It felt unreal, after all these years. FX Jimmy was different from how Maryam remembered him—shorter, so young, his smile friendly. She rubbed her thumb across her finger pads, recalling a line of grease on the car seat; she’d been worried it would get on her favorite pair of jeans.

  She navigated all the way down to the bottom of his feed. There was nothing but the car photos.

  “Well, he likes cars and he’s improved his hairstyle,” Zahra said. “You’re not getting anything more than that.”

  “I can get more.”

  “Don’t,” Zahra said. And then, “Don’t tell me.”

  She stood up to walk to the kitchen, as if there were nothing in that sentence that needed to be explained.

  “Okay,” Maryam said, certain she understood.

  “He could be a very different man today,” Layla had said, when Maryam came home and told her about Zahra’s visitors. “Hammad sounds like the real arsehole in the situation.”

  Layla believed in the improvability of human character, which made her the only real idealist Maryam knew. Zahra didn’t fall into that category because Zahra didn’t believe people could become better; she just thought she could change the world by the force of her arguments.

  Maryam made the call standing beside her study window on the top floor of the house while Layla and Zola kicked a football around the garden in the late June twilight. Some parts of her life had to take place far out of Layla’s hearing. Golden Boy answered on the first ring, calling out Maryam’s name with a possibly drug-laced enthusiasm. He was on an island in the Caribbean that he was planning to buy with money from the deal Maryam had shepherded through to its conclusion.

  “But how can it be goodbye between us?” he’d said after Maryam’s final Imij board meeting. She was glad to be done with the company. There would be more trouble ahead, more Taheras, more pressure on governments to impose fines and criminal charges.

  She turned her back to the window so she was facing the far wall with its floor-to-ceiling Pistoletto mirror painting, two nude women dancing together in it, breasts almost grazing, the leaves from a potted ficus tree next to Maryam’s desk reflecting onto them. She looked away, toward the blank white door. “I wondered if you felt like doing me a favor?” she said, her voice dropping slightly.

  “I’ll give you this island if you want it,” he said. “But only if you’ll let me come and visit you here with no one but the seagulls to see us.”

  She laughed, made a joke about all the staff he’d need to clean up the seagulls’ mess, told him what she really wanted.

  “I’ve been going crazy trying to work out a parting gift for you,” he shouted down the phone. Definitely drugs.

  “And here it is,” she said, trying to match his tone of astonishment at how the universe was showing its favors by giving him exactly what he’d been searching for. He was so delighted by it all he didn’t even ask why JimmyHussain was of interest to her.

  After the call ended, she opened the window, rested her crossed arms on the frame, and watched the two figures at play below. The football spun toward the rose bed off Layla’s foot, Zola made a diving stop just inches from the thorny stems. Layla threw herself on top of Zola and the delighted screams that followed told her exactly what Layla was doing to try to get possession of the ball. “It’s a tackle, not a tickle!” Maryam called out, and they waved up to her and told her to stop being a work-bore and come and join them.

  A download link arrived in her in-box. She blew down a kiss and closed the window before going to sit at her desk with its twenty-seven-inch computer screen. One hundred and seventy-eight images, seventeen videos. The subject line said, Not very popular! Doesn’t get out much!

  She knew Layla was wrong about people changing, but even so she was surprised by how quickly she found the proof of it. The video was from last night. A girl, a teenager maybe, looking into a phone’s camera saying, “Look at these pervs.” She turned the camera to face a dance floor—it seemed to be a nightclub—and panned to two men standing to one side, watching a group of very young women in tiny dresses writhing against each other. They weren’t saying anything, the two men, Hammad and Jimmy, just watching. Watching with those Jimmy eyes that had watched her in the rearview mirror all through the car ride. The girl with the camera moved closer to them. “Hey, perverts,” she yelled. Jimmy turned his back to the camera, the same skinny neck that she’d seen from the backseat, and quickly walked away. Hammad blew the girl a kiss before following. She didn’t give up. No girlfear in this one, protected by the camera recording everything the men did. She plunged into the crowd calling out “Perv, perv,” until even Hammad picked up speed and followed Jimmy toward the exit. At the door Jimmy stopped and looked back at the girl as though he were regarding her from the front seat of an FX with tinted windows on Napier Road.

