Into The Trees Of Lickey Hills

A short story set in Birmingham’s Bangladeshi Community.

Written by Mujibur Rahman

Chapter 1 – Night Shifts And Nightmares

The bus juddered as it rolled past the halal chicken shop on Stratford Road, its windows smeared with rain and greasy fingerprints. Outside, neon signs bled into each other: “24hr Off Licence”, “Desi Grill”, “Money Transfer – Best Rate to Bangladesh”. Birmingham at 6am was a strange in-between place – not quite night, not quite morning, the sky the colour of a bruise.

Amina Rahman sat halfway down the upper deck, hood up, rucksack hugged to her chest. Her ID badge still hung around her neck, the cheap plastic digging into the soft skin above her collarbone. She could have taken it off, but she liked the weight of it. Proof she had made it through another night without breaking.

Her phone buzzed once – a WhatsApp message from her mum.

Beti, are you nearly home? I’ll make paratha. Don’t sleep before you eat.

Amina typed back with one thumb, eyes on the blur of grey terraces and shuttered shopfronts outside.

On bus now. 10 mins inshaAllah. I’m shattered, Ma.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then:

Okay. Just come. We talk later.

That last bit made Amina’s stomach clench. We talk later in her mother’s language could mean anything from “Your aunt rang” to “I found a hair on the bathroom floor and I have questions”. Lately, it usually meant marriage talk. Someone’s son. Someone’s nephew. Someone’s cousin from Luton who had “a good job in IT” and a face that looked permanently confused in his filtered photos.

The bus swung left, tyres hissing on wet tarmac. Amina closed her eyes, letting the gentle sway rock her for a moment. She could still feel the hospital corridors in her legs, that particular ache that came from twelve hours of walking quickly but never quite running. The smell of antiseptic clung to her clothes – mixed with something else: metal, sweat, the faint ghost of vomit.

She worked nights as a health care assistant at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, mostly on medical wards. “Support worker” sounded nicer, but what it really meant was everything and nothing. Helping patients wash and dress. Answering buzzers. Changing beds. Fetching water. Watching people die quietly at 3am under harsh strip lighting while the city slept.

Shifts blurred into one another. Seven nights on. Three off. Seven on again. Four off. This was her life’s wallpaper now, patterned with broken sleep and microwaved dinners.

The bus slowed by a zebra crossing. A group of lads in puffer jackets crossed slowly, hoods up, taking their time, the way people moved when they believed the world would always make space for them. One of them looked up at the bus, right at her. For a second – shorter than a blink, longer than a heartbeat – she thought she recognised him.

Her breath caught.

The outline of a jaw. A way of tilting his head when he laughed. That loose, careless confidence in the way he walked.

Her fingers gripped the fabric of her rucksack so tightly her knuckles whitened. She felt the old, familiar rush – cold and hot at the same time, palms slick, throat suddenly dry. The bus pulled away, the boy’s face disappearing behind a film of dirty rainwater.

It wasn’t him. Of course it wasn’t him.

Still, her heart didn’t get the message immediately. It hammered against her ribs all the way to Sparkhill.

Her parents’ terrace on the quiet side street looked like all the others, red-brick and damp-eyed, a satellite dish jutting from the wall like an accusation. The curtains in the front room twitched before she even got the key in the lock. Her mum always did that – checked who was coming in even though they only had three keys between them.

“Assalamu alaikum,” Amina called, stepping inside and kicking off her trainers by the radiator.

“Walaikum assalam,” her mother replied from the kitchen, voice already busy, already slightly stressed. “Close the door properly, cold is coming in. You want me to get arthritis or what?”

Amina smiled in spite of herself, locking the door, the familiar script settling her nerves. The small hallway smelled of last night’s spices, damp coats and that particular brand of Asian home cleaning product that promised both “Lemon Fresh” and “Kills 99.9% of Germs”.

She dropped her rucksack in the living room, next to the sagging sofa with its permanently lopsided cushion. The TV remote lay in the middle of the prayer mat – her dad’s habit. The news was still on, the volume low, a ticker scrolling headlines about strikes and something happening “in Westminster”.

Her father sat in his usual spot at the dining table, glasses perched low on his nose, reading a Bangla newspaper that had seen better days. He glanced up as she walked in.

“You’re back,” he said, as if she might have been someone else. “Night okay?”

“Alhamdulillah,” she replied automatically. “Was busy. One lady kept pressing the buzzer every five minutes just to ask what time it was.”

Her dad snorted softly, folding the paper. “Some people don’t know how easy they have it.”

Amina didn’t answer. Sometimes she wanted to snap, Do you know how many times I’ve held someone’s hand as they took their last breath while you complain about people asking for the time? But she never did. Partly because he was her dad. Partly because she knew it was his own fear that made him say things like that – fear of hospitals, of being the one in the bed, of his English failing him when he needed words the most.

Her mum emerged from the kitchen with a plate in one hand and a frying pan in the other, eyebrows knitted in a way that meant she was thinking about fifteen things at once.

“Come, sit,” she ordered. “You’re too skinny.”

Amina looked down at herself. She was not skinny. Not fat either. Just… there. Her dark green scrubs hung loosely on her, creased and tired-looking. Her hair, flattened under a scarf all night, exploded into a kind of exhausted frizz now.

Her mum shoved a plate of paratha and fried egg in front of her, followed by a small dish of aloo bhaji and a glass of steaming milky tea.

“You didn’t eat all night, I know you,” her mother said, sitting down opposite. “If you faint in that hospital, who will catch you? These white nurses? They’re too thin. They’ll fall before you fall.”

Amina laughed, the sound surprising her. “I had some toast in the staff room, Ma.”

“Toast is not food,” her mum declared. “Toast is insult.”

Her dad chuckled into his tea. For a brief, gentle moment, the house felt warm, solid, safe.

Then her mother reached for the tissue box and slid it towards her, eyes suddenly soft.

“You look tired,” she said quietly. “And not just working-tired.”

Amina’s fork paused mid-air. “I’m fine, Ma. Just a long night.”

“You have those nightmares again?” her mum pressed, lowering her voice even though her father was right there.

“Which nightmares?” he asked, frowning now. “What nightmares?”

Her mother shot him a look that said, Not now, but the question was already hanging in the air. Amina lowered her fork.

“It’s nothing,” she lied, the word familiar and bitter on her tongue. “Sometimes I just dream I’m still at work. You know. Buzzers, alarms. It’s normal.”

Her father nodded, accepting the surface explanation but not entirely convinced. He turned the TV volume up a notch, letting the news presenter’s polished voice fill the awkward space.

Her mother didn’t push further. Not yet. But Amina could feel the unasked questions humming between them.

When did you last sleep properly?
Why do you wake up crying sometimes?
Why did you change after you left university?

They had never really talked about that year. Not properly. Not about the police station or the cold metal chair or the way the officer had said “Are you sure you didn’t just regret it in the morning?” in a tone that sounded almost bored.

Her mother had been there, physically. Herding her into the cab. Holding her hand in the waiting room. Making her sweet tea when they came home. But her words had quickly narrowed into something small and desperate.

“Don’t tell anyone. People will talk.”
“Maybe this is a test from Allah.”
“We move on now, okay? We forget.”

Forget. As if memory was a switch.

“Amina,” her mum said now, fingers tapping the table, “your aunt from Walsall called yesterday.”

There it was. The we talk later.

“Oh,” Amina replied cautiously. “Everything okay?”

“She said her neighbour’s son is looking to get married,” her mum continued, eyes dropping to the plate as if the paratha needed urgent examination. “He is… what did she say… he works with computers. Good job. From a good family.”

Her father made an approving noise. “IT. Yes. Solid.”

Amina swallowed a mouthful of egg that suddenly felt like sand.

“Ma, please,” she said, trying to keep her voice level. “I just finished a week of nights. Can we not do this now?”

Her mother looked up, a flash of hurt crossing her face. “I’m your mother. I think about your future. You think these nights will be easy when you’re thirty-five? Forty? Your back will break. Then what? You’ll bring your patients home to look after you?”

Amina stared at the tablecloth, a faint pattern of roses faded from too many washes. She hated that part of her knew her mother was right. The job was already chewing through her body. Her knees ached. Her shoulders burned. But the idea of bringing a stranger into this – into the locked room at the back of her mind where that year lived – made her feel physically ill.

“I’m not ready,” she said quietly.

A silence fell. The TV mumbled on about inflation. A car drove past outside, bass rattling the window slightly.

Her mother broke first, letting out a breath. “Okay. Eat before it gets cold. Then go sleep. We talk properly when you wake up.”

There it was again. Properly. As if this, right now, was just the warm-up act.

Amina’s bedroom was the smallest of the three, a narrow rectangle that had once been her dad’s “study” when they first moved in. Now, the single bed took up most of the space, pressed against the wall under a window that looked out over the concrete back yard and, beyond that, a line of washing belonging to the neighbours.

She shut the door and leaned her forehead against it for a moment, breathing in the familiar smell of fabric conditioner and the faint, lingering tang of incense from last night’s maghrib.

This room had been her universe since she was a teenager. The posters had changed – One Direction and random Korean boybands replaced by a small framed ayah her dad had bought from the mosque bookstall, a calendar from a charity, and a pinboard cluttered with sticky notes: “Annual Leave Request”, “Pay Council Tax”, “Samira’s henna night”.

On the chest of drawers sat a row of cheap candles, their wicks bent and tired, and an aged copy of the Qur’an, its edges decorated with notes in her awkward teenage handwriting.

She changed into an old oversized T-shirt and loose joggers, hair spilling out as she tugged off the hairband. Her reflection in the small mirror on the wardrobe door made her pause.

Dark circles smudged under her eyes. There was a tightness around her mouth she didn’t remember having at nineteen. Her once baby-round cheeks had hollowed out slightly, leaving sharper angles.

“You look like you need sleep,” she told herself in a mockingly bright tone. “Groundbreaking analysis, Amina.”

She lay down and pulled the duvet up to her chin, curling on her side. For a few minutes, sleep hovered just out of reach, like a shy cat. Her muscles began to unwind, the weight of the night shift settling into her bones.

Then the thought came – that stupid, traitorous thought.

What if that was him outside the bus?

Her eyes snapped open.

She replayed the few seconds in her head: the tilt of the head, the laugh, the way he’d looked up at the bus. Logically, she knew it wasn’t him. He didn’t live in Sparkhill. At least, he hadn’t back then. He’d had a flat closer to the city centre. He could have moved. People moved. People married, had kids, changed jobs.

People who raped girls and walked away without a charge got to move on with their lives.

Her heart started its familiar race, stubborn and erratic, thumping against her ribs as if trying to escape. She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling, counting the faint cracks.

“One,” she whispered. “Two. Three. Four.”

At the hospital, the counsellor had taught her grounding techniques in the break room once, on a rare quiet night when she’d admitted she sometimes felt like she was floating away.

“Name five things you can see,” the counsellor had said gently. “Four things you can touch. Three things you can hear…”

Now, in her bedroom, she tried.

“I can see the wardrobe. The window. The calendar. The lamp. The crack in the ceiling that looks like the map of Bangladesh upside down.”

She could touch the duvet, the pillow, the edge of the mattress, the cold wall against her fingertips.

She could hear the distant whine of a police siren, someone’s TV through the wall, her own breathing.

