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.
"I would have liked to see your nikah."
Amira Qureshi did not open her eyes.
She lay in a chair in a side room on level four with a coat over her and her eyes shut, and listened to her mother say the only thing she said about any of it in eleven weeks, and then say nothing else, and then go back to sleep at about half past two.
She got up at four and stood in a corridor for eleven minutes.
Here is what she thought about, in order, and she has been entirely honest about all of it since, including the parts that are not creditable.
That the number is sixty.
That sixty is a good number and that she has told about four hundred people that a number is a good number and has never once believed it about her own.
That her mother has asked her for nothing in twenty-eight years. Not one thing. Not money, not a house, not a wedding, not grandchildren — and that this is not because she does not want them but because Nusrat Qureshi decided at some point in about 1998 that she was not going to be a woman who asked.
And that there is a man in Manchester who two women shook hands about over a teapot in 1997, and that Amira Qureshi has been dismantling the subject in under eleven seconds for nine years, and that she has his number because everybody in that family has everybody's number.
She did not ring him for four days.
She has been asked why about eleven times, mostly by him, and the honest answer is that she spent four days trying to find literally any other way of producing a nikah.
She got as far as a list. It is on the back of a drug chart and she has kept it.
1. Nobody.
2. Adnan from the trust board? No. No no no.
3. Tell her the truth, that there is nobody and there is not going to be anybody for four years, and let her have that.
4. Hamza.
Item three has a line through it that goes through the paper.