“Thirty years later, and he’s still angry with me,” Jimmy said, sitting down, his tone wondering. “When he got in touch I was so happy—I thought, finally we’re old enough that we just remember the good times together.” His smile ingratiating, as if she were part of the good times and he was grateful to her for it.

  “What is it you needed?”

  “You’re Habib Ali’s daughter,” he said. “I should have worked it out earlier. I see you on TV, you know, but I never made the connection. So many Alis in the world.” She couldn’t quite pin down his manner—his tone was polite, but there was something unpleasant in it, an overfamiliarity. He had placed his briefcase on the floor and was taking up more space in the chair. “I was such a fan of your father. When I saw him outside your flat that day, when I dropped you home, I felt so bad I had treated Habib Ali’s daughter that way. I thought you were just, you know, one of those rich girls. Like that friend of yours.”

  He said it as if they shared some understanding about Maryam, the kind of girl she was.

  “What was in that bag? The one you picked up from the man near the port.”

  He frowned and made a gesture—palms facing upward, wrists turning, fingers curled. The Who knows? gesture that said it was just another evening in his life, he couldn’t be expected to remember the details of it. “I would never behave that way today. I want you to know that. Back then, I didn’t know how to be with girls.” A subtext she might have imagined to let her know that now he very much did know how to be with girls. “I didn’t know how to say, Hello, my name is Jimmy, can I take you for a drive?”

  She edged a mug of tea closer to him. “If you’d said that, I would have answered no.”

  “That was your right,” he said, a little too quickly, as if it were a line he’d prepared when she’d left the room and had been waiting to find a place for in the conversation. He sipped the tea, she did the same. Neat soundless sips, both of them. Those hairy knuckles gripping the handle, the lips no longer chapped.

  Over the years, when some comment of Maryam’s had forced her to think of Jimmy, she’d seen his shiny shirt, the thin finger he’d placed on her cheek, the mullet she hadn’t then known to describe as such. His face had been lost to her, she’d thought, but it hadn’t, all along it had been squatting in some dark fold of her brain, and now she could see the twentysomething so clearly in this middle-age man.

  “I’m aware of my rights.” She gestured around the office. “It’s in the job description.”

  He stood up, briefcase in hand. “I’m sorry for taking your time. Obviously you want me to go somewhere else.”

  He was almost out of the building before she reached the reception area and called him back. “You should tell me what you need and I’ll let you know if we’re the right people to speak to.”

  “I’m applying for indefinite leave to remain,” Jimmy said, stepping toward her. “I know many people are being rejected these days. Hammad said you must have connections with the Home Office, a person in your position. Maybe you can help out a friend of his, put in a good word.”

  Hammad, that absolute bastard.

  She picked up a flyer from Ray’s desk and proffered it to Jimmy. “If you’re concerned about your application, you should get an immigration lawyer. Here’s a list.”

  He took the flyer between his thumb and forefinger. A little current of energy traveled along the paper before she relinquished her hold on it.

  “And if you can’t afford a lawyer . . .” she said, switching into English.

  His expression carried the offense of a man who had made his way up in the world, and now saw how deliberately she was insulting him in a language the receptionist could understand. “I can afford ten lawyers.”

  “Oh?” she said, glancing at the sweat patches under his arms, knowing enough about the arrows of class to have gauged exactly how that one would land.

  He drew his arms tighter into his body. “Hammad said you’d be happy to help a friend of his. You know, like I said, I’ve seen you on TV so many times, so . . .” He straightened his back, shaped his features into an expression of cold authority that made it clear he loathed her, not just for the last few minutes but whenever he’d watched her on television, because of how she looked and how she spoke and the space she occupied in the world. “And then yesterday at dinner Hammad told me, I know her! I saw her earlier today. My god, I couldn’t believe what he was telling me.” He slowed down the last few words, as if recalling, very clearly and in great detail, all the things Hammad had told him. She felt an ancient shame go through her.

  “Who are you to humiliate me?” Jimmy said, and the word you was stressed. “I’ve said I was sorry for what happened before.”