It helped. A little. The edges of the panic smoothed, not gone, but dulled enough that she could close her eyes again.

Sleep finally took her.

The room was dark, the air thick. She was standing in a corridor she half-recognised – not the hospital, not her house. Somewhere in between. Doors on either side, all closed. A buzzing sound filled the space, loud and insistent, like a fire alarm and a phone vibrating on a hard surface at the same time.

At the end of the corridor, there was a door with a frosted glass window. Yellow light seeped through it, sickly and slow. Her feet felt glued to the floor. Every step forward was like pushing through wet sand.

She didn’t want to open the door. But she had to. There was something on the other side. Something important. Something she had forgotten and remembered and forgotten again a thousand times.

Her hand reached out, fingers trembling as they closed around the cold metal handle. The buzzing grew louder. Underneath it, she could hear a voice. Laughing. Male. Familiar.

She turned the handle.

The door wouldn’t open at first. She pushed harder. It resisted, then suddenly gave way, swinging inward with a crash.

The light hit her like a slap.

She was in that flat again.

The sofa. The cheap rug. The empty pizza boxes on the low table. The sink full of glasses. The TV playing some music channel on mute.

He was there. On the edge of the bed. Same smirk. Same careless eyes. He looked exactly as he had that night – not a day older. Like time had skipped him, preserving him in that exact moment while it chewed her up and spat her out on the other side.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said, voice slow and amused. “We had fun, didn’t we?”

Her throat closed. Her tongue felt heavy. She tried to form the word, the small, simple word that had failed her then.

“No,” she whispered. It came out like breath on glass, barely visible.

He tilted his head. Stood up. The buzzing got louder, filling her ears, making the room bend at the edges.

“You came here,” he said. “You wanted this. Don’t act innocent now.”

She stepped back, pressing against the wall, but it felt soft, like it might swallow her. The carpet under her bare feet turned to something wet and sticky.

She looked down.

Red. Everywhere. Not bright. Dark. Old. It seeped towards her, up her ankles, over the tops of her feet.

Her hands flew to the door handle behind her. It was gone. Just smooth, endless wall.

His laughter echoed, bouncing off surfaces that no longer made sense.

“You’re the one who can’t move on,” he said. “I’m already gone.”

The buzzing became a siren. A wail. A scream.

Her scream.

Amina jerked awake, choking on air. Her T-shirt clung to her back, damp with sweat. The room was bright now, sunlight squeezing in around the edges of the thin curtains. The alarm on her phone buzzed furiously on the bedside table.

For a few moments, the lines between dream and bedroom blurred. The corridor, the flat, the blood, his voice – all layered faintly over the wardrobe and the small lamp and the calendar.

She sat up slowly, chest heaving, pressing the heel of her hand into her sternum like she could calm her heart manually.

On the other side of the door, she could hear her mother talking on the phone, voice half-annoyed, half-animated. Her father cleared his throat in that way he did before every cough, every attempt to speak over the TV.

Life was happening without her permission. Buses were running. People were going to work. Somewhere, someone was making a TikTok about their morning coffee.

And somewhere in this same city, the man from her nightmares was living his life, completely untouched.

Amina swung her legs over the side of the bed, feet touching the cool floor. She stared at her hands, at the faint grooves left in her palms from clutching the duvet too hard.

“You’re okay,” she told herself out loud, voice hoarse. “You’re in your room. You’re safe.”

Safe was a relative term. Safe meant four walls and a locked door and parents who, for all their flaws and shouting, loved her. Safe meant Sparkhill and parathas and her little brother’s old football trophies on the shelf.

But safe did not mean free.

Free would have been a world where he didn’t exist in her head anymore. Where his face wasn’t etched behind her eyelids. Where she could walk down Broad Street and not feel like she was walking through a graveyard of all the versions of herself she’d lost.

She reached for her phone, swiping away the alarm. The lock screen lit up with a notification from the NHS app – “New message from your employer” – and a random Instagram reel her friend had tagged her in.

She ignored both and opened another app: Gmail.

Her thumb hovered over the old folder she’d never quite managed to delete. “CPS Case 2019.”

She tapped it open.

The subject lines stared back at her, like gravestones.

RE: CPS Update – No Further Action
Case Review Outcome
Victim Support Information

She opened the one she knew word-for-word but read anyway, like pressing on a bruise.

“…no realistic prospect of conviction…”

“…insufficient evidence to proceed…”

“…this does not mean we do not believe you…”

The words that followed were meant to be comforting, professional, neutral. They landed like knives every time.

Amina closed the email, throat tight, jaw clenched.

He had walked away. The system had let him.

For years she had done what everyone told her to do – study, work, help at home, pray, try to heal, try to forget.

But trauma had its own calendar. It kept its own time.

And somewhere deep in her chest, where the nightmares lived, something else was starting to wake up too.

Not forgiveness.

Not yet.

Something harder. Sharper.

The beginning of an idea.

She didn’t know it yet, not fully, not in words she could write down or say out loud.

But everything in her life – the night shifts, the panic, the bus windows and the corridors and the emails she read until the words blurred – was shifting, inch by inch, towards the day she’d see him again.

And when that day came, Amina Rahman would not be the same girl who’d walked into that police station at nineteen and walked back out with “No further action” attached to her name.

She lay back down, eyes open, staring at the crack in the ceiling that looked like the outline of a country she’d never really known but still mourned.

Outside, a siren wailed faintly in the distance.

Inside, her heart answered.

Chapter 2 – The Night Everything Broke

Seven years earlier, Birmingham felt like a promise.

Back then, Amina’s world was the stretch between home in Sparkhill, the bus into the city centre, and the new life she was trying to build at Birmingham City University. The glass-fronted buildings had looked impossibly modern the first time she walked up to them, hugging a new notebook to her chest like a shield.

She had been nineteen, clutching a student ID that made her feel both official and like an imposter. Her mother had fussed with her scarf all morning.

“Don’t talk to boys,” she’d said, not unkindly. “Study. Pray. Come home. That’s all.”

Her father had slipped a folded £20 note into her palm at the door, eyes suspiciously shiny.

“For books,” he’d muttered. “Or… whatever you need. Don’t waste it in Costa.”

Of course Amina had wasted some of it in Costa. Sitting with coursemates who said things like “I literally can’t function without caffeine” and “Oh my God, that lecturer is actually ancient”, she’d bought a hot chocolate and held the cup with two hands like a prop, nodding along.

For the first time in her life, she wasn’t just “the good Bangladeshi girl from Sparkhill”. She was Amina from Media and Communication, who got decent grades and laughed at memes and tried to follow class group chats that never slept.

She lived at home still – her parents had drawn the line at halls – but her days belonged to the city now. She learned shortcuts through the Bullring, the best place to get cheap lunch near Millennium Point, which bus stop to avoid because the pigeons there had no fear of God or man.

And then there was Daniel.

She met him halfway through first term, at the bar attached to one of the student venues near Broad Street. She wasn’t supposed to be there. Not in a haram, haram way – it was just “networking drinks” after a guest lecture, and there was no entry fee, no ID check – but it still felt like stepping over a line her parents would never see but would somehow know about anyway.

Her coursemate Jade had looped an arm through hers and pulled her along.

“Come on, you never stay out,” Jade had complained. “You always rush home like Cinderella before midnight. Just one hour. It’ll be dead anyway – it’s Tuesday.”

Inside, the lighting was warm and low. Music played just loud enough to make you lean in to be heard. People clustered in small groups, clutching pints, laughing in that overly casual way students did when they wanted to look like they belonged.

Amina stayed near the edge of the room, sipping orange juice she’d ordered very clearly as “just orange juice, no vodka, no anything.” The bartender had raised an amused eyebrow and said, “You got it,” with a half-smile that landed in her stomach like a stone dropped in water.

That was Daniel.

He was older than them – maybe mid-twenties – with tired eyes and the kind of easy banter that came from serving drunk students for a living. He had a beard that hovered somewhere between “fashionable stubble” and “forgot to shave”, and a tattoo on his forearm that disappeared under his T-shirt sleeve.

Over the next few weeks, she noticed him more.

He remembered orders. Not just hers, but everyone’s. “Latte, extra sugar, no foam, right?” to one girl. “You’re the guy that pretends to like IPA for personality reasons,” to one boy.

To Amina, it was always, “Orange juice, halo intact?” or, later, “Hot chocolate, no marshmallows, extra guilt?”

She rolled her eyes when he said things like that, but she smiled too. Because he made her feel seen. Not as a stereotype. Not as the quiet brown girl with a scarf. As someone… interesting.

She told herself she liked him like you like a character in a TV show. Safe. Distant. Fictional.

Then he started slipping extra biscuits onto her saucer, and she realised it wasn’t that simple.

The first real conversation happened on a rainy afternoon when the bar was almost empty. Amina had stayed on campus to finish a group project that somehow everyone else had bailed on. By four o’clock, her brain felt like overcooked dal.

She went to the bar just to get away from the buzzing of the library. Daniel was wiping down glasses, a tea towel slung over his shoulder.

“Rough day?” he asked as she leaned on the counter.

“You have no idea,” she sighed. “I never want to hear the word ‘presentation’ again in my life. Or ‘PowerPoint’. Or ‘reflective practice’.”

He laughed. “That bad, huh? What are you studying again?”

“Media and Communication,” she said. “Which is code for ‘group work forever’ apparently.”

“Ah, media,” he nodded sagely. “So one day you’ll be one of those people who decides which headlines annoy my mum.”

She snorted. “Something like that.”

He made her a tea without asking what she wanted. Milk, two sugars. How he knew she took sugar, she had no idea. It felt like magic and also like simple observation, but her nineteen-year-old brain wanted to lean into the magic.

“So, Amina-from-media,” he said, sliding the mug towards her, “where are you from?”

She braced herself, the way she always did when white people asked that question.

“Sparkhill,” she replied. “Birmingham.”

“Yeah, but like, originally?” he pressed lightly, eyes amused rather than accusatory.

She gave him a look. “Planet Earth.”

He barked a surprised laugh. “Okay, okay. I walked into that one.”

“Bangladesh,” she relented after a beat, softening. “My parents are from Sylhet. I was born here.”

“Cool,” he said. “I went Shazan’s once for a curry. Restaurant with the neon palm trees? Nearly died from chilli, but in a good way.”

She smiled in spite of herself. Shazan’s was a rite of passage.

They talked for twenty minutes. About nothing and everything. How he’d dropped out of uni halfway through a Sports Science degree and “never quite climbed back out of the hospitality hole”. How he worked nights sometimes at a club further down Broad Street. How he liked watching people and guessing their stories.

“You look like you work too hard,” he observed at one point, studying her face.

“You look like you don’t,” she shot back.

“Touché.”

When she finally checked the time, she realised she was half an hour late for the bus she’d told her mum she’d be on. Panic flared.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, grabbing her bag. “My mum will think I’ve been kidnapped.”

“Tell her you were just being radical and doing something wild,” he said. “Like… talking to someone from the wrong side of the bar.”

She shook her head, laughing. “Yeah, that’ll really help.”

“Hey,” he called as she turned to leave. “You coming to the fundraising night next week? Live music, cheap drinks, pretend hipster atmosphere. Should be fun.”

She hesitated. The words “live music” and “drinks” sent an automatic alarm through her chest.

