking on the stove, see Maryam curled on a sofa with her tablet, reading out something amusing or informative to Layla, who moved about the kitchen, chopping and stirring, while Zola came thundering down the stairs to throw her arms around her godmother—the fourth member of her family, as she’d insisted from the time she’d been old enough to draw stick figures and a square-and-triangle house.

  She didn’t even have to call Maryam. She could call Layla. She could just show up, uninvited. Say nothing about her afternoon. Yell at Maryam about the High Table as though it were just the latest in a series of disagreements that at some point petered out or were brought to an end by Layla’s intervention. In the worst moments, they’d left each other’s company still cross, and eventually one or the other would send along a clip of George Michael singing, an act of conciliation that couldn’t be denied.

  Her phone vibrated with a new message from an unknown number. This is Shaz, Azam’s wife. He’s been arrested for working illegally. Please help us.

  She rested her head against the wall for a long time.

  There was so often that one batsman who seemed to be playing in a different match, on a different day, to a different set of bowlers. Majestic, in command, anticipating every turn of the ball. It had been too long since Maryam had played cricket, but she could still remember that feeling of perfect stillness in passages of play when time moved differently for you than for the rest of the world. But no matter how the gods favored you, when you ran out of partners to bat with it was time to walk off the pitch. Did any other sport allow for the glory of the individual and the necessity of partnership as cricket did?

  “When did you turn so philosophical?” Babar said, walking with Maryam across the Nursery Ground of Lord’s. The match had ended a while ago, and the celebratory drinking was carrying on in the Venture Further box, but Maryam was ready to go home and Babar was coming with her. Babar’s younger daughter and Zola were passionate friends, though they’d only ever spent a few weeks in each other’s company. Theirs was a friendship that largely existed on screens, and it had made Babar a regular fixture in Maryam’s household as a background figure waving hello or commenting on some overheard exchange between the two girls. Sometimes he and Maryam would text each other while listening in. Babar: We were so clueless at their age! Maryam: They’re clueless too they just have so many more things to be clueless about.

  “Well played,” said a man with a face red from sun and alcohol, standing up unsteadily from a picnic blanket on the Nursery Ground to extend his hand toward Babar. Maryam was accustomed at Lord’s to being treated as though she were just some man’s companion, and was willing to accept the moment for its graciousness.

  “Luck of the toss,” Babar said, shaking the man’s hand. “Anderson would have destroyed us if we’d been batting today.”

  “When did you turn into a man of such perfect manners?” Maryam said, looping her arm through Babar’s as they wandered on toward the North Gate. “You were a total hooligan of a boy.”