Mahira Hassan couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed – the right-hand side of the mattress always hers – unable to drift off as she tried to fight back the barrage of thoughts that thundered through her brain. There was usually the incessant rumble of her husband’s snoring in the bed beside her, and his being away with work again should have meant a much-needed night of uninterrupted peace. For twenty-six years Mahira had been able to count on her fingers the number of nights she had spent without her husband sleeping by her side, but the last year had seen him away with work more often. Rather than missing him, she more often than not these days found herself glad of the break.

She wondered whether he was asleep in his hotel room, imagining that he would be. Youssef always slept soundly. How could he sleep so deeply, she wondered, knowing everything that had happened? How would he react to the news of what had happened again that evening?

She heard a noise on the landing; the soft padding of feet descending the staircase. Slipping from beneath the duvet, she slid her bare feet into the slippers that waited at the bedside and reached for the dressing gown draped over a chair. Edging around the bed, she left the room and headed downstairs.

In the kitchen, Syed was standing at the fridge, illuminated in the darkness by its strip light. He was wearing a dressing gown and his bare feet were exposed, showing a shock of thick dark hair at his ankles. Her eldest son had once been such a source of pride – a good child, hard-working and respectful – but age had changed him. Sometimes Mahira would experience thoughts as she was looking at him – strange, unwelcome ideas that she didn’t think it natural for a mother to feel. She loved her son, but she didn’t like the person he had become. The thought felt dirty, sinful.

She was his mother. Surely anything he had become was in some way her doing?

Syed turned slowly, sensing someone behind him.

‘How many times?’ Mahira said, gesturing to the orange juice carton in his hand. ‘Use a glass.’

She moved to the cupboard, took a glass from one of the shelves and put it on the worktop in front of him, banging it down with a force greater than she had intended. Her son took the glass and half-filled it.

‘This has to stop, Syed.’

He glanced at his mother over the rim of the glass as he drank. ‘It’s just orange juice,’ he said, his lips curling into a smirk. He shook his head, flicking a wave of dishevelled hair from his face.

He had been such a handsome boy growing up, Mahira thought. He had known it, but it hadn’t spoiled him. Now, his arrogance and anger were making him ugly. Exasperated, her hands moved to her hips. Where had this insolence come from? This wasn’t how they had raised their sons. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’

‘Speak to Jameel in the morning,’ Syed told her, before draining the last of the juice. He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

Mahira tutted. Her hands slid from her hips and slipped into the pockets of her dressing gown. ‘It’s always something to do with you, Syed. Every time there’s a fight, you’re there in the background somewhere.’

Syed went to the sink, turned on the tap and briefly held his used glass beneath the flow of cold water before standing it upside down on the draining board. ‘Defending my brother’s honour.’

‘Rubbish,’ Mahira said with a sigh. ‘Goading him, more like. Don’t you think this family has been through enough without you making things worse?’

When her son stepped towards her, she felt a ripple of fear that began in her stomach and raced up to her throat. She suspected it was foolish of her, yet there was always an element of doubt; a nagging thought that ticked at the back of her brain, reminding her not to be complacent. Syed was not to be trusted, not completely. She had seen the results of his anger. She had seen the way his silences could fester over time, manifesting themselves in outbursts of violent rage. Who was to say they wouldn’t one day be directed at his own family?

‘When are you going to see things as they really are?’ he challenged. ‘If people left us alone, we wouldn’t need to fight. As it is, there’s hardly a day we go out without some idiot insulting us. You want us to avoid people, is that it? What would you have us do – stay locked up in this place forever?’

He eyed the room with contempt, as though ‘this place’ had become unrecognisable as home. The truth, she knew, was that it never had been home. Their home had been back in Cardiff, where the children had grown up. Uprooting their lives had been done with the best of intentions, but it was already proving to be a mistake; one she knew there was no going back from. Where had she gone wrong? Mahira wondered. She had done everything she could, given them everything she had, yet it never seemed to be enough. No matter how hard she had tried to keep her boys on the right path, Syed had been intent on dragging himself elsewhere, taking the rest of them with him.

‘You can’t control how other people behave,’ she told him, ‘but you can control how you react to it. You don’t have to fight, Syed. You don’t have to encourage Jameel to fight. You have the choice to walk away.’

With a roll of his eyes, Syed stepped past her and headed back to the hallway. ‘No we don’t.’

She sat at the kitchen table and listened to her son go back upstairs. She wouldn’t go back to bed now; there was no point. She wouldn’t sleep, not after this. She waited, lost within her worry, the ticking of the clock on the far wall and the whirring of the fridge the only sounds to break through her thoughts. When those thoughts threatened to take her to places she didn’t want to visit, she got up and went to the sink to wash properly the glass that her son had left unclean.

From the worktop where she had left her mobile charging before she had headed up to bed earlier that evening, the phone began to ring. Mahira crossed the room quickly, not wanting the noise to disturb the house. She wondered who might be calling her, knowing that at this time of night it was only likely to signal bad news.

No number. She answered, and her fears were substantiated.