They had met about nine times in twenty-eight years.
Two weddings as children, which neither of them remembers and which four aunts describe differently.
A funeral in 2016. Her father's brother. He was twenty-two and she was nineteen and they did not speak at all, and he carried a tray.
A wedding in 2019. They talked for about forty minutes by a fire exit and both of them, separately, went home and thought well, that was fine, which is the single most dangerous sentence in this entire business.
Eid in 2021, at his mother's, at which the two of them were left alone in a kitchen for eleven minutes so transparently that Amira started laughing at minute four and could not stop.
"They've gone."
"They have all gone," said Hamza Sethi. "Every single one of them. My aunt has taken a tray out of this kitchen that she brought in ninety seconds ago."
"Your mother did a thing with her eyes."
"My mother has been doing a thing with her eyes since 2018 and I have been pretending not to see it since 2018, and we are both extremely tired."
They talked about a car park.
That is what she has never been able to explain to anybody, including him, including at four in the morning nine years later: that the eleven minutes she thought about for the next four years were eleven minutes about hospital car parking.
She had been on nights. She had been fined thirty-one pounds by a machine at the Queen Elizabeth for reasons that were not her fault and were, she maintained, structurally impossible.
And Hamza Sethi — thirty-one now, twenty-seven then, an architect for four years — had put his tea down and asked her four questions about the layout of that car park, and then said:
"That barrier is on the wrong side."
"It's — what?"
"The barrier. If you have got a night shift entrance and a day entrance and one barrier and the barrier is on the north side, then everybody coming off a night shift crosses the flow of everybody arriving, and that is why the machine cannot read a plate at seven in the morning and it is why you got fined."
Amira Qureshi looked at him.
"Say that again."
"It is a bad car park," said Hamza Sethi. "I am very sorry. It is genuinely a bad car park and I have been trying not to say so for about nine minutes."
Then somebody came in for the tray, and that was the end of it, and she went back to Birmingham that night and he went back to Manchester.
He did not ring her.
She has asked him about that exactly once, in the June of the year everything happened, at eleven o'clock at night, on the telephone.
"Why didn't you ring me?"
"Because you were twenty-four," said Hamza Sethi, "and you had four years of training in front of you and about ninety people who wanted this to happen, and I was not going to be the ninety-first."