“I don’t really… go out like that,” she said. “My parents would have a heart attack.”

“Well,” he shrugged, towel back over his shoulder, “if you change your mind, I’ll be here, emotionally devastated by your absence.”

He winked. It was cheesy. It was ridiculous. It shouldn’t have worked.

It worked.

It started small. Jokes at the bar. Then follow requests on Instagram. Then replies to each other’s stories.

He posted Boomerangs of pints clinking; she posted pictures of overpriced coffees and half-finished essays. He reacted to her snaps with fire emojis and laughing faces; she replied to his with eye-rolls and the occasional “You’re going to get liver failure before thirty.”

He slid into her DMs one night when she posted a blurry photo of her Media Law notes captioned “Send help”.

Daniel: I can’t help with law but I can offer sympathy and caffeine.
Amina: Sympathy is haram.
Daniel: Pretty sure it’s the opposite of haram?
Amina: Depends who it’s from.
Daniel: Ouch. Wounding. On that note, how’s your week?

Their conversations stretched later and later, into that dangerous soft part of the night where people confessed more than they meant to.

He told her about his parents’ divorce when he was ten, how he’d bounced between houses like a parcel no one wanted to sign for. She told him about being the eldest, the extra weight of expectations, the way her mum worried if she was five minutes late home.

He never made fun of her for praying. When she mentioned she had to log off for Maghrib, he said, “Fair,” and waited. When she said she didn’t drink, he said, “Cheaper dates for you,” and sent a winking emoji that made her heart stutter.

“Dates” should have been the red flag. The word sat there on the screen, bright and dangerous.

She stared at it for a long time before deciding to pretend she hadn’t seen it.

The night everything broke didn’t look special at first.

It was May. Exams were looming. Campus hummed with the nervous energy of students pretending they’d studied all term. Jade came up to her after a seminar, eyes wide and mouth already forming the word “please”.

“Broad Street tonight,” Jade said. “End-of-module drinks. Our group, some of the third years, a few from Sports. You’re coming.”

“I have an exam in two days,” Amina protested.

“So do I,” Jade said. “If I don’t drink now, I’ll accidentally kill someone in the library. You, me, two drinks max, home by midnight. Promise.”

Midnight.

Her mum would be asleep by then. Her dad too. If she told them she was staying late to revise and then slept over at Jade’s, they might grumble, but they’d let it slide. She had done it before – actually revising, sitting cross-legged on Jade’s floor, highlighters everywhere.

Her phone buzzed. A message from Daniel.

Daniel: Guess who’s stuck on bar duty at Mojo’s tonight?
Amina: The guy who dropped out of Sports Science?
Daniel: Harsh but accurate. Come say hi, halo girl.

She stared at the messages, heart thudding.

Maybe it would be okay. She’d be with a group. She wouldn’t drink. She’d stay where it was busy. She’d say hello to him casually, like it was no big deal, and then leave.

She could control this.

“Okay,” she heard herself say to Jade. “But two drinks max. And I’m not drinking alcohol.”

“Deal,” Jade grinned, already texting the group chat. “You’re going to look so hot, I’m not ready.”

Getting ready felt like stepping into someone else’s life.

At home, she packed a small bag with jeans, a nice top Jade had lent her (dark blue, loose enough to feel decent, fitted enough to feel like she existed), and a lighter scarf. She told her mum she was staying late to revise and would probably sleep at Jade’s.

“Again?” her mum frowned. “You don’t sleep if you go there. You talk all night, then you cry in the morning when you have panda eyes.”

“It’s just for a couple of hours,” Amina said, choosing her words carefully. “We need to finish the group presentation. It’s half our grade.”

Her father, sitting behind his newspaper fortress, grunted noncommittally. “Study hard now, rest later.”

Her mum sighed, relenting. “Okay. Call me before bed. And don’t eat junk food from the machine. Your stomach is not made of iron.”

Amina kissed her on the cheek, feeling guilty in advance.

On the bus into town, she changed in the tiny space between seats, pulling the blue top over her T-shirt, adjusting her scarf in the scratched window reflection. She looked… different. Not like the girls in tiny dresses and bare shoulders she saw every weekend spilling out of clubs on Broad Street. But not like the Amina who went to the mosque with her mum either.

Somewhere in between. Not fully comfortable in either direction.

Jade met her outside the Bullring, already in heels, already complaining about them.

“You look amazing,” Jade squealed, grabbing her arm. “Boys are going to be obsessed.”

“Please don’t say that,” Amina muttered. “I’m just here for the vibes.”

“The vibes are boys,” Jade declared. “Let’s go.”

The club was everything Amina had imagined and also worse.

The bouncer’s stare, the sticky floor, the bass so loud it vibrated in her sternum. Lights strobed, turning people into brief, jerky snapshots: laughing mouths, glittered eyelids, hands holding plastic cups that sloshed neon liquid.

Her coursemates were already there, clustered around a tall table, drunker than she’d expected for 10.30pm. Someone pushed a drink into her hand before she’d even taken her jacket off.

“What is it?” she shouted over the music.

“Vodka cranberry,” came the answer. “Just drink, you’ll be fine.”

Her throat closed. She forced a smile, set it down on the table as if she’d forgotten about it immediately, and made a beeline for the bar.

Daniel saw her before she saw him.

“There she is,” he called, grinning, sliding along the counter to where she stood. “On a school night, too. I’m honoured.”

She laughed nervously, tucking a strand of hair back into place under her scarf.

“I’m being peer-pressured,” she shouted back. “I blame them.”

“Ah, classic,” he nodded. “What can I get you? And don’t say ‘nothing’, because I’ve already clocked your drink dodging.”

“Orange juice,” she said. “Just orange juice. If you put anything in it, I’ll sue.”

“I would never disrespect you like that,” he said, hand on heart, mock offended. “One halo juice, coming up.”

He made it in front of her, theatrically, holding up the bottle as if to prove his innocence. When he slid the glass towards her, his fingers brushed hers briefly. Electricity shot up her arm.

“Cheers,” she said, trying to sound casual.

“Cheers,” he echoed. “So, what’s the occasion?”

“End of module,” she replied. “Apparently that means we have to come here and shout at each other in the dark.”

“Well,” he leaned in slightly, voice dropping just enough that she had to lean in too, “for what it’s worth, I’m glad you did.”

She swallowed, looking down into her drink. “You’re just happy for the business.”

“That too,” he grinned. “But mostly you.”

People jostled around her, the crush of bodies pressing her closer to the bar. His proximity felt both safe and dangerous at the same time.

“I should go back to my friends,” she said, after a moment. “They’ll think I’ve been kidnapped.”

“Text me if you get bored,” he said. “Or if they drag you somewhere worse.”

She laughed. “What’s worse than this?”

“You don’t want to know.”

The night blurred.

Songs she half recognized. Selfies with Jade in the toilets, tongues out, flashing peace signs. Girls crying by the sinks over boys whose names they’d mispronounced. The line outside the smoking area, breath fogging in the cold air.

Amina stuck to her orange juice, and some not realised vodka and orange juices, then Coke, then water. Jade necked shot after shot, eyes glassy, eyeliner smudging as the night wore on.

At some point, near midnight, their group thinned. People peeled off into taxis, into alleyways, into each other’s arms. The air outside bit at Amina’s cheeks when they finally stumbled out onto Broad Street.

“My feet,” Jade groaned, clinging to Amina’s arm. “I hate capitalism. And gravity. And men. In that order.”

“Let’s get you home,” Amina said, glancing at her phone. She had three missed calls from her mum, one voicemail, and a WhatsApp: Are you okay? Call me.

Guilt punched her in the chest.

“Stay at mine,” Jade slurred. “We’ll order pizza. Watch something trash. You can wear my soft pyjama bottoms. The leopard print ones.”

“Maybe,” Amina said, half-leading, half-dragging her down the pavement. “Let me call my mum first, otherwise she’ll send a search party.”

“Tell her you’re with your white friend,” Jade said, trying and failing to twirl. “We’re like… wholesome. We like hummus.”

Before Amina could reply, Jade lurched away suddenly, hand clamped over her mouth.

“Bathroom,” she gasped. “I’m gonna be sick. I’m gonna die. Tell my mum I loved her.”

She swayed, eyes unfocused, then stumbled towards the side of the building.

“Jade, wait—”

Amina followed, but the crowd swallowed her friend in a wave of bodies heading in the opposite direction. Someone bumped into her shoulder; someone else stepped on her foot. She lost sight of Jade completely.

Panic flared.

She pushed her way towards the nearest doorway, breath shallow, scanning faces. No Jade. No leopard-print promise.

“Hey,” a voice said behind her. “You okay?”

She turned.

Daniel stood there, jacket on now, no longer behind the bar. The sight of a familiar face in the chaos made her shoulders drop.

“Have you seen Jade?” she shouted over the music spilling out of club.

“The blonde one with the blue dress?” he asked.

Amina nodded.

“She left ages ago with some guy,” he said. “Looked like she was about to fall asleep on her feet. I assumed she was going home with him or to a cab. You didn’t go with her?”

“I was in the toilets,” Amina said, stomach plummeting. “I thought she was waiting outside.”

“She’s probably fine,” he said quickly. “She’s a big girl. These lot do this every week.”

Amina pressed her hand to her forehead, weighing options. She could call Jade. Her phone was at 12%. Her mum had already called three times. The last bus home wasn’t for another forty minutes.

“You look freezing,” Daniel said. “And slightly like you regret your life choices.”

She let out a shaky laugh. “Something like that.”

“I’m done here anyway,” he said, nodding towards the club. “I was heading back to mine. It’s like ten minutes away. You can come warm up, have some tea, charge your phone, call your mum from there. Then I’ll walk you to the bus stop. Less dodgy than you standing here alone, trust me.”

The sensible answer was no.

No, thank you. I’ll wait for the bus. I’ll call Jade. I’ll call a cab. I’ll do anything except follow a man I barely know to a place I’ve never been.

But the night had already eroded some of her edges. Her feet hurt. Her head buzzed. The idea of a quiet flat, a cup of tea, somewhere to sit that wasn’t sticky or cold – it sounded so reasonable.

And he wasn’t a stranger. He was Daniel. The familiar bartender. The guy who knew her drinks order. The guy who’d never pushed her to drink. The guy who’d listened to her talk about her family, who’d told her about his.

“Okay,” she heard herself say. “Just for a bit. I need to call my mum anyway.”

“Good girl,” he smiled. Not in a patronising way. In a relieved way. “Come on. It’s not far.”

His flat was on the second floor of a tired building just off the main road. The hallway smelled of damp and someone’s overly ambitious cooking. The stairs creaked.

“Excuse the mess,” he said, unlocking the door. “I wasn’t expecting guests. Or anyone to see my tragic sock collection on the floor.”

The living room looked exactly like she’d imagined. A sagging sofa. A low table scattered with empty glasses and takeaway containers. A couple of game controllers tangled in the corner. A big TV on a cheap stand. It wasn’t filthy, just lived-in.

She stood awkwardly by the door, clutching her bag.

“You can sit down, you know,” he said, shutting the door behind them. “I won’t charge you rent.”

She smiled politely and perched on the edge of the sofa.

“You want tea?” he asked.

“Please,” she said. “I need caffeine to stay awake on the bus.”