  Maryam zoomed in and in on him until he blurred into the nothing that he’d always been. He was the dime on which her life had turned. Not even a gold coin, just a dime. This preener, this poser. He had cost her so much: Karachi, Khan Leather, her grandfather. There would be no justice for that, not in any court of law. But there were older forms of justice. An eye for an eye. She zoomed out, returning with precision his cold, unyielding gaze.

  The first day of September, and London felt like itself again, late August’s barrage of sunshine finally depleted. During the summer there had been endless barbecues in gardens, picnics in parks, al fresco dinners, even, at long last for Maryam, a swim with her daughter in the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, which on a July day of record-breaking heat finally reached a temperature that a Pakistani body could lower itself into without feeling instantly deracinated. Not a Nigerian body, Layla had said, but in the end even she relented. Everyone had to say repeatedly how glorious it all was. A real summer! Two years in a row! But each weekend approached with a question hanging over it that was increasingly a demand: What will you do to make the most of the weather? Zahra’s parents had been visiting from Karachi and her father wanted to know what you could do to make the least of the weather. And now, thank god, it was done, though Shehnaz and Habib Ali had returned home before the weather broke.

  It had been cool during Zahra and Maryam’s Sunday walk and lunch had been indoors, with the glass doors closed. But now it was midafternoon, and just warm enough for everyone to troop out to the deck for coffee, which Zola insisted she was old enough to partake in, though young enough to only want it poured over a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She was offended when Maryam told her that this was already a real dessert, called affogato, and said she didn’t want it if the Italians had already thought it up. But a couple of minutes later she was spooning the melting coffee-drenched ice cream into her mouth while perched on the arm of Zahra’s chair, telling her of the devastating discovery that her best friend, Mark, who had lived one street away her whole life, was moving to Highgate. When she’d told him he couldn’t go, he said she was moving to Lagos for six whole months and would probably find a new best friend there.

  “Let me introduce you to the difference in meaning between the words friendship and propinquity,” Zahra said.

  Maryam smiled and stretched out on the sofa, her feet in Layla’s lap. Layla pressed her thumb against a pressure point on her sole. Zola had spent the previous night at Mark’s house, and this morning Maryam had woken to Layla’s mouth moving down her spine rather than the usual Zola-singing that announced it was time for breakfast.

  The pressure on her sole became more insistent, a signal.

  Maryam sat up on her elbows and took a sip of coffee, ignoring Woolf’s plaintive look. The dog had once licked up a coffee spill and hadn’t since stopped hoping for another taste. “So there’s a thing that’s going to be announced soon.”

  “Worrying use of passive voice,” Zahra said to Zola, who giggled, having just been introduced to this concept by her godmother.

  “There’s a campaign to get more investment into Britain. ‘Britain’s Open for Business.’ BOB, as Layla likes to call it. And I’m one of the people chosen to front it. I’ll be a global business envoy.”

  “This is a government campaign?” Zahra’s tone was neutral, waiting for the response before taking a position.

  But Zola was the one to explode when Maryam nodded. The Prime Minister was a sadistic flapjack, an absolute pimple pus–head. Here Zahra Khala was, spending her entire life trying to stop him from drowning people who were escaping from war zones. What was Mama doing, getting involved with one of his campaigns? That question wasn’t directed at Maryam, but at Zahra.

  Zahra looked over at Maryam. After that day in her flat, she hadn’t mentioned the High Table again, and Maryam hadn’t mentioned Hammad. Neither of them had brought up Jimmy. Zahra gave just the tiniest shake of her head and Maryam extended the palm of her hand toward Zola to say, Go ahead, then, destroy me.

