Home Fire

All this security around the house, and the nexus of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State is just going to waltz in on the arm of my son.”

“Don’t you ever refer to her in that way again. She’s the woman I’m going to marry.”

he told the man he loved most in the world about the woman he loved most in the world. Aneeka, he said. Yes, Pakistan—her mother raised in Karachi, her father a second-generation Brit whose parents were originally from Gujranwala.

Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.

What do you say to your father when he makes a speech like that? Do you say, ‘Dad, you’re making it okay to stigmatize people for the way they dress’?

The next year it was “Do you want to come?” and he didn’t seem to mind when his wife and children said no.

she reached for the phone and sent Eamonn a text: I’m sorry. I envy you your father. Mine died while being taken to Guantánamo. I want to explain it all to you.

He answered, earlier than she imagined he would be awake: Tell me where to meet you.

For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.

There he was—the man whom she had thought Eamonn looked just like before she’d spent enough mornings noticing the particulars of his face, his mannerisms.

Do you consider yourself British?” the man said.

“I am British.”

“But do you consider yourself British?”

“I’ve lived here all my life.”

Does the manager know you took it?”

“I was the manager.”

“You were the manager of a dry-cleaning shop and now you’re on your way to a PhD program in sociology?”

“Yes.”

“And how did that happen?”

“My siblings and I were orphaned just after I finished uni. They were twelve years old—twins. I took the first job I could find. Now they’ve grown up; I can go back to my life.”