The hospital’s cement floors were polished to a dark, translucent onyx. A warm wind that carried the tang of the sea blew down its corridors. Latticed sections of its coral frame were open to the air.

Julia and Lucy were slumped on chairs in the corridor. She was talking to the trauma doctor when Storm walked in.

‘Where have you been all night?’

Julia cast a look at her. This was her question, by rights.

‘At Evan’s.’

Storm’s voice was hollow. He sounded half himself. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

Lucy answered for her. ‘We forgot about you.’ Her lips pulsed with a flickering distrust.

Storm walked out of the dim corridor and disappeared into the white blare of sunlight at its end. They all watched him go. He did not look back.

The drive from Bahari ya Manda was a negative copy of the one they had made in the middle of the night two days before. Now the driver overtook languidly. Julia sat in front, holding voluble conversations about the increasing price of water and petrol with him. She watched as Julia gesticulated emphatically but abstractly, unable to hear her words over the rush of air through the windows as she called people on her mobile and conducted terse, animated conversations as she made plans for the funeral.

Zebu cows grazed next to the road. Goats and their child pursuers clattered on the half-weeded paths on the shoulder of the road. She thought she saw a bat hawk slice the air, swooping from a tree to an electricity line on the other side of the road.

She missed the ordinary life of the road, which had vanished with the crisis, the mango baskets and jute bags of makaa stationed along the road, the Saturday markets, with their piles of clothing set out on the ground on burlap bags, smoke from mahindi cooking, the men who walked by the side of the road, shirts rippling in the wake of buses and trucks streaming past them. She even missed the policemen who waited in the shade next to invisible speed bumps, or the motorcycle taxi drivers who flung themselves headlong onto the road without looking in an attempt to die young.

A village wedding had gone ahead despite the lockdown, she saw. They passed its tottering marquee and morose-looking guests sitting on plastic chairs with their elbows on their knees, music hurling from a hastily erected pyramid of speakers that looked as if it would collapse before the end of the day. She saw the thin minarets of mosques painted mint and apricot, the maze of roadside shambas and their cargo of bitter kale and pumpkin.

Her uncle was gone. She tried to absorb the fact. The bullet had hit his shoulder. He would have been back to normal within a month. But his heart rebelled against the intrusion. The heart attack happened as he was being prepped for theatre. Bill would have had no idea he had a heart condition. It was not at all uncommon that such conditions went undiagnosed. Left-dominant arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, the doctor at Bahari ya Manda had confirmed. She had studied it but never diagnosed it in a patient. They had tried adrenalin, the defibrillator, even CPR. She watched from the back of the theatre, feeling increasingly desperate. She knew – she would think this later – that he was not going to respond. Sometimes you just knew.

She felt pity for him, also a nameless emotion that panicked her if she approached it. She took refuge in ordinary shame. It was an armed robbery attempt, insurgents looking for loot, that was all. It had all happened so fast and it had been as violent as she had feared, but neither had she been convinced it would really happen. She had thought she could protect them. And if she couldn’t, that she would save them.

They passed the saline flats of mangroves. Giant egrets perched in their branches, looking out to sea. The mudflats shone like slate. The coast gets under your skin, Margaux’s voice floated to her, an uncharacteristically sentimental pronouncement she made one of those nights at Reef Encounters. You want to get away, you say it’s too hot to think, nothing ever happens here, but then as soon as you leave you start planning to return.

They turned off at the Estate road, whose entrance was flanked with two pickup trucks of armed security guards. They passed the signs for Oleander House, Zanj Mansion. Margaux was right; the coast was an anesthetic. For a while, it had been possible to forget oneself here, along with the world, and history. But Ali and Al-Nur had returned history to its shores. History had rediscovered this somnolent backwater. It would prod it into the now.

They passed through the gate of the house. On either side the servants were lined up, hands pressed together, faces drawn. As the car came to a halt she began to hear a low murmur. They were chanting a single word, so low it was almost under their breath: Pole.

A mound of freshly dug earth marked where Charlie the dog lay. Storm must have been there and had buried him. On his grave was a bouquet of bougainvillea. Lucy got out of the car and went to stand over the fresh earth. Julia shot out of the passenger seat and into the house.

She hesitated on the drive. Lucy’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. Her cheeks were stained with dried tears.

‘Aren’t you coming in, Rebecca?’

She followed Lucy into the house. In the kitchen Julia stood with her back against the breakfast bar. She gave them a plain look. ‘I have so much to do.’

Storm was there. He had been waiting near the infinity pool.

‘The man,’ he said. ‘What did you say to him?’

‘I told him not to harm the family. That no good would come of it.’

‘Did you know they were coming?’ Storm said.

‘You weren’t even here.’ Lucy’s face was ashen.

Storm ignored her. ‘Why do you speak Arabic?

‘I have to, for my work. I’ve worked for five years in Arabic-speaking countries.’

She looked at Julia. Her thought was that her aunt might do something – take the whole thing away with a wave of her hand, with the demure diamond wedding ring that clutched her fourth finger. But Julia’s eyes were glossy. Her gaze was pitched over and beyond them, out to sea.

Storm had not looked at her – really looked at her – since she had arrived. She sought him out, tried to find his eyes. He had turned away. He no longer looked like himself, or he did, but like an effigy, a statue that had been abandoned in the rain.

This is what you get, the voice inside her head savage, for the first time in months, for having anything to do with him. He is a boy. Her rage was so close to the surface of her skin she worried it would spill out through her eyes.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Julia said, finally. She was relieved to hear the authority in her aunt’s voice. ‘Rebecca has nothing to do with any of this.’

They stood in the living room in a triangle: her, Storm, Lucy, angled towards Julia, who now stood in front of them, who was not the same woman they had known until only two days before. It was hard to know what had changed. A hollow grandeur had taken up residence. But there was something else, indefinite, which was not engineered by grief.

Julia walked across the living room, towards the pool. She wore patchwork linen trousers and silver thong sandals with little wings on their straps, where they clutched her ankles. She walked into the garden. They watched as a trio of Amani sunbirds unruffled themselves from the neem tree and hovered for a moment in the air. They followed Julia to the edge of the garden, before shooting up into the sky in a flash of a second. They watched the birds disappear into the air.