Novels by Ayisha

October. She was fifteen weeks along and visible now in the specific unambiguous way of someone past the hiding stage and simply in the next one. Victoria had been coming to Sunday lunches. This had started three weeks after the board meeting, tentatively, with a phone call that was different from all the previous Victoria calls — quieter, less produced. She had asked if she could come for Sunday lunch and Alison had said yes and Eric had said nothing except to set an extra place at the table. The first Sunday lunch had been careful. The second less so. By the fourth Victoria had brought a dish — prepared carefully, the kind that required knowing someone's preferences — and set it on the counter and said she had remembered Alison mentioning she liked this. Alison looked at the dish. She looked at Victoria. "Thank you," she said. "It is nothing," Victoria said. And then, because she was learning: "I wanted to." They had lunch. Eric was quieter than Alison during these lunches —

They came back from Shanghai on a Friday and the city felt both familiar and slightly strange in the way of places you have been away from long enough to require reacquaintance. She stood at the east window of the penthouse at six on Saturday morning with her coffee and the August light coming through and thought about Mrs. Chen and the photographs and her father laughing and her mother at the market. He appeared at six-twenty. He came to the window. "Good to be back?" he said. "Yes," she said. "And sad to be back. Both." "Both is correct," he said. She looked at the city. She thought about what Mrs. Chen had said. She thought about what that meant — the specific gladness of a parent who sees the life their child built and understands that it is real and good. She was going to build something worth being glad for. She already had. She was going to keep building. "The board meeting outcome," she said. "Webb sent the formal notice while we were away." "I saw," he said. "The

They spent six days in Shanghai. She showed him the building and the market and the park and the street where she had grown up and the window of the apartment — a different family in it now, curtains she did not recognise — and the restaurant two corners away that had been there when she was fourteen and was still there. She showed him who. Chen, whom she had arranged to meet for lunch on the fourth day. Mrs. Chen arrived at the restaurant with a small paper packet of photographs and set them on the table. She and Alison went through them one by one while Eric sat beside her and watched. Her mother is at the market. Her mother is at the park. Her parents were together at a restaurant she recognised, her father laughing at something off-camera the way he always had. She held the photograph of her father laughing. Eric put his hand briefly over hers. She let him. Mrs. Chen watched this exchange with the clear-eyed warmth of someone who had lived long enough to recognise thin

They went to Shanghai in the third week of August. She had not been back in four years. She had been preparing herself for the emotional weight of it — the specific quality of returning to a place that had been home and was now both familiar and foreign. What she had not prepared for was how much easier it would be because he was there. They landed in the morning. The heat was the heat she remembered — specific and immediate, the summer heat of a city that had been doing this for centuries. She stood outside the terminal and breathed it in and felt something in her chest she did not have a complete word for. He stood beside her. "The heat," she said. "Yes," he said. "It is exactly how I described it." "You described it very accurately," he said. They went to the hotel. She took him to the building on Fumin Road first because he had asked for it first. He stood in front of it for a long time. She stood beside him and watched him look and thought about November, all those mont

She told Eric about Victoria's visit when she got home. Not the Thursday lunch — she had already told him about that. The visit that had happened on the morning of the board meeting, when Victoria had appeared at the building lobby at nine-fifteen and asked to speak with Alison directly. She had not told him at the time because the board meeting was in ninety minutes and she had not wanted to add anything to his morning. She told him now. "She came to the building," he said. "Yes. She was waiting in the lobby. She wanted to tell me that whatever the board decided, she was going to be different. She said it without managing it. In the lobby, at nine-fifteen, before the meeting." He was very still. "What did you say," he said. "I said I knew," Alison said. "Because I did." He looked at the kitchen counter. "She has never—" He stopped. "She has never come to me that way. Unmanaged. Without preparation." He looked at Alison. "She came to you." "Yes," Alison said. He held her ga

The morning of the board meeting she woke at five and lay in the dark for ten minutes and then got up. She made tea instead of coffee. She stood at the window. The city was dark at the edges, the specific quality of a day that had not yet decided what it was going to be. He appeared at six. He poured his coffee and came to the window and they stood together in the silence that had been one of the constants of the year. "Ready?" he said eventually. "Yes," she said. "The document." "Printed in triplicate in the folder by the door." He looked at her. "When did you—" "Last night. After you went to bed." He held her gaze. "Thank you," he said. "It is just preparation," she said. "You know I prepare." "I know," he said. "I know exactly how you prepare and what it costs and I am thanking you for it." She looked at the city. "Drink your coffee," she said. He drank it. They went to work. At ten-thirty the board meeting began in the large conference room on the executive floor.