Two O'Clock in the Morning

She said it at two o'clock in the morning on the eleventh of April and she said it to a room she believed was empty.

Not to Amira. That is the whole of it. Nusrat Qureshi had watched her daughter fall asleep in a chair at about half past midnight — she had checked, twice, the way you check a child — and she said it at two in the morning, quietly, in Urdu, to nobody at all.