Nasreen chewed for several moments, staring at Alia before answering. “Pushing boundaries. That’s the only way to change things. You ask for more than they’ll give, but as much as you deserve. Have you learned nothing from this country?

Nothing was neutral, there was always something attached to it, clinging to it, triggering, pulling, insisting, asking her to look, telling her not to forget. She’d tried explaining this one to Adam, but he had shaken his head and insisted that she was going to exhaust herself, that it sounded like she was living several lives at once, all stacked up on her, weighing her down, bottoming her out. Waleed had understood, a little. He had told her it was the same for him, to walk through the city was to walk with ghosts.

He just kept thinking, if people are hurting each other now, when we are at our most hopeful, what’s going to happen in ten years, in twenty years? So he hadn’t read it. Didn’t mean he didn’t love her. Should he say that? Right now?

Waleed offered his friend a non-committal smile, and the two men began to walk back to his place in a companionable silence. He didn’t tell Rashaad that he hoped never to stop being angry, not because he wanted to live in a state of perpetual rage, but because the anger was a way of remembering.

On insomnia-plagued nights, she told herself that she could have learned to live with and inside those stories, she would have found a way to meet them, offer to bandage him up, return him whole to himself. It was only much later when she realised that it wasn’t the stories, it was the constant fluctuation between being showered with attention and then abruptly ignored, being loved with a totalising force, and then treated with an arctic disregard. It was the knowledge that, at any moment, she could be made invisible: that terrible swing between being alive and dead.