We clinked bottles and smiled, but his words stung because the life I’d imagined for myself had slipped through my inattentive fingers. It was not the place that was a backwater, it was me. My spirit had eddied into the shallows of domesticity and beached itself. I had let John down because I had let myself down by immuring my combative originality, which he’d always valued and loved. Yes, my brother’s words stung –look how long I have remembered them- but they were a gift: he would not me forget that I had once known other things and made other plans.

You are deceiving me, abi?’ I followed him to the door, grappling for words to tell him I did not really want to fight with him, to explain that I was afraid that he would leave me and I would be all alone in the world again. ‘Akin, God will deceive you, I promise you. God will deceive you the way you are deceiving me.

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?

But I think I did believe that love had immense power to unearth all that was good in us, refine us and reveal to us the better versions of ourselves.

At first, I saw it as an enormous change in the man I knew, but that notion did not survive reflection. What presumption is involved in attributing change to him when all that can be said is that I had come to know something about him that I had not known before?