He disappeared into the small kitchen area. She heard the click of the kettle, the clink of mugs.

She took out her phone. Two more missed calls from her mum. Her chest tightened.

Maa just stayed late to revise, she typed quickly. I’m at Jade’s now. Her mum said it’s okay. Don’t worry xxx

It wasn’t a complete lie. She had stayed late. She had been with Jade. She just wasn’t there now.

Her mum replied almost instantly.

Okay. Don’t stay up too late talking. Read some Quran before bed. Love you.

Amina stared at the screen, a prickling behind her eyes.

“Your mum?” Daniel asked, emerging with two mugs.

“Yeah,” she said, locking her phone, placing it face down on the table. “She worries.”

“Mums do,” he said, handing her a mug. “Mine still thinks I’ll get scurvy if I don’t eat enough fruit.”

She took a sip. The tea was strong, sweet. Comforting.

“Thanks,” she said. “For this. And for not laughing at me for being useless at nights out.”

“I would never,” he said, sitting on the far end of the sofa, angled towards her. “You survived Broad Street. That’s like, level one of Birmingham.”

They talked. About nothing again. Music. Exams. His plan to “definitely leave bar work one day” and “maybe do a course or something”.

The TV played some music channel on mute. The only light came from a lamp in the corner, casting everything in a soft, golden blur.

She felt herself relaxing. The tight coil in her chest loosened.

When she finished her tea, she set the mug down carefully.

“I should go soon,” she said. “I don’t want to miss the last bus.”

“You’ve got time,” he said, checking his phone. “It’s only half twelve. Last bus is, what, after one?”

“I still have to get from town to home,” she said. “My dad will wake up for morning prayer and see I’m not there and then my funeral will be at ten am.”

He laughed. “Okay, okay. Five more minutes. Then I’ll walk you.”

He shifted slightly closer. Not much. Just enough that she could feel the warmth of him.

Alarm bells chimed in the back of her mind. She ignored them. Or tried to.

When he asked if she wanted to put on some music, she said yes. When he said, “Come on, you can’t sit all the way over there like we’re in a job interview,” and patted the space next to him, she hesitated.

“You’re safe,” he said softly. “I’m not an axe murderer. You’d have seen it in my eyes by now.”

She laughed weakly and shifted a little closer. Not right next to him. Just less far away.

He put on a playlist – slow R&B, the kind of songs Jade said were “for when lights are off and clothes are falling”. Amina tried not to think about the mismatch between the lyrics and the cup of tea cooling on the table.

“You know,” he said, after a while, voice lower, “I’m glad you came tonight. I always see you rushing around campus like you’re trying to break a world record. It’s nice to see you… relaxed.”

She glanced at him. His eyes were dark in the low light.

“I’m not very good at relaxing,” she admitted.

“I could help,” he said.

It was such a simple sentence. Four words. It could have meant a hundred different things.

Her body heard one thing. Her brain tried to hear another.

“What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.

He smiled. “I mean…” He reached out, gently brushing a loose strand of hair back from her face, fingers grazing her cheek. “You’re always so… on guard. You can chill, you know.”

Her heart thudded against her ribs.

“I don’t…” she started, but the words tangled. “I’m not… I don’t do that.”

“Do what?” he asked, still smiling. “Kiss people? Talk to boys? You’re allowed, you know. It’s not illegal.”

“I’m Muslim,” she said, as if he’d somehow forgotten.

“I know,” he replied. “I’m not asking you to marry me. It’s just a kiss. You like me, right?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Did she? Yes. No. In some ways. In others, she didn’t know.

“I…” she began.

He leaned in, closing the space between them, and kissed her.

It was clumsy at first. His stubble scratched her skin. His breath tasted faintly of beer and mint. Her brain short-circuited for a second.

Then guilt roared up, loud and hot.

She pulled back, hands on his chest.

“I shouldn’t,” she said, breathless. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here. I should go.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said, still close. “Relax. It’s fine.”

He kissed her again, harder this time, his hand sliding to the back of her neck.

“No,” she said, the word finally surfacing. “Daniel, stop. Please.”

But the music was loud. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe her pulse was the loudest thing in the room.

The rest blurred – not because it wasn’t sharp in her memory, but because it was too sharp. A series of images and sensations that stitched themselves into her skin.

His weight. The feeling of the sofa under her back. The sound of her own voice saying “stop” and “please” and “I don’t want this” over and over, like a recording on a loop.

The door. The lock clicking. Her phone out of reach on the table, screen lighting up briefly with a notification she couldn’t see.

At some point she went still. Not because she wanted it. Because her mind did what minds sometimes do when the body realises no one is coming to help – it left. Floated somewhere just above the ceiling, watching a scene it couldn’t quite believe it was part of.

When it was over, the room looked the same.

The TV still glowed. The lamp still cast its soft pool of light. The mugs still sat on the table, one with a lipstick print on the rim.

Daniel stood up, adjusting his clothes. He looked slightly flushed, slightly proud of himself. He leaned down and kissed her forehead.

“You’re beautiful, you know,” he said.

She lay there, frozen, her body not quite her own.

Then, slowly, she sat up, pulling her clothes around her, hands shaking.

“I said no,” she whispered. Her voice sounded small, far away. “I told you no.”

“You’re just freaking out,” he said lightly. “First time’s always intense. You came here. You wanted this. It’s okay.”

“I didn’t,” she said, louder. “I told you to stop.”

He rolled his eyes, just a fraction. Enough.

“Look,” he said, more serious now. “You were into it. You kissed me back. Don’t make it weird.”

Her throat burned. Tears prickled, hot and useless.

“I need to go home,” she said, standing up on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else.

“Okay,” he said, shrugging. “I’ll walk you to the bus.”

She grabbed her bag, her phone, her scarf. Everything felt wrong. Her clothes, her skin, the air.

As they stepped out into the corridor, the cold hit her like a slap. The night smelled different now. Sour. Off.

On Broad Street, the lights were still bright. People still laughed, still staggered, still shouted into the dark. The world hadn’t shifted on its axis. Only hers had.

He walked her to the bus stop, hands in his pockets, chatting about nothing. She barely heard him. Her ears rang.

“You alright?” he asked as the bus pulled up. “You look… weird.”

She looked at him then, really looked.

And she understood, in a way that hollowed her out.

He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong.

“Don’t ever message me again,” she said quietly.

His grin faltered. “Seriously? You’re going to do this now? After—”

“After you raped me,” she said.

The word hung between them, obscene and heavy.

His face changed. Not to guilt. To indignation.

“Woah,” he said. “That’s a big word. Be careful throwing that around. You wanted it, Amina. You came to my flat. You didn’t scream. You didn’t fight. Don’t rewrite it now because you feel guilty.”

The bus doors hissed open.

She stepped on, heart in her throat. As the bus pulled away, she saw him in the smeared back window, shaking his head, lighting a cigarette, already turning away.

Her hands shook so badly she almost dropped her phone.

She dialled a number she hadn’t planned to.

999

When the operator answered, her voice broke.

“I… I need to report something,” she said. “I think I’ve been… I think I’ve been raped.”

The words tasted like blood.

The police station was bright and cold.

They put her in a small room with hard chairs and a box of tissues already on the table, as if the room was permanently set up for people like her. A female officer sat opposite, a pen poised over a form.

“I know this is difficult,” the officer said, not unkindly. “But I need you to tell me everything that happened, in as much detail as you can remember. Okay?”

Amina nodded, fingers twisting in her lap.

She told the story. Or tried to. The words came out tangled, her voice cracking, her memory jumping.

“He’s a bartender,” she said. “At the club near the corner. Daniel. He knows me. He knows I’m Muslim. I said no. I told him to stop. He locked the door.”

“Did you attempt to leave?” the officer asked, pen scratching. “Did you shout? Did you push him away physically?”

“I… I froze,” Amina said, shame creeping in like a slow leak. “I said no. I kept saying no.”

The officer nodded, face neutral. “Okay. We’ll need to take some samples, if that’s alright. For evidence. Is anyone we can call? Family? Friend?”

Her parents.

The thought of her father sitting in a fluorescent waiting room, of her mother’s face crumpling – it made her want to disappear.

“They don’t know I went out,” she whispered.

“We can support you through that,” the officer said. “But we do recommend you tell someone close to you.”

She ended up calling Samira first. Her cousin arrived within half an hour, hair hidden under a hastily wrapped scarf, eyes red with fury and fear. Samira called Amina’s parents from the corridor.

They arrived an hour later. Her mother’s eyes raw, her father’s shoulders stiff as if bracing against a storm.

In the hospital, nurses moved around her with professional kindness. They handed her a gown. They explained every step. They told her she could say stop at any time.

The irony almost made her laugh.

She stared at the ceiling while they collected evidence. Answered questions about when she’d last had consensual sex (“Never”), what she’d been wearing, whether she had any injuries. Every answer felt like she was building a case and also building a wall between who she’d been before that night and whoever she was now.

Her mother sat in the corner, silent, rosary beads moving through her fingers. Her father stood by the window, back turned, fists clenched.

On the way home, the car was quiet. The city blurred past in streaks of orange.

Finally, her mother spoke.

“Why were you there?” she asked, voice thin. “That place. That time. With that boy. Why didn’t you tell us?”

Amina stared at her hands, at the hospital wristband still wrapped around her wrist.

“I thought I could handle it,” she said, voice barely audible. “I thought he was my friend.”

Her father let out a noise that was somewhere between a sigh and a growl.

“We will deal with this,” he said. “We will trust Allah. But you must promise, Amina. No more places like that. No more boys. No more secrets.”

She nodded. Promised. Watched the small, frightened hope in their eyes that if they wrapped enough rules around her, she’d be safe.

She didn’t have the heart to tell them that the worst thing hadn’t happened in the club. It had happened in a quiet flat over a cup of tea.

You couldn’t ban cups of tea.

The investigation crawled.

They took her statement again. And again. They asked her to repeat details that were already burned into her skin.

Where were his hands?
What did he say when you said no?
Why did you go to his flat if you weren’t planning to have sex?

They interviewed him too, she later learned. He told them it had been consensual. That she’d kissed him, that she’d “seemed into it”. That she hadn’t fought. That she hadn’t screamed.

“He has no previous convictions,” the officer told her, weeks later, in that same small room. “No history of violence or sexual offences. He says he believed you were consenting. It comes down to your word against his regarding whether you said no.”

“But I did,” she insisted, throat raw. “I said it. I remember. I remember saying no.”

“I’m not saying you didn’t,” the officer said quickly. “I believe you. I do. But the Crown Prosecution Service has to decide if there’s enough evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.”

The phrase hit her like a foreign language exam she hadn’t revised for.

“Realistic prospect,” she repeated.

She waited weeks. Months. Life shrank to the space between emails.

When the decision finally came, it arrived as a notification on her phone while she was on the bus home from campus.

She opened the email. The words swam.

“…after careful consideration…”
“…insufficient evidence to proceed…”
“…no realistic prospect of conviction…”
“…this does not mean we do not believe you…”

The bus hummed. People scrolled, yawned, stared out of windows. Someone’s headphones leaked tinny drill music.

Her heart cracked quietly in her chest.

At home, her mother read the email over her shoulder, lips moving silently.

“So that’s it?” her mum whispered. “He just… goes? Nothing happens?”

