Fary was very, very moving. Her voice was soft, like the lapping of the river against fishermen’s canoes on quiet mornings. Fary’s smile was the dawn, her ass round as dunes in the Lompoul desert. Fary had eyes that were both doe and lioness. At times an earth-shattering tornado, at others an ocean of tranquility. God’s truth, I would have lost Mademba’s friendship to win Fary’s love. Luckily, Fary chose me over Mademba. Luckily, my morethan-brother deferred to me. It was because Fary chose me in front of everyone that Mademba stepped aside.

He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

When they were deciding whose place to go back to, he said they could go to his, but she should know he lived with his parents. She was amused again, said “very unusual” and kissed him, lightly holding his face between cool, pale hands. At her flat, which was decorated like an adult’s, with paintings and wooden furniture, he felt like a mortal who’d climbed Mount Olympus and with one outstretched, trembling hand, touched the breast of a god. It became one of his favourite memories, making him smile whenever he thought of it. But it never occurred to him to ask her out again. In later years, he couldn’t understand why. He suspected that this was a chance of happiness blithely overlooked.

James was twenty-seven and never had a boss again. Until that moment, he and Roland had lived as employees, as if in the warm, dark, cosy-fetid hold of a ship. What happened up at the helm was not their concern. Their preoccupations were how to get a better position, and the whims and characters of their superiors and colleagues. Even James had never cared about what was best for McKinsey. Now, however, they were up and exposed. The wind blew away the comfy indoor reek; the horizon was a wide blue empty circle around them, as if the ship were the fluttering needle on a gigantic compass. And they had to choose the direction.

James was suddenly, utterly, exhausted. He should have foreseen this. Everyone loved Roland. James loved him. For the first time since their trip to Lochnagar in the purple Lamborghini, he felt himself to be alone in the world. Nothing had changed since he was a teenager. He hadn’t, after all, left himself behind. Slowly, he reasoned his way through the matter at hand. Perhaps if he’d been less reasonable, he’d still have her. “Well, if Alice and me didn’t match up, that doesn’t mean you and her shouldn’t try. It’s a question of compatibility not… possession. It’s not like I’ve got any claims on her.”