13th November 1997. Cairo, Egypt. 03:40 hrs

You lie, there on the floor, with your jacket spread over you. I watch your shoulders rise and fall, hear the steady sigh of your breathing as you sleep. In the light from the street I can see the fresh bandage pale on your left forearm, and the torn, blood-stained gash on your left trouser leg, just below your waist. Whenever I see you, mon amour, you are like this – cut or bruised or shot. And I know that inside the damage is worse.

Last night, when I asked you to intercept those policemen, I thought I might never see you again. Forgive me, Claymore, but I was ready to sacrifice you to save myself and Samira’s daughters. I think back and I know this to be the truth. What am I becoming? Am I so obsessed that I would wish you dead? Or, perhaps, did I trust you to keep the policemen away? Knowing you as I do, should I be surprised at the state you are in? I know now that you would do anything for me. It is a terrible realisation, a hateful responsibility, one that I did not ask for. And yet, when the time came, I deployed you as one would a soldier in a battle, knowing what the consequences might be. And you obeyed.

And now you are here, sleeping so close to me.

I shiver and pull the bedclothes up around my neck. We share a room, but not a bed. A bond, but not a life.

The two girls are asleep in the lounge room, one on the settee, the other on cushions our hostess laid on the floor and fashioned into a mattress with a fitted bed sheet. They are good girls. Samira has raised them well, despite everything she has had to contend with. They did not complain once. I know that, after everything we have been through together, they trust me.

Yesterday, when you joined us in the taxi, you sat in the back seat, beside the girls. Your right hand was dark with blood and you kept it pushed down on your leg. Thank God it was night. You looked me in the eyes and told the taxi driver to go to Zamalek. Your Arabic is as rough as ever.

Hello, beautiful, you said in English, gazing into my eyes. I could see the pain there. The pain of your wounds, but also the damage I have done you over these past years.

I tried to respond, but something held me back. Was it the shock of having you so close again, of seeing your blood dripping to the floor of the taxi, the thought of all that we could have shared? Every time I thought I might speak, something held me back, so that the longer I remained silent, the more hollow anything I might say would sound. There was – there is – so much to say. And yet, as we drove through the night-lit city, I said nothing, until the echo of your two words filled the small space inside the car to rupturing.

I do not feel beautiful, Claymore. Quite the opposite. I sent you into a fight I knew might you cost your life. I feel dirty and befouled. I made a whore of myself. The widow-whore. How many of my sisters have been forced down this road of ugliness? And yet I chose it. My heart breaks. I have violated, and been violated. And worse, I have been made to betray my convictions. I am a murderer. And I know that, soon, I shall have to tell you all of this, and shatter your illusions of me. I am ugly.

But then, as we crossed the Nile into Zamalek, you reached out to me. You touched me on the shoulder with your stump. I reached up and put my hand over it, and you did not pull away. I sat in the darkness, not caring what the taxi driver might think, and ran my hands over the intimate, bloody topography of that calloused surface. Then I closed my eyes and traced my fingers along the big veins up the warm inside of your forearm and into the soft damp crook of your elbow. I know you could feel my hands quivering. Do you know, Claymore? Do you understand?

And then we arrived. You told the driver to stop in an alley behind a newish apartment building. I paid. We stood in the darkness and watched the taxi disappear. Then you led us through the streets of Zamalek. We walked another fifteen minutes. I could see you limping, cradling your arm. Finally we came to a crumbling, old pre-revolution apartment block. We climbed the stairs and came in here.

I remember you mentioning your friend Atef when we first met in Yemen, that time we walked out to the ocean side of the crater in Aden. You had brought a picnic dinner, which we ate on the rocks as we watched the sun go down over the Indian Ocean. It was very beautiful, and it seemed as if we were alone at the edge of the world. I complimented you on the food, and you told me that Atef, your friend, had made everything. I had only agreed to come with you because I needed information from you. But I know now that even then I loved you.

Atef’s wife is a nurse at one of the local hospitals. She has cleaned your wounds, sewed you, bandaged you well. She gave you painkillers and a sedative, and you slept. Not before insisting that I take the bed, of course. Sometimes, chéri, your old-fashioned ways are ridiculous.

I resist the temptation to wake you. I have been lying here for more than an hour, watching you sleep. I know that tomorrow I will have to tell you everything. I also know that I will lie. I will say I am telling you everything. But I will not. How can I? I now know how difficult it has been for you, opening your past to me. I understand now, chéri. And I also know that you will want to take me away, and I will have to tell you that it is impossible for me to run.

And yet there is time, now, before the sun rises. I imagine myself creeping to your side, kissing your face, pulling you into bed, holding you tight and close and warm until the day comes. And yet I do not. My husband is not yet one month dead. Hours ago, a man forced himself inside me. And yet, dear God, I lie here in flames. Desire for you consumes me, eats away at everything I was taught to respect and believe, burns away my morals, as if it were not the greatest gift of God, but a vile disease over which I am powerless.

Allah, most merciful, if you are out there, guide me.