Her father didn’t read it. He just sat at the table, staring at the same line in the newspaper for twenty minutes.

“We move on,” he said eventually, voice flat. “We focus on your degree. We forget this boy. If Allah wants to punish him, He will. It’s not our job.”

Forget.

The word lodged in her throat like a splinter.

She went back to uni. Tried to focus. Tried to pretend.

But lecture halls felt different now. Group chats felt different. The campus itself felt like a place that had watched her turn herself inside out in a police station and then handed her back to herself with a Post-it note that said “No further action”.

She lasted another term.

Then she dropped out.

“Just for a while,” she told everyone. “To work. To save. To think.”

No one said, “Because the world taught you exactly how much your body is worth in a court of law.”

They didn’t need to.

She already knew.

Back in the present, seven years later, lying in her small bedroom in Sparkhill, Amina stared at the crack in the ceiling and felt that night sitting in her chest like an old, badly healed fracture.

The world had kept moving.

She hadn’t.

Not really.

But something was stirring now, beneath the scar tissue. Something that looked a little like anger and a little like resolve.

The girl who had walked into that police station at nineteen had believed the system would help her.

The woman she was becoming knew better.

And whether she wanted it or not, her story with Daniel was not over yet.

Chapter 3 – A Face In The Crowd

On Saturdays, Birmingham city centre belonged to other people.

Couples with Primark bags and prams. Teenagers in matching puffer jackets, moving in packs. Hen parties in neon sashes, already loud by midday. Men with headphones and takeaway coffee cups, walking like the whole world was an obstacle course.

For Amina, Saturdays were usually for recovery. If her nights on shift lined up just right and she’d slept enough, she might venture into town to do the boring things: bank, pharmacy, Poundland for things no one needed but everyone bought.

That Saturday, she’d woken up feeling almost… normal.

No nightmare. No 6am bus. Just the pale, puzzled light of a late morning creeping round her curtains and her mother knocking softly on the door.

“Amina? You awake? I made omelette. Your favourite.”

“Coming,” she’d mumbled, voice thick.

Breakfast had been surprisingly peaceful. Her father had gone to a friend’s nikah at the mosque, suit slightly too tight, hair combed down with too much gel. Her mother, in an unusually good mood, had talked about the neighbour’s new baby and the rising price of onions instead of marriage and “good proposals”.

“You should go out today,” her mum had said, scraping pan-fried onions onto a plate. “You look like a ghost. Get some fresh air. Not hospital air.”

“I might go Bullring,” Amina had replied. “Need shampoo. And… life admin.”

“Life admin,” her mother repeated, amused. “Okay. Don’t come home with ten shopping bags. You’re not Beckham’s daughter.”

It felt almost like being nineteen again for a moment. Before.

She left the house around lunchtime, wrapped in a long charcoal coat, scarf tucked neatly around her face, trainers already scuffed from too many night buses. The air had that damp Midlands chill that wasn’t quite rain but definitely not kind.

On the number 6 bus into town, she managed to find a window seat upstairs. She watched Sparkhill slide by – the halal butchers with pictures of perfect lambs who definitely hadn’t grown up on Stratford Road, the aunties with their shawls pulled tight, the teenagers glued to their phones even as they crossed busy roads without looking.

At one stop, a group of schoolkids piled on, all noise and energy, even though it wasn’t a school day. One of them wore too much aftershave; the scent hit the back of her throat, sharp and chemical, reminding her briefly of that corridor in the police station.

She shook her head slightly, as if she could dislodge the memory.

Today was just errands. Nothing else.

The Bullring was its usual overwhelming self – glass and steel and noise and endless people. Amina moved through it like a fish through a crowded tank, slipping around slow-walkers, sidestepping abandoned buggies.

She ticked things off her mental list.

Shampoo.
Sanitary pads.
Moisturiser that didn’t cost more than her hourly wage.
Vitamin D tablets her mum would forget to take.

She let herself browse in a clothes shop for a few minutes, fingers brushing fabrics she couldn’t afford. A long, soft cardigan. A dress she’d never wear because it showed more arm than her mother would tolerate and more shape than she herself felt comfortable with.

Her reflection in the mirror between rails caught her eye. She looked… older than the girl who’d once giggled her way through charity shop trips with Samira, trying on ridiculous outfits “just for jokes”.

There were faint lines now around her eyes. The curve of her mouth tilted down more often than it tilted up.

She left the shop without buying anything.

Outside, the grey sky pressed down on the open plaza, the Selfridges building glinting like a giant metal bubble in the weak light. Someone was playing an acoustic guitar near the steps, the same three chords on repeat. A toddler in a puffy jacket was dancing proudly in front of them, parents filming on their phones.

Amina smiled despite herself. Small, but real.

She checked the time. She still needed to pop by the bank to sort out a mess with her direct debits. The branch near New Street closed early on Saturdays. If she went now, she’d just make it.

She threaded her way through the crowd, past two girls taking photos in front of a Christmas display that hadn’t fully come down even though it was weeks past New Year. Past a group of lads shoving each other playfully, swearing with the careless abandon of people who’d never had to justify their existence to anyone.

Past him.

At first, her brain didn’t register it. He was just another tall white guy in a jacket, standing outside a bar with a pint in his hand. Another laugh in the confusing orchestra of city centre noise.

Then he tilted his head.

That same, particular angle. Half-cocky, half-listening. The way he always had when she’d been talking at the bar years ago, pretending to be fully focused on her even as he served six other customers.

The laugh cut through everything – the busker’s guitar, the chatter, the distant siren. It reached into her chest and ripped something open that she’d plastered over with seven years of “I’m fine”.

Her feet stopped moving.

The crowd flowed around her, annoyed, making those small tuts Brits did instead of saying “Move”.

It was him.

Older. Slightly thicker round the middle. Hairline receding a bit. Jacket more expensive than the hoodies he’d worn back then. But him.

Daniel.

Her blood turned to static. The edges of her vision pulsed. The bar’s exterior lights, the sign, the colours – everything blurred into one too-bright smear.

He was with a group of men. One slapped him on the back, laughing hard. Daniel threw his head back, mouth wide, genuinely amused. He leaned in to say something to the group, eyebrows raised, miming some exaggerated story.

Amina couldn’t hear the words. She didn’t need to.

He was fine. More than fine. He looked… happy. Whole. Like the kind of man who had funny stories and friends and a favourite pub he went to on Saturdays.

Her body made a small, involuntary movement backwards. Her heart pounded so loudly she could hear it in her ears.

Walk away, a voice in her head whispered frantically. Walk away now, Amina. Turn around. Go home. Go anywhere else.

Another voice, smaller but sharper, said: There he is. The man who broke you. He’s just… here. Laughing. Like nothing happened.

He turned slightly, adjusting his grip on the pint. For a second – just a second – his eyes slid past her, skimming over the crowd.

Their gazes didn’t meet. If they had, she wasn’t sure what would have happened. Would he have recognised her? Would his face have changed? Would he have looked straight through her, the way the CPS email had?

She didn’t wait to find out.

Her legs finally listened. She moved, not towards the bank now, but down the nearest side street, away from the noise, away from him, away from that horrible, casual happiness.

The side street was narrow, shadowed, lined with the backs of buildings – service entrances, bins, a stray cat watching from under a metal staircase.

She leaned against a wall, the cold brick seeping through her coat.

Her chest tightened. Breath refused to come properly. Her fingers tingled.

Not here. Not now.

Her vision tunneled. The sounds of the city became warped, far away, like she was underwater. A woman’s high laugh somewhere to her left. The beep of a reversing van. The distant rumble of a train overhead.

Her body thought she was in danger. Real danger. Flat. Locked door. His weight. The word “no” trapped in her throat.

But she was in a side street, in broad daylight, with people near enough that if she screamed, someone would come. This dissonance made it worse.

She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the cold, dirty pavement, knees pulled up, hands hovering in the air like she’d forgotten what to do with them.

Her breathing went ragged. Short, shallow gasps.

Panic attack, some rational part of her brain supplied clinically, like one of the nurses on her ward reading from a pamphlet. You know what this is. You know what to do. Grounding. Counting. Name five things you can see.

“I can’t,” she whispered, though no one had asked.

Tears pushed up, hot and sudden. She gritted her teeth, trying to swallow them back. The familiar shame rose alongside the fear.

She hated this. Hated how easily her body betrayed her. How seven years of distance meant nothing to the nervous system that still thought she was twenty minutes away from walking into a police station with her insides turned wrong-side out.

“Amina?”

The voice didn’t belong here. For a split second, irrational terror flared – He followed me. He knows. He’s here.

Then she blinked, forcing her eyes to focus.

It wasn’t him.

It was a stranger – a middle-aged Black woman in a Sainsbury’s uniform, carrying a shopping bag, frowning with concern.

“Are you alright, love?” she asked, coming a little closer but not too close, as if recognising some boundary without needing it explained. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

Amina opened her mouth. No words came. Just a strange, wheezing sound.

“Okay,” the woman said quickly, putting her bag down. “I’m just going to sit here with you, yeah? I’m not going to touch you. Just breathe with me. In… and out… slowly.”

She sat down on the pavement too, not caring about her trousers, not caring about the cold. She lifted one hand, demonstrating.

“In through the nose,” she said, inhaling deeply. “Out through the mouth. Longer out than in. Like you’re blowing out candles.”

Amina latched onto the rhythm. In. Out. In. Out. Her body resisted at first, clinging to the sharp, shallow gasps it thought were keeping her alive. But the woman’s voice was steady, her presence a small anchor in the spinning room.

“That’s it,” she murmured, watching Amina carefully. “You’re doing really well. Is there anyone I can call for you?”

Amina shook her head, a small, jerky movement. “I’m… I’m okay,” she managed eventually, though it was a lie and a promise at once. “Just… dizzy. Low sugar.”

The woman gave her a look that said she didn’t believe her, but she didn’t push.

“Do you want some water?” she asked. “I got a bottle in my bag.”

Amina nodded. The world was slowly slipping back into focus. The brick wall behind her. The blue door of a back entrance opposite. A poster peeling off a lamppost.

The woman handed her a small bottle of water. Amina’s hands were still shaking as she unscrewed the cap.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“No worries,” the woman said. “We all have days, love. No shame in it.”

After a few more minutes of breathing and water and that simple, human solidarity, Amina felt the panic ebb enough that she could stand. Her legs were wobbly but functional.

“You sure you’re okay to walk?” the woman asked, standing too, brushing dust off her trousers.

“Yeah,” Amina said. “I’m… I’m fine. Thank you so much. I’m just going to… get the bus.”

The woman nodded. “Alright then. You take care of yourself, yeah?”

She picked up her shopping bag and walked away, leaving Amina alone in the narrow street, heart still beating too fast but at least keeping time again.

For a moment, Amina just stood there, watching her breath fog in the cold air.

She could go home now. Crawl back under her duvet. Pretend this had never happened.

Or she could do what she always did when she didn’t know what to do.

She could gather evidence.

On the bus home, the city slid past without really registering. She sat upstairs again, near the back, hood up, hands wrapped around her phone like it was the only solid thing left.

Her fingers moved almost of their own accord.

Instagram. Search. @…

His surname popped up before she’d finished typing. Her stomach lurched. She clicked.

Public account. Of course.