  “You haven’t said it, actually.”

  She and Jimmy were both speaking in English now, and she was aware of Ray looking between the two of them, wondering what was going on.

  “I came here because I need help. I have a lawyer. He’s looked at my papers. He says they’re fine. How can anyone say that these days? Everywhere, people I know being told they have to leave because of some small error, some little fault. Someone with a speeding ticket, rejected. Someone whose accountant made a tax error that was quickly fixed, rejected. These lawyers don’t care. They take your money and don’t even look properly at your file. I came because Hammad said you would help me.”

  “Everything okay?” Rose, from the hallway.

  “Rose, do you have a few minutes? I know we don’t usually do this, but could you be very thorough in looking through Mr. Hussain’s immigration file and seeing if there are any red flags? As a personal favor to me.”

  For a moment she thought Jimmy would stalk out, but instead he slumped his shoulders, unable to reject the ultimate humiliation of her largesse. Then he followed Rose down the hall without looking back at Zahra.

  She returned to her office and left the door wide open, to let the stench of him out. Then she took a tissue from her desk drawer, picked up the mug he’d used, and took it to the kitchenette, where she poured the contents down the sink. She squeezed an excessive amount of dish soap onto the sponge and scrubbed the mug with it. After rinsing the mug, she chucked the sponge in the bin and washed her hands thoroughly. All she could smell now was the lemony pine dishwashing liquid.

  She walked quickly down the corridor to Rose’s office, opened the door. Rose looked up from the file on her desk; Jimmy turned, anxious, alert for what she might say.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” Rose said. “Everything looks fine so far.”

  She went back to her office. The air was still sweat-tinged, Jimmified. She pressed her nose into the crook of her arm, trying to blot him out, but his presence was in her memory. In the car, when he’d rolled up the window, that cologne scent. Musky, spiced, suffocating. How terrifying it had felt to be in her body that night, her heart violent. She rested two fingers against her wrist; her pulse jumped, quick and forceful.

  She picked up her phone and sent a message:

  How early can you get off work today?

  The only remnant of Tom was Zahra’s taste for unexpected furniture. Maryam lifted a glass of nimbu pani off the tree stump and settled back on the chaise lounge. She had finally come to be fond of this flat, Zahra’s place, though for many years it had been hard to rid it of the associations of Zahra’s moving-in day—just after Christmas 2007. They’d been unpacking boxes together when Layla called from a cafe where she’d gone to pick up sandwiches for lunch to say they had to plug in the television, and she was so sorry, so sorry. Benazir had been assassinated.

  Maryam made a gesture toward the open window, through which the trapped heat of the day was escaping, as if she could expel the memory. When Zahra had texted to ask her to leave work early—an unheard-of demand—she’d feared it was the kind of awful news that required them to be in a room together. Someone known to both of them dropping dead, a routine medical test revealing something it shouldn’t—these were the kinds of events that had entered their lives, a foretaste of the decades ahead. But now that she was here, Zahra was in the shower, leaving her with the nimbu pani and her own curiosity. First the abrupt departure from Lord’s and the refusal to answer her texts, and now this.

  “Sorry,” Zahra said, emerging in a caftan that the length of her managed to turn into an elegant gown. “Needed to wash off the day.” She sat down at the foot of the chaise lounge, arms hugging her knees close to her chest. “I have to tell you something about yesterday. I left with Hammad.”

  “Why?”

  Zahra picked at a loose thread where the fabric of the chaise lounge met the frame. When she looked up, there were red blotches on both cheeks. She raised her chin, and it took a moment to work out she was indicating the bedroom door.

  Maryam stood up. “I need whiskey.”

  “It gives you a hangover. Try the tequila.”