  “Lots of very good people take government appointments,” Zahra said, wrapping her arm around Zola’s waist. “Children’s welfare, the climate crisis, refugees. There are government roles for all these things.” She looked at Maryam when she said, “The thing to focus on here is, your mama has been asked to do this because no one is better at what she does.”

  Only Zahra could make her feel so grateful for a compliment, as grateful as she’d been decades ago when Zahra said she was her only real friend and everyone else was in her life because of propinquity.

  “Do you know they call your mama the Czarina of Tech?” Layla said.

  “Will she have to be nice to the Prime Minister?” Zola, unrelenting.

  Zahra raised her hands to say, I’ve done all I can.

  “You know how you’re always complaining that Christobel shows off incessantly about her mother’s MBE?” Layla said. “Well, this is a much bigger deal.”

  That trumped all other concerns. Zola stood up and did the rooster-walk that was her signature celebration of every goal she scored.

  “Do you think the people who call Mama the Czarina of Tech know she still can’t put things in the recycling bag properly?”

  “Recycling is about as useful as squeezing a lemon into the ocean in the hopes of turning it to lemonade,” Maryam said, relieved that the conversation was moving on to more familiar ground. “While you all wash out your cans and place them in blue bags, I’m doing two things. One, investing in green tech that might actually save the planet. Two, buying property in New Zealand so if tech fails and the world collapses in flood or drought we can all go and live where we’re most likely to survive.”

  “Afraid I’ll be too busy looking after the climate refugees,” Zahra said. Zola said she’d be doing the same, and Zahra said could her generation please hurry up and take over the world.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll chloroform you both and drag you on to the plane,” said Maryam. Zola looked relieved.

  “She really will,” Layla said. “All of us, if she has to. And Woolf too.”

  The wolfhound got to her feet at the mention of her name, gracefully climbed up onto the empty garden chair, and curled herself into a ball.

  “What?” said Zola.

  “I think she’s decided she’s reached the stage in life when she shouldn’t have to sleep on the floor anymore,” Maryam said. They all laughed at the air of authority with which Woolf had done something she’d been trained out of as a puppy. The feeling of being a family settled on the four of them in the shared humor of this moment, which was constructed of so many moments that came before, stretching back years.

  The conversation swerved toward the discontinuation of the number 10 bus route from Hammersmith to King’s Cross, which had been such a feature of their twenties. Zola wandered into the garden, having no interest in the discussion beyond declaring that she was going to start taking buses on her own to visit Mark in Highgate. She cartwheeled her way down to Layla’s studio and slipped behind it. Her secret place among the blackberry bushes; she’d liked hiding there with her teddy bears as a toddler.

  Maryam closed her eyes, lying back once more. Layla and Zahra were talking about a mutual friend from Cambridge, how much she’d changed. She was boring now, a terrible thing to say about someone with no other faults. But it made them not want to meet her, though she lived so nearby. And as always happened when they discussed this friend and her terrible dullness (it was nothing new, Maryam had seen it right away twenty years ago), they decided they’d have to meet her for dinner soon because it had been so long, and they didn’t want her to think they were avoiding her, though oh god they so wanted to avoid her. Maryam smiled, didn’t interrupt. How she loved to hear them together, these two, every timbre of their voices so known that she could see the exact expressions on their faces without looking.

  “Mama,” she heard, and opened her eyes to see her daughter standing above her with the palms of her hands cupped, their contents hidden. She sat up, placed her own hands beneath Zola’s hands, her palm—lifeline, heartline—against her daughter’s skin. She saw Layla turn toward her, heard Zahra stop speaking midsentence. Zola smiled gravely at her. It was as though they all felt the same string tug through them, pulling them closer, though no one moved.

  Zola lifted her palms, separated them with a flourish. Blackberries fell into the hands Maryam raised as though in prayer—ripe-dark, glossy, bittersweet as summer’s end.

