In a surprisingly quick motion, she opened the door and pushed me inside.

I was in a study, dark save for an up-lighter on the floor, directed at a large mirror which reflected the dim light on to the bookshelves and sofas and Ed, sitting in an armchair, rocking a millefiori paperweight in his hands. The door closed behind me.

‘Is this about me or are you just in a bad mood?’ I asked, staying near the door.

‘Too much these days is about you. I don’t know how that happened. I can’t seem to stop thinking about you.’

‘And this is a terrible thing?’ I walked up to him as I spoke, resting my hand on his shoulder when I came to the end of the question.

‘Why did you call me?’ He was looking down at the paperweight, which he was twisting as though to pull the clear glass off the enclosed blue, green and yellow flowers. ‘I had just convinced myself that you wouldn’t call, that you weren’t thinking about me. That it was over before it had really begun. Then you called. And hearing your voice, Aasmaani, it was like… like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and the world is colour. Remember that haiku of yours? How did she recognize emerald, ruby and yellow when all she’d known was grey? She dreamed of colour, that’s how she knew. And that’s why she had to return home to grey Kansas. Because there’s nothing more frightening than stepping into the dream closest to your heart. If it lets you down, you won’t even have a dream of colour any more, you’ll have nothing but grey.’

‘Is it really so impossible to believe I won’t let you down?’

He looked up at me, finally. ‘You already did. When I realized you weren’t calling because of me. You were calling to ensure you kept getting those damned messages from your beloved Poet. If it was the CEO giving you the letters, you’d have been calling him instead.’

I sat on the arm of his sofa. ‘Do you know the story of Merlin and Nimue?’

‘Yes. She imprisoned him in a tree.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it. She needs something from him. But she can’t get it unless she falls in love with him.’ Then I did what I’d been wanting to do since the first time I saw Ed. I ran my fingers through the thickness of his hair. ‘I don’t deny the Poet’s messages are what brought us close, or that they continue to make it essential that you don’t step out of my life. But, Ed, do you really think that if the CEO had been the one to give me the messages I would be sitting here playing with his hair?’

‘No. He’s bald.’ He glared at me as he said it. And then — it was like alchemy — he smiled. He put an arm around my waist and pulled me on to his lap.

‘Eid Mubarak,’ he said. ‘How’s your day been?’

‘It’s had a couple of low moments, but on the whole, pretty wonderful.’

‘Am I the low moments?’

‘You were most of them. There’s also a whole phone thing going on which is starting to get to me.’

‘What phone thing?’ He reached up to my hair and pulled off the band that tied it up.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Probably just a crank caller. I’m being paranoid. Result of getting a lecture from an esteemed journalist about staying under the radar.’

‘You’ve lost me. If you ever cut your hair, Aasmaani, I’ll run through the streets wailing like a madman. What journalist, what radar? What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing very effective.’ I held up a lock of my hair over his upper lip to see what he’d look like with a flowing moustache. ‘Unless alerting reporters and Archivists and doctor’s sisters and God knows who else to my attempts at discovering what happened to the Poet can be termed effective.’

All the playfulness vanished from his face as he took hold of me by the shoulders. ‘Aasmaani, you stupid woman. What have you been doing?’

I pulled myself away, and stood up. ‘Don’t talk to me in that tone.’

‘What have you done?’ He was standing up too, now.

‘Nothing. Nothing that led anywhere. I went looking for answers about the Poet, that’s all.’

‘You did what?’ He caught my shoulders again. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe everyone was right all along? That really powerful agencies were involved with his death?’

‘He’s not dead.’

He slammed his hand on the desk. ‘Whatever happened to him sixteen years ago, Aasmaani, someone — maybe several someones — planned it, and executed it, and has kept it a secret all these years. And you just decide to wake up one morning and let the world know that you’ve decided to be Nancy Drew.’

‘Hey!’

‘Don’t “hey” me. These people are dangerous. And they’re without compunction. Who do you think you’re dealing with here, some incompetent cartoon goons? They can hurt you. They can kill you. They can do to you what they did to him. And that may not matter to you, and it certainly won’t matter to them, but it goddamn well matters to me. Do you have any idea how much it matters to me?’

I didn’t know what to say to that. I just stood, looking at him, wondering where this terrifying and terrified stranger had come from.

What an odd life I’ve had, I thought unexpectedly. Because it was my life I didn’t stop very often to think how it must look from the outside, or how distinct it was from other lives. But here was Ed, almost delirious with panic because I had been asking questions about the Poet’s death — seeing his reaction I couldn’t help but feel silly about those moments of concern I had about ringing telephones or men wrapped in shawls. This was nothing. Compared to what I’d grown up with, this was nothing. I was nothing. There wasn’t a thing I had yet done to shake the complacency of those men who were so assured of their ability to know exactly what was going on that they wouldn’t strike unless someone posed a threat. I posed no threat. I had, to all intents and purposes, come no closer to finding Omi than in all those years I believed he was dead. That was the terrifying part. And I had no idea how to start looking for him. That, that was what was unendurable.

‘You don’t really believe he’s alive, do you?’ I said at last.

‘Oh God, Aasmaani.’ He stepped back and covered one side of his face with his hand. ‘I don’t care if he’s alive or not. I don’t care about him. But you. You…’ He came closer to me. ‘What if he really is dead?’

I shook my head. ‘No. It’s him. I know it is. And it’s like a miracle.’ I was speaking slowly now as for the first time I tried to explain what it meant to me to read those pages. ‘It’s like… stepping into a dream of colour.’

‘I see.’ He shrugged. It took me a moment to understand why that mechanism of self-defence had come into play.

‘I’m sorry, Ed.’

He shook his head. He was unshaven, and I could imagine how his stubble would feel against my lips, the rasp of it. ‘How do you not resent him? The Poet. How? My mother… everyone she ever… I always…’ He stopped, drew a long breath.

‘You resent your stepfather?’

Ed made a dismissive gesture. ‘That nonentity? Hardly! I resented all the others.’

‘Oh.’

‘And I resented her for having them.’

‘We’ve all got our different wounds, Ed. At least she didn’t ever leave you. See, that’s what I obsess about. The leaving.’ He stood there with his hands jammed into his pockets and I could see the young boy who jumped off a tree and broke his leg to distract his mother away from everything else in the world.

And I had hidden Omi’s postcard from Mama.

It was the second time in twenty-four hours that I had felt this tug of recognition towards the man opposite me — but with Mirza that recognition had only led to self-pity. With Ed, it brought on something more complicated. Here stood a man of such intelligence and ability — a man of such potential — unable to regard the scars of adolescence as markers of injuries he’d survived rather than as evidence of the pain inflicted on him. And what reason did he have to be scarred? Because he was something less than her entire world?