  Maryam walked into the kitchen, looked around, saw the wine rack filled only with wine, and walked out. Zahra pointed to the vintage traveling trunk in one corner of the living room—that was new—and Maryam opened it to find a variety of bottles, one of which she recognized as the Calvados she’d brought to flambé something at least five years ago. Longer. Zola had been a toddler, held fast in Layla’s arms, while Maryam set the—what was it?—aflame. She didn’t really need or particularly want whiskey, but she didn’t know how to respond to Zahra’s unexpected—and, as it sank in, grotesque—revelation, so was mimicking the kind of behavior that people in movies brought to such moments. She lifted out the whiskey, placed it back in the trunk, and, with a glare that dared Zahra to say anything, reached for the tequila. Then back into the kitchen and out again with two egg cups in the shape of scalped ducklings.

  “I do have shot glasses,” Zahra said.

  Maryam handed her tequila in an egg cup, filled her own, and remained standing. Zahra downed the tequila in a single gulp, which Maryam hadn’t seen her do since her first year at Cambridge, when she’d decided to try everything she’d never tried in Karachi.

  “These are creepy,” Maryam said, looking more closely at the duckling waiting for an egg to be placed where a brain should be, only to have it smashed open. Zahra said nothing. “It was Lord’s. You were outnumbered twenty-to-one by men. You had to pick the sleaziest of the bunch? And how, when? You spoke to him for maybe two minutes before he left.”

  Zahra placed the egg cup on the floor, the base precisely covering a knot in the wood. “He’s the guy I was texting in the spring.”

  “What?”

  “I stopped it because I knew how betrayed you’d feel. But yesterday, well, I felt betrayed by you, so . . .” She made a gesture with her palms of scales evening out.

  “Am I going to be lectured at about the High Table?” Maryam’s voice had never been this sharp with her best friend, but the possibility that Zahra was about to vault from such shaky ground onto a moral high horse was maddening.

  Zahra shook her head, her expression strange. There was shame in there but something else too. “What did he do to you?” Maryam said, all her anger swinging toward Hammad.

  “Nothing. Nothing like that.” A little smile. “He really was all hat and no cattle. And not very happy about having that pointed out to him.”

  There was some satisfaction in that. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised or sorry.” Maryam looked again at the bedroom door, looked away. “Please say you’re done with him.”

  Zahra still had that strange expression. “I didn’t ever want to see him again. But he came by my office today. With Jimmy.”

  “Jimmy Jimmy? What? In London?” Maryam felt a little stupid, a little sluggish, as she sat down on the chaise lounge. “What did he want? Why did you even let the two of them in?”

  “I didn’t know it was them. Some Najam Hussain from Karachi turned up with a friend, saying he knew me. Then in walked those two.” She made a face to express the unbelievability of it all. “Jimmy didn’t know who I was at first, any more than I knew who he was. Hammad . . . I don’t know. He seemed to think it was funny.”

  “Small men like to feel like big men. It’s not complicated.”

  “The Choreographer of All Things. Yes.”

  “And then?”

  “Then he left, and it was Jimmy and me. And it became horrible. I don’t know if I was the one who was horrible first or if he was.”

  “But what did he want?”

  “He’s applying for ILR, and Hammad told him he had a friend who could put in a good word with the Home Office on his behalf.” She nodded at Maryam’s look of disgust and then shifted into one of her Zahra faces. “I understand his terror of being rejected. Everyone has it these days, unless they’re earning six figures. But apparently he’s a model citizen-to-be, our Jimmy. I asked Rose, who nosed about his application looking for any snarls. He’s some kind of engineer. Moved here from the Gulf with his wife and two daughters. They’re divorced now but he pays regular child support. Never even had a parking ticket. Makes charitable donations but not through any of those Islamic organizations that the government might wonder about.”

  “Wait, what? He comes in—that man, after what he did—and you send him to your head of Legal for help? Why didn’t you offer him a cup of tea and biscuits while you were at it?”

  “Didn’t think of the biscuits.”

  “Oh come on!” Maryam stood up again, swiftly, her foot hitting Zahra. Zahra cried out, clutched at her ankle, and returned the fierce, angry look Maryam was giving her.

  “Why did you give him tea?”

  “It’s what I do when someone comes to my office. What should I have done?”

  “I don’t know. But not tea. Throw him out? Call the police?”