  Winter

  Maryam wondered if her two-hundred-thousand-pound donation entitled her to play “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” at Chequers on the grand piano that Winston Churchill had loved. Every now and then a Layla thought invaded her brain, and this one felt particularly satisfying, though she’d never act on it—not because of propriety but because it was Layla, not Maryam, who could play the Clash on the piano. Layla who, another two weeks from now, would be in Lagos with Zola.

  The Chancellor wafted up to her, his manner emollient since her Business Breakfast with tech leaders in New York had convinced the CEO of a leading internet company to keep his European headquarters in London after Brexit. In truth, the CEO had never seriously thought about moving out of London, but he’d known Maryam a long time, owed something of his early success to her investment, and was happy to overplay the significance of the breakfast to the Chancellor.

  “First time at Chequers?” the Chancellor said.

  “What would Churchill make of the two of us in the Great Hall?”

  He didn’t like that, neither the suggestion that she was his equal nor the reminder that they were both anomalies here, and did his usual thing of making eye contact over her head at someone else in the room. Maryam moved away, toward the Russian oligarch’s wife, whom she had befriended over the course of several High Table events. They’d discovered the pleasure of turning the country’s most influential men into awkward schoolboys every time they wandered off from the rest of the pompous gatherings with the explanation “women’s matters,” which covered a range of possible issues from saturated tampons to hooks that wouldn’t stay fastened to an unwillingness to walk down long corridors to a loo unaccompanied. Now she hoped that invoking “women’s matters” would allow them to leave the wood-paneled Great Hall with its oppressive paintings crammed onto the walls to wander through the rest of the Prime Minister’s country home. But the Prime Minister intercepted her along the way.

  “Let me tell you how to detect when a man in this room can’t be trusted,” he said, taking her by the elbow and leading her to a corner away from everyone else. A painting was mounted at eye level directly onto the wood paneling. A self-satisfied man looked back at them. Remarkable, how little the ruling class in England had changed over the centuries. Or perhaps power carried its particular stamp—there was nothing in the man’s expression that was unknown to her from her own upbringing. “This was painted by a lady artist and every man who wants to convince a woman of his sensitivity to the achievements of her sex brings her over and talks about it.”

  He smiled; she smiled in return to show she understood the joke and thought him clever and charming.

  “I should know more about art after all the years I’ve been with Layla. That’s my partner—she’s an artist.”

  If anything, his hold on her elbow tightened. “What I really want to know is how you did it.”

  “It?”

  “Found exactly what you needed to use against that man. Of course, I also want to know why.”

  “I found it the very old-fashioned way,” she said. “I hired private investigators. How else would I have done it?”

  “How else, indeed?” He dropped his hand. “You must have remarkable private investigators, to find that needle in a haystack you owned until recently.”

  “Yes, wasn’t that a funny coincidence?”

  The wife of the Russian oligarch swished up to them in her noisy silk dress with enormous sleeves, alerted by the earlobe-touching signal that Maryam had been sending her way.

  “The Chancellor was talking to me about this pasty fellow,” she said, smiling at the Prime Minister. The PM’s veneer dropped to reveal the ugliness of a man who can’t bear any form of insult. “Apparently the painter was a woman.”

  “Oh, ha. Yes,” the Prime Minister said. He winked at Maryam, conspiratorial.

  “It’s lovely here,” Maryam said, moving toward the window that looked out onto the vast manicured grounds. It was far too cold, the heating set for men in black ties rather than women in cocktail dresses. “But I’m sure you’ll want to escape to the sun at some point this winter.” He was known for his fondness for holidays by the sea. She said a friend of hers had a stunning island home, which is to say he owned the entire island. She knew he’d love for the Prime Minister to stay there. She showed him some pictures on her phone. The Prime Minister said, god, that looked like heaven. Conversation glided forward.