There was a question Nasreen could not stop asking. She wanted to know, once he realised what was happening, if he regretted sanctioning those hours at that table; she wanted to know if, during those last moments, he hated them, as she did now. She was convinced he must have, even as she hoped he didn’t.

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.

OK, we’ll tell her you dug the grave.’ It’s the truth – stretched, but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?

Or else she would be taken over by an inexplicable rage, saying that I, the only person she loved, deserved the ugliest death because I did not love her enough. Why did you curse me so, Mother; why did you not stop her cursing, Father? Though the truth is, I do not want to know the answers. I resent even thinking about the questions—what others and the world have done should not define one as much as what one has done to oneself.

He shrugged. “It was just politics. You know those guys will say anything. But why would you stop being a Christian? Why would you make up a new religion?” “I didn’t make it up. It was something I had been thinking about since I was 12. It was—is—a collection of truths. It isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t the only truth. It’s just one collection of thoughts that are true.