  “It’s no crime to walk into a person’s office.”

  “And what he did all those years ago? Was there no crime in that?” Maryam frowned. “Wasn’t there? If that were now, if that happened to Zola, what could you charge him with?”

  Zahra sat up a little straighter, abstract thinking the element in which she was most at home. “You could try false imprisonment. Maybe abduction. Certainly dangerous driving.” Then she raised her shoulders, spread her hands apart. “Honestly, it’s as if that night belongs to a category for which I don’t have the language.”

  “He terrorized us. He wanted us to know what men can do to women. What’s so hard about having the language for that? If your beloved legal system doesn’t have the words, there’s something wrong with it.”

  Zahra cupped her palm against her neck. It had been a very long time since Maryam had seen that gesture of vulnerability.

  “You want to know why I gave him a cup of tea? It was so that he wouldn’t know he still scares me. Here.” She pointed at her stomach. “I felt it here. That terror, when you don’t know if you’ll ever make it home again.”

  “Oh, Za.” Maryam sat down, put her arms around her oldest, dearest friend. Zahra leaned into her, forehead pressed against Maryam’s shoulder. “I hated it, hated it. How he made me feel. And then he looked at me in this way, it was horrible, letting me know that Hammad had told him what we did together, all the details of it, everything.”

  “Bastard,” Maryam said, tightening her grip.

  “But I don’t even know if he really did that or if it was all in my head. Just like that night in his car—I don’t know what was him and what was me. All that shame and fear we carry around from childhood. Do you think someone like Jimmy understands any of it?”

  “Why are you trying to talk yourself into saying he did nothing wrong?”

  “I was awful to him, Maryam, I was mean and condescending and I wanted to humiliate him. I did humiliate him.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s not good. He came to my office. I had no business behaving that way.”

  For a rare moment, Maryam didn’t know how to respond. Two men had put Zahra through hell when she was fourteen years old. The next time they met she brought one home and shagged him, she offered legal advice to the other. Sometimes Zahra felt so distant from her it was as though the forty years of friendship between them were just a lesson in the unknowability of other people.

  “Why didn’t you have him thrown out?”

  “Because he came to my place of work needing help. We don’t throw anyone out unless they’re abusive or violent, and he was neither.”

  Maryam pressed her tongue against the top of her mouth and held it there until she was sure she could speak without yelling. “Does your job really not allow you to have human responses?”

  “In this instance, no.”

  Maryam had never heard Zahra sound more matter-of-fact. She pivoted so her back was against the wall, and Zahra did the same. They were side by side, shoulders touching, heads leaning toward each other. “Tell me everything, from the beginning.”

  Zahra told her, not in the usual crisp Zahra fashion that started at the beginning and went to the end, but in a circular way, looping back on itself, adding details, that sweaty-coat smell, it had lingered in the office even after he’d left, and did Maryam recall the smell in Jimmy’s car, that cologne of his, she’d forgotten it until today, she’d forgotten so many things that now came back, Zahra peeling away from the present into the thing they’d hardly ever talked about—that night, how she’d felt, the absolute terror of it, the certainty that something awful was going to happen that she couldn’t put a name to, hadn’t wanted to put a name to. Yes, Maryam said, yes.

  Eventually they came to silence. Maryam rested her hand on Zahra’s knee. Zahra laid her own hand on top of it. They sat like that for a while, and then Maryam refilled the egg cups with tequila and said, “I want to see what he looks like.”

  It was straightforward enough with Imij. Maryam followed Saba who followed Hammad who had only recently started following a JimmyHussain, whose profile picture was a man leaning against a Ferrari. How ordinary he looked, just a middle-aged man, slightly ridiculous with his thumbs-up pose beside a car that clearly wasn’t his. She navigated to his page. Picture after picture of Jimmy posing with cars—Jimmy and a Porsche, Jimmy and a Lamborghini, Jimmy and a Tesla. Zahra clicked on a thumbnail image near the bottom of the screen. A grainier picture: Jimmy with a mullet, acned skin, leaning against a Suzuki FX.