Grid full of curated normality. Gym mirror selfies. Holiday snaps on a beach somewhere that definitely wasn’t Blackpool. Pints held up to the camera. Group photos with captions like “Lads lads lads” and “Mad one last night”.

In between, the occasional attempt at depth – a black square from a long-ago social media campaign, a caption about “mental health matters”, a sunset with some half-remembered quote about “living your truth”.

Her thumb scrolled.

There he was, standing outside the very bar she’d just fled from, arm slung around another man’s shoulders, both of them grinning like the world owed them something and had finally paid up.

Caption: New Saturday spot. Dangerous. 🍻😂

People had liked it. Commented things like “Weapon 😂” and “Leave some fun for the rest of us bro”.

Amina’s vision blurred again, but not from panic this time. From anger.

She clicked on another photo. Him on a sunlounger, sunglasses on, drink in hand, sea in the background. The caption read, Work hard, play harder. You only live once.

“Work hard,” she whispered, bitterly. “Do you even know what that means?”

She moved to Facebook. His profile hadn’t changed much there either. Updated job titles. “Bar manager” now, not just “bartender”. A relationship status set to “It’s complicated” with a smirking emoji.

In the “memories” section, he’d shared photos from around the time she’d known him. Nights out. House parties. Other girls in his flat, on that same sagging sofa.

Her chest tightened.

Was she one of dozens? Hundreds? Just another story he told in pubs, twisting the narrative to turn himself into the hero of a dirty joke?

She imagined him saying her name wrong, for laughs. Imitating her voice. “She said no, but you know what they’re like. All talk.”

Her jaw clenched so hard it hurt.

The bus rolled through Highgate, the grey flats towering like tired giants. A man got on with a crying baby, apologising to everyone with that British mix of guilt and annoyance even though no one had complained yet.

Amina opened her email app without fully deciding to.

The CPS folder was still there.

She clicked it. The familiar subject lines stared back.

She chose the one that mattered. The one she’d read so many times the sentences marched through her dreams.

*CPS Decision – Case Reference *****

She scanned it again, though she could have recited it by heart.

“…The decision has been made that there is insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction…”
“…The CPS must be satisfied that a jury, properly directed, would be more likely than not to convict…”
“…We recognise the impact this may have on you and it does not mean we do not believe you…”

She snorted, an ugly sound in the quiet bus.

Did not mean they didn’t believe her. As if belief without consequence was anything but a polite shrug. As if it wasn’t just a clever legal way of saying, We see you. We hear you. We are still doing nothing.

Her thumb hovered over the delete button. She’d thought about it before, wiping the whole folder, freeing up digital space at least if not mental.

But every time, she’d stopped herself.

The emails were proof. Not of what had happened in that flat – the system had declared that unprovable. But of something else.

Proof that she wasn’t “crazy”. That there’d been an investigation. That someone, somewhere, had taken her words seriously enough to produce paperwork.

Now, as she stared at the screen, another thought slowly took shape behind the fury.

He was here.

In the same city. Walking the same streets. Posting his pint photos and “you only live once” captions like he hadn’t stolen something from her that she could never get back.

For seven years, her story had been stuck on one chapter: girl is hurt, girl reports, system fails, girl tries to move on.

But life wasn’t a book with a set number of pages. It was more like a loop, the same scenes repeating until something finally shifted.

She looked again at his Instagram, scrolling back up to the most recent post outside the bar.

The location tag was switched on.

A little red pin sat on the map. The exact spot she’d just walked past. The caption timestamped from last weekend.

He was back in the city centre scene properly. Not just some ghost from her uni days. Present tense. Active threat.

Images flickered uninvited across her mind. Him behind the bar again. Laughing with girls. Pouring drinks. Hand brushing hand.

He hadn’t stopped because nothing had made him.

The bus turned onto Stratford Road. Familiar shops appeared – the sweet shop with jars of colourful sweets her brother loved as a kid, the travel agents with posters of beaches that looked too blue to be real.

Her reflection in the bus window looked strange. Like someone she might recognise from somewhere but couldn’t quite place.

A survivor. A daughter. A liar in her mother’s eyes the night she said she was at Jade’s when really she’d been in hell. A professional now, calm and efficient on the ward even when patients screamed abuse in her face.

All these versions of her, stacked on top of each other.

What about the version who didn’t just try to “move on”?

What about the version who moved towards something instead?

Her phone vibrated in her hand, jolting her out of the thought.

A WhatsApp from Samira.

Cuzzz, you alive? Haven’t seen you in 100 years 😭 I’m making biryani tomorrow, you’re coming. No excuses. I will kidnap you.

Amina stared at the message, the stupid crying emoji, the heart that followed in a second text.

If there was one person in the world who would understand even a fraction of what had just happened, it was Samira.

Her fingers started typing before her brain could decide whether this was wise.

Can I come tonight instead? Need to talk about something. Serious.

Three dots. Then:

Oof. 😬 That sounds like therapy-level serious. Yes of course. Come after maghrib. I’ll make tea. Don’t wear nice clothes, I want you to help peel onions.

Amina smiled faintly despite the churn in her stomach.

She locked her phone and shoved it in her pocket, fingers still tingling. The bus drew closer to her stop, the familiar road rising to meet her.

She didn’t have a plan yet. Not really. Just a jumble of anger and images and questions.

But the sight of Daniel’s laughing face on Broad Street had cracked something open that couldn’t be sealed shut again with parathas and polite forgetfulness.

The city she lived in suddenly had two maps layered over each other.

One was bus routes and halal shops and hospital shifts.

The other was a network of memories and unresolved grievances, with one red pin burning bright over the bar where he now drank, where he now lived his unbothered life.

As she pressed the bell and stood up to get off, gripping the rail to steady herself, a thought formed, clear and cold.

She might not have believed in the justice system anymore.

But she still believed in justice.

By the time she stepped off the bus onto their quiet Sparkhill street, a decision had taken root in her chest, fragile and furious.

Tonight, at Samira’s kitchen table, she wouldn’t just cry and say, “I saw him,” and leave it there.

Tonight, she would say something she’d never said out loud before.

“I want to do something about it.”

The wind bit at her cheeks as she walked towards her front door, coat pulled tight. The sky hung low, full of unshed rain.

Inside, in the warmth of their small terraced house, her mother’s voice floated from the kitchen, humming a half-remembered song.

Amina paused with her hand on the doorknob, took a breath, and stepped in.

The past had found her in the crowd.

She was done hiding from it.

Chapter 4 – The Plan In The Prayer Room

The women’s side of the mosque always made Amina feel like time had slowed down.

Outside, Coventry Road roared with traffic and sirens and somebody’s tinny Bollywood remix blaring from a car with one exhaust too many. Inside, behind the heavy door and the thick curtain that divided the men’s and women’s sections, the world shrank to carpet, quiet and breath.

It was just after Maghrib. The sky outside had turned that particular deep blue that only lasted ten, fifteen minutes before sliding into black. Amina slipped off her shoes in the narrow entrance, nudging them into the chaotic line of sandals and trainers already crowding the rack.

The wudu area was still damp. She rolled up her sleeves and splashed cool water over her hands, her face, her arms. Each motion was muscle memory now, done a thousand times, but tonight she clung to it like a rope.

Wash the right hand. Then the left. Rinse the mouth. The nose. The face. Each action a small, stubborn defiance against the panic that had almost swallowed her in that side street earlier.

You’re here now, she told herself, watching droplets run down her arms. You’re in Allah’s house. Nothing bad can reach you here.

The women’s prayer room wasn’t big. A rectangle of worn, patterned carpet. White walls with a few framed calligraphy pieces – Ar-Rahman, Ar-Raheem, Al-Adl – The Most Merciful, The Most Compassionate, The Just.

A low bookshelf sat in one corner, Qur’ans lined up neatly, spines cracked from years of fingers turning pages. A handful of women prayed in scattered rows – a mother with a toddler clambering over her back, an old lady with a walking stick propped up beside her, two teenage girls whispering until an aunty shushed them with a single, well-practised glare.

Amina joined the back row, even though there was space further ahead. Habit. Instinct. Safety in distance.

She raised her hands and began her salah.

For a few precious minutes, her mind managed to narrow to the rhythm she’d known since childhood. Standing, bowing, prostrating. The familiar words poured out – Alhamdulillahi Rabbil ‘alameen – but underneath them, another silent prayer pulsed.

Ya Allah, I saw him.
Ya Allah, he’s here. In the same streets as me. Smiling.
Ya Allah, what am I supposed to do?

When she finished, she stayed seated on the carpet, fingers slipping over invisible tasbih beads. The room slowly emptied as women drifted out, back to dinners and homework and TV soaps.

Soon it was just her and one other woman – an older aunty in a navy jilbab, reading Qur’an softly to herself, lips moving, voice barely above a whisper.

Amina stared at the calligraphy on the wall opposite.

Al-Adl.

The Just.

She’d grown up hearing stories about that Name.

How every wrong would be accounted for. How no one would get away with anything in the end. How Allah saw every tear, heard every whispered “no” that humans pretended not to hear.

It had comforted her, back when the CPS email had landed like a slap. When people said, “Allah will deal with him,” as if that closed the file.

Tonight, it felt like sandpaper on a fresh wound.

“Ya Allah,” she whispered under her breath. “I know You’re Just. I know. But I’m still here. He’s still out there. I’m tired of waiting for the Day of Judgement while he’s having pints on a Saturday.”

The thought felt blasphemous and honest at the same time.

She pressed her palms to her eyes until little white stars exploded behind her lids.

Another voice, the one that sounded suspiciously like her mother at Islamic lecture nights, piped up inside her head.

Be careful, Amina. Anger can eat your iman. Shaitan loves revenge. Leave it to Allah.

She knew all that. She believed it. Mostly.

But she also believed what she saw today: him laughing outside that bar, his life apparently untouched by the night that had shattered hers.

If this was justice, it was on a timescale her human heart struggled to accept.

The door creaked as someone else entered – a young woman in gym leggings under a long hoodie, headscarf wrapped carelessly, cheeks still pink from the cold. She slipped past Amina with a small smile and began to pray in the corner.

People kept living. Kept praying. Kept doing their best in a world that rarely made sense.

Amina took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She wasn’t going to find all her answers staring at the carpet. But she needed this moment of stillness before she walked into Samira’s kitchen and let the dam break.

She put her hand over her heart, feeling its stubborn, uneven thud.

“Ya Allah,” she whispered, so quietly only He could hear, “protect me from doing something haram. Show me a way that is not wrong, but doesn’t leave me like this forever.”

It wasn’t poetry. It wasn’t a scholar’s dua. It was clumsy and raw.

It would have to do.

Samira’s flat in Small Heath always smelled like onions, chai and impending chaos.

When Amina knocked, the door flew open so fast she barely had time to take in her cousin’s face before being pulled into a hug that felt more like a tackle.

“You took long,” Samira said into her shoulder, voice muffled. “I thought you died on the bus and had a whole dramatic monologue ready for your janaza.”

“Assalamu alaikum to you too,” Amina wheezed, laughing weakly as Samira finally let go.

“Walaikum assalam, drama queen,” Samira replied, stepping back to look at her properly. Her eyes softened immediately. “You alright? You look… I don’t know. Different.”

“Bad different?” Amina asked, attempting a smile that didn’t quite land.

“Like you saw a jinn in Tesco,” Samira said. “Come inside before the neighbours think I’m running a shelter.”

The flat was small but somehow always felt full. Tonight, it was just them – Samira’s husband was out with friends, and their two kids were at their dadi’s – but the toys on the floor and the drawings on the fridge gave the place a permanent hum of family.

In the kitchen, a giant bag of onions sat open on the counter next to a chopping board. A saucepan bubbled gently with something tomato-based and promising.

“I wasn’t joking about the onions,” Samira said, tossing Amina a vegetable peeler. “Free therapy session with every kilo peeled.”

Amina rolled up her sleeves and set to work. For a while, they chopped in companionable silence. The knife clacked rhythmically against the board. The radio in the corner played a presenter talking about football with too much passion for something involving grass and men chasing a ball.

“How’s work?” Samira asked eventually, without looking up.

“Same,” Amina said. “Busy. People coughing on me for entertainment.”

“Any fit doctors yet?” Samira wiggled her eyebrows. “You can give me one. I’ll trade you for a halal Idris Elba from my dua list.”

Amina snorted. “I think Allah has more pressing concerns than your Idris Elba obsession.”

“Blasphemy,” Samira said. “So, what’s this serious thing? You texted me like someone in a Netflix show.”

The knife slowed in Amina’s hand. She stared at the half-peeled onion, its layers slippery under her fingers.

“I saw him,” she said quietly.

Samira paused. “Who?”

Amina swallowed. “Him.”

Samira’s hand tightened around the knife. Her eyes flicked up to Amina’s face, searching.

“Daniel?” she asked, voice already shifting, going sharper. “Here? In Brum?”

Amina nodded.

Samira’s jaw clenched. “Where?”

“Near New Street,” Amina said. “Outside some bar. He was with his mates. Laughing.” The last word came out jagged.

For a second, Samira just stared at her, the kitchen’s cozy warmth suddenly feeling too small for the weight of it.

“What did you do?” she asked, just above a whisper.

“I walked away,” Amina said. “Well, I kind of stumbled away. Then had a panic attack in a side street. Some nice Sainsbury’s aunty helped me breathe like I was giving birth in public.”

Samira let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sob. “Only you, wallah.”

She put her knife down and leaned both hands on the counter, shoulders rising and falling.

“How did he look?” she asked, then winced. “Actually, I don’t know if I want to know.”

“Fine,” Amina said bitterly. “Happy. Alive. Like the world is one big Nando’s loyalty card and he’s on the free chicken level all the time.”

Samira’s eyes flashed. “I swear to God, if I ever see—”

She cut herself off, lips pressing into a thin line.

They both knew vague threats meant nothing. A college girl’s fantasy of “If I see him, I’ll smash his face in” had less power in the real world, where the law had already shrugged.

Samira wiped her hands on a tea towel and turned to Amina fully.

“Come sit,” she said. “Onion duty adjourned.”

They moved to the small dining table, a cheap IKEA thing covered in a plastic cloth with a floral pattern that had seen better days. Samira poured them both masala tea from the sauce pan, hands slightly unsteady.

“So,” she said, wrapping her fingers around her mug. “You saw him. You had a panic attack. You came here. Now what?”

“I don’t know,” Amina said honestly. “That’s the problem. I feel like… like the last seven years have been me trying to forget. To move on. To be ‘strong’. And then five seconds of his stupid laugh and I’m right back there. Nineteen. That sofa. That room.”

Her voice cracked. She took a deep breath, forcing it back.

“I wanted to vomit,” she went on. “And scream. And… I don’t know. I also wanted to—”

She stopped, the next words heavy and sharp in her throat.

Samira leaned in. “Say it,” she urged. “Don’t hold it in for my sake. I can handle it.”

“I wanted him to disappear,” Amina whispered. “Properly. Permanently. I wanted someone to push him under a bus. I wanted a building to fall on his head. I wanted… I wanted to do it myself.”

There. The ugliest thought, laid bare on the cheap floral tablecloth.

Samira didn’t flinch. Her face changed, though – a flicker of pain, of recognition, of fear.

“Ya Allah,” she breathed quietly. “Amina…”

“I know it’s haram,” Amina said quickly, shame rushing in. “I know. Murder, qatl, all of that. I know. I’m not stupid. But for a second, it felt so… simple. Like, if he wasn’t here anymore, maybe my brain would finally stop replaying that night like a YouTube video on loop.”

Samira stared into her tea, watching the tiny ripples on the surface.

“I’ve thought it too,” she admitted. “About… other men. The ones who hurt girls and then sit in front of the imam pretending to be pious. I’ve imagined acid rain just falling on their heads only, like Allah sending a targeted storm.”

Amina huffed a small, humourless laugh. “Imagine that. Acid rain for predators only. I’d do the weather forecast.”

“But,” Samira continued, looking up now, eyes serious, “we’re not Allah. We don’t get to choose whose story ends and when. You know that. I know you know that. If you killed him… or even hurt him badly… they wouldn’t care what he did to you. They’d see one thing: brown Muslim girl, violent, dangerous. Prison. Shame for your mum. Shame for your dad. Our whole family would be ‘that family’ for the next fifty years.”

“I know,” Amina repeated, voice small. “That’s why I didn’t do anything. I just sat in an alleyway breathing like a dying fish.”

Samira reached across the table and took her hand, squeezing it hard.

“You survived,” she said. “Again. That’s not nothing.”

Amina swallowed the lump in her throat.

“But I can’t just keep… surviving,” she said quietly. “I can’t keep having panic attacks in random places while he lives his best life. I can’t keep telling myself ‘Allah will deal with him’ and then going to work and changing beds like that’s the only thing I’m allowed to do with my anger.”

“So what do you want to do?” Samira asked gently.

Amina hesitated.

“I want him to feel what I felt,” she said finally. “Not… the same thing. I don’t want to become him. But I want him to know he’s not untouchable. I want him to be scared. To be exposed. I want the world to know he’s not this funny guy on nights out. He’s a rapist. He’s a liar.”

The word sat between them like a live wire.

Samira let out a breath. “We tried the police,” she said. “They gave you that stupid email with all their ‘we believe you but also we don’t’ language.”

“I read it again on the bus,” Amina admitted. “Like a masochist.”

“So going back to them with nothing new…” Samira shook her head. “They’ll just pat you on the head and recommend counselling.”

Amina nodded. “Which I also tried.”

“And our community…” Samira’s mouth twisted. “They’re getting better but… you know. Half of them still think if a woman gets hurt, it’s because she left the house without enough layers of modesty and had the wrong thoughts in this era.”

Silence lapped at the edges of the kitchen. The onions in the pot hissed quietly, forgotten.

Samira’s eyes narrowed slightly, the way they did when she was trying to untangle a knot in her kid’s shoelace.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “So what do we have?”

“A man,” Amina said. “A face. A name. An address probably, if we stalk hard enough on Facebook. And a system that already failed once.”

“And we have you,” Samira added. “Smarter now. Stronger now.”

Amina snorted. “I had a meltdown on a side street two hours ago.”

“Strong doesn’t mean you never meltdown,” Samira said. “It means you get up after. Which you did. You came here instead of going home and pretending it didn’t happen. That’s growth, cous.”

They fell quiet again. Somewhere in the building, a neighbour laughed loudly at something on TV.

“What if…” Samira started, then stopped, chewing her lip.

“What if what?” Amina pushed.

“What if you didn’t wait for the system to find evidence?” Samira said slowly. “What if you… made him give it to you?”

Amina frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Samira leaned forward, energy shifting.

“Listen,” she said. “The first time round, it was your word against his, yeah? You saying no, him saying you were into it. No recordings, no witnesses. Just trauma versus bravado.”

“Yeah,” Amina said warily.

“But you know him,” Samira went on. “His ego. His mouth. The way he talks. You think if he thought you were back in his orbit, flattering him, maybe saying you ‘overreacted’… you think he’d keep his mouth shut? Or would he brag? Would he admit things without even realising they’re admissions?”

A minute ago, Amina’s stomach had felt heavy. Now it dropped altogether.

“Samira…” she said slowly. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Samira pulled her hand back, palms up, as if she was afraid of her own idea.

“I’m not saying we catfish him with some fake Instagram girl and then drive him to the woods and stab him,” she clarified quickly. “I’m not trying to end up on Crimewatch. I’m saying… maybe you message him. Pretend you want… closure. Or to ‘talk about what happened’. Or even that you miss him. Appeal to his ego. Get him somewhere quiet. Make him talk. Record everything.”

The words hung there, bold and dangerous.

Amina’s heart sped up, a different rhythm this time. Not panic. Something more like… possibility.

“And then what?” she asked, though a part of her already knew.

“Then we have something,” Samira said. “His voice. His own words. Him acknowledging things he denied before. We take that to the police. To a lawyer. To whoever we have to. And if they still don’t do anything…” She shrugged, a hard glint in her eye. “Then maybe we don’t go quiet this time. Maybe we go loud. Media. Social. Community. I don’t know. But at least we won’t be empty-handed.”

“It’s… risky,” Amina said.

“Of course it’s risky,” Samira replied. “Existing as a woman is risky. But we can make it less stupid-risky.”

“How?”

Samira sat back, tapping her fingers on the table.

“We don’t do this alone,” she said. “We need someone who’s not ruled by emotion. And someone who knows tech stuff. Phones, recordings, backups. Someone who won’t run off and try to punch him in the face.”

Amina’s brain supplied one name before Samira even said it.

“Hassan,” they both said at the same time.

Samira’s older brother. Tall, calm, annoyingly competent. The family’s unofficial IT department and crisis manager. The one who’d fixed Amina’s laptop when her dissertation had corrupted, talking her off the ledge with dry jokes and backup drives.

“He’ll lose it,” Amina said quietly. “If he finds out. About… everything.”

“He’ll lose it at him, not you,” Samira said firmly. “And he won’t do anything stupid. You know Hassan. He’s like… lawful good, if he was a Dungeons & Dragons character.”

“Since when do you know Dungeons & Dragons?” Amina asked, bewildered.

“I’m married to a nerd,” Samira said. “I absorb things.”

Amina’s throat tightened. “I don’t know if I can handle another person looking at me like I’m broken,” she said. “Mum, Dad, the police, the counsellor… I’m tired of that face.”

“Hassan won’t,” Samira said. “He’ll be angry. Furious. But at him. Not you. He’s always had your back, you know that.”

Amina thought of the time in Year 9 when a boy had called her a racial slur outside school. Hassan, then a lanky sixth former, had marched over, put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, very quietly, “Repeat that. Go on. I dare you.” The boy had turned pale and legged it.

She took a deep breath.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Call him.”

Samira blinked. “Now?”

“Yeah,” Amina said, surprising herself with the steadiness in her own voice. “If we’re doing this, I don’t want to go home and overthink it for three weeks. I’ll talk myself out of it. Call him.”

Samira stared at her for a moment, then nodded sharply, like they’d just agreed to a minor home renovation instead of a life-altering plan.

“Alright,” she said, pulling her phone from her pocket. “But if he starts shouting, I’m blaming you.”

“He can shout at me,” Amina said. “He’s allowed.”

Samira dialled. Put it on speaker. The line rang twice before Hassan picked up.

“Yo,” came his familiar, slightly bored voice. “What’s up? I’m literally in the middle of FIFA, so this better be life or death.”

“In between,” Samira said. “Come over. Now. Amina’s here.”

There was a pause. Hassan’s tone changed.

“Amina’s there?” he repeated. “She okay?”

“That’s the point,” Samira said. “She’s not. Just come. And bring your brain. And maybe your laptop.”

“That sounds ominous,” Hassan muttered. “Give me twenty minutes.”

He hung up before they could reply.

Samira locked her phone and looked at Amina.

“You still sure?” she asked softly.

“No,” Amina admitted. “But I’m tired of being sure only about doing nothing.”

Samira nodded once, respect in her eyes.

“Good,” she said. “Because I think we’re about to start something messy.”

Hassan arrived in less than fifteen minutes, breath puffing slightly in the cold as he stepped in, trainers squeaking on the hallway floor.

He was in joggers and a hoodie, a backpack slung over one shoulder, hair still damp from a quick shower. His expression, usually set to default mild sarcasm, was tight.

“Assalamu alaikum,” he said, kicking off his shoes. His gaze went straight to Amina. “You look like you haven’t slept in a month.”

“Walaikum assalam,” she replied. “You look like you take FIFA too seriously.”

“Painfully accurate,” he said. “Alright, what’s going on?”

Samira didn’t waste time. She shut the kitchen door, turned the radio down, and launched into the story.

As she spoke, filling in gaps Amina couldn’t quite bring herself to say out loud, Hassan dropped into the chair opposite, elbows on knees, hands clasped tightly.

He didn’t interrupt. Not once.

He just listened.

By the time Samira got to “she saw him in town today,” his jaw muscles were ticking like a clock in a quiet room.

When she finished, the kitchen was silent except for the simmer of the onions on the stove.

Hassan exhaled slowly through his nose, like a pressure cooker releasing steam. His eyes were shiny in a way Amina had never seen.

“You told the police,” he said finally, voice low. “You went through all that. And they… what… sent you a politely worded ‘get lost’?”

“Pretty much,” Amina said.

He swore under his breath. Not loudly. But with weight.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, looking at her, not accusing, just… hurt.

Amina stared at her hands.

“I was ashamed,” she said. “I thought you’d see me differently. And everyone kept saying, ‘It’s over now, move on,’ like it was a bad idea to keep talking about it.”

Hassan shook his head, swallowing hard.

“Amina,” he said, leaning forward. “Listen to me carefully. Nothing that happened makes you less in my eyes. Or in Allah’s eyes. He should be ashamed. He should be scared. Not you.”

Tears pricked at the back of her eyes.

“If I’d known his name back then…” Hassan muttered. “I swear I would have—”

“Exactly,” Samira cut in. “That’s why we didn’t tell you when it happened. We didn’t need two ruined lives.”

Hassan sat back, rubbing his face with both hands.

“Okay,” he said, forcing himself back into the present. “So what’s the plan? Because I can already tell you didn’t call me just to share trauma.”

Samira and Amina glanced at each other. Samira nodded for Amina to speak.

She took a deep breath.

“We want him to confess,” she said. “On tape. On your phone. In his own words. We want… new evidence. Something the CPS can’t ignore so easily this time.”

Hassan’s eyebrows rose. “…Go on.”

“I message him,” Amina said, throat dry. “Act like I want to talk. Maybe apologise for ‘overreacting’. Make him think I miss him. Or… something. We arrange to meet somewhere public but quiet. I get him to talk about that night. I push his ego a bit. Get him to say he knew I was drunk. That I said no. Whatever I can. You set up the tech so it records everything.”

Hassan was quiet for a moment. He drummed his fingers lightly on the table.

“Entrapment,” he said eventually. “Sort of.”

“He already did it,” Amina said. “We’re not asking him to commit a new crime. Just to show his true colours.”

“I know,” Hassan said. “I’m not saying no. I’m just… thinking through the risks.”

“What risks?” Samira asked, though her tone said she already knew there were many.

“He might not take the bait,” Hassan said. “He might smell something off. Or he might meet you and be overly careful, especially if he knows there was a police case. He might say, ‘I didn’t do anything, you’re crazy,’ the whole time, and you end up with nothing but more trauma.”

“I can handle that,” Amina said, though her voice betrayed how unsure she was.

“And,” Hassan continued, “there’s the small matter of your safety. You’d be alone with him. Again. I’m not comfortable with that.”

“You won’t be far,” Samira cut in. “We thought… maybe you could be nearby. Like, in a car. Or somewhere you can see them from a distance.”

“We’re not following them around like some budget spy movie,” Hassan said. “Police take one look at us and we’re the suspects.”

“So what do we do?” Amina asked. “Because if the answer is ‘nothing’, I’m going to scream.”

Hassan looked at her, really looked at her. The way her eyes still had that panicky flicker. The way her shoulders curled in slightly, like she was forever bracing for impact.

“Okay,” he said finally. “We don’t do nothing. We do something. But we do it properly. No heroics. No violence. No illegal rubbish that’ll land you in a cell next to him, yeah?”

“Agreed,” Amina and Samira said in unison.

“First,” Hassan said, slipping into his problem-solving voice, “we pick the place. Somewhere not too isolated but not packed. Somewhere you can plausibly suggest without sounding weird. Like… a park. Or a big open space.”

“Lickey Hills,” Samira said immediately. “You know she loves it there. She used to drag us there every summer like we were in some Sylheti Sound of Music remake.”

Amina almost smiled. “It’s pretty,” she said. “And easy to get to by train. And big enough for privacy.”

Hassan nodded slowly. “Okay. Lickey Hills. Or somewhere like it. We can refine later. Second, we sort the tech. I can set your phone up to record from the moment you get there. Hidden in your bag or coat. Also, we can set up live location sharing with me, so I know where you are at all times.”

“Is that… difficult?” Amina asked.

He snorted. “No. Toddlers can do it. We’ll practice.”

“Third?” Samira prompted.

“Third,” Hassan said, “we agree on a safe word or phrase. Something that sounds normal but is actually you saying, ‘I’m not okay, I need help.’ You say it on a call to me or in a text if you can. If I hear it, I call the police immediately and give them your location.”

Amina’s mouth was dry. “And you?”

“I’ll already be on my way to you,” he said simply. “But I’m not trying to be a vigilante. I’m there as backup, not judge, jury, executioner. Got it?”

She nodded.

“And fourth,” he continued, holding up a finger, “we set boundaries. You don’t go into a house or a flat with him. Ever. You meet in public spaces only. If he tries to move you somewhere you didn’t agree to, you leave. Immediately. No ‘I don’t want to be rude’ rubbish.”

Amina let out a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding. “Okay.”

“This is still dangerous,” Hassan said. “Emotionally. Maybe physically. I’m not going to pretend it’s not. And I’m not going to lie to you and say the CPS will definitely act afterwards. They might still be useless.”

“I know,” Amina said. “But doing nothing… it’s been killing me slowly. I need to try. Even if it fails. I need to know I didn’t just let him live in my head rent-free forever.”

Hassan nodded slowly.

“Then we do it,” he said. “We build a net and make him walk into it himself. And we pray Allah protects you and guides us, because if He’s not with us on this, we’re just three idiots with phones.”

Samira snorted. “Speak for yourself. I’m at least a four-idiot minimum.”

The tension in the room loosened just enough for a ghost of laughter.

Hassan unzipped his backpack and pulled out his laptop and a small pouch of tangled cables.

“Right,” he said, business-like. “Let’s script this a bit. You’re not going in cold. We think about what you’ll say, how he might respond. We practise. And we set this up properly.”

“They said TV was bad for our brains,” Samira muttered. “But look at us now, building a morally conflicted sting operation like Pakistani Scandal.”

Amina watched them – her cousin with onion smell on her sleeves and fire in her eyes, her cousin-brother untangling wires like he had a direct hotline to sanity – and felt something shift.

For years, her story had been just her and him and a faceless bureaucracy.

Now, for the first time, it was her and them.

She wasn’t alone in it anymore.

Later, when Hassan had left with a list of things to set up and Samira had gone back to her onions, Amina sat at the table with her phone in her hand, staring at the empty message box.

His name on the screen made her skin crawl.

Daniel.

She typed and deleted a dozen openings.

Hey stranger – too casual.
We need to talk – too dramatic.
You ruined my life – too honest.

Her fingers trembled. Her stomach twisted.

Samira, stirring the pot, watched her quietly.

“You don’t have to do it tonight,” she said gently. “You can sleep on it. Think. Change your mind if you want. No one’s going to call you a coward.”

“I know,” Amina said.

She thought of him outside the bar. The laughing. The pint. The easy, unearned peace.

Her thumb moved.

She typed:

Hey. It’s Amina. From BCU days. Saw you in town today. Weird blast from the past. Made me think about… stuff. Wondered if we could talk sometime. Properly. No drama.

She hovered over the send button, heart pounding, sweat slick on her upper lip.

Once she sent it, there was no taking it back. No pretending she hadn’t opened this door.

She thought of the prayer room, of the calligraphy on the wall.

Al-Adl.

Justice.

“Ya Allah,” she whispered under her breath, phone still in her hand. “If this path is wrong, close it. If it’s right, make it easier than it feels right now.”

Then, before she could overthink it again, she hit send.

The message whooshed off into the digital void, the little “delivered” tick appearing almost instantly.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then the three dots appeared.

He was typing.

Amina’s heart climbed into her throat.

The plan had stopped being theoretical.

It had just begun.

Chapter 5 – Messages, Lies And Lickey Hills

The three dots on WhatsApp pulsed like a heartbeat.

Amina stared at the screen, thumb hovering in mid-air, as if she could catch his reply before it appeared and throw it away.

Then the dots disappeared.

For a second, she thought he’d changed his mind, put his phone down, gone back to his pint and his endlessly forgiving life.

Then the message popped up.

Daniel: Wow. Blast from the past is right 😂
Daniel: Didn’t think you’d ever speak to me again tbh

Her stomach twisted.

Of course he didn’t. As far as he was concerned, she’d “falsely accused” him and then disappeared. She’d been the problem, the overreacting Muslim girl who couldn’t handle a “grown-up” night.

Her fingers shook as she typed back.

Amina: Yeah well. Time passes I guess
Amina: Saw you outside a bar earlier
Amina: Looked like life’s going well

He replied fast. Too fast, like he’d been waiting for this conversation without knowing it.

Daniel: Can’t complain 😏 just working, drinking, same old
Daniel: You still in Brum?

She swallowed.

Amina: Yeah. Still here
Amina: Hospital work
Amina: Was just… weird seeing you
Amina: Made me think about that time. Uni. Everything that happened after

She watched the little “typing…” indicator flash on and off.

Daniel: Yeah… that whole thing
Daniel: That was MAD tbh
Daniel: Didn’t think I’d ever have the police knocking on my door because of a girl who liked me too much 😅

The audacity almost took her breath away.

Samira, peering over from the cooker, saw her face change.

“What did he say?” she demanded.

Amina turned the phone so she could read.

Samira’s mouth fell open. “Liked him too much,” she repeated. “Wallah, I hope his shower goes cold every morning for the rest of his life.”

“Focus,” Amina muttered, fingers already moving again.

This was the act they’d agreed on. Not full forgiveness. Not begging. Something in between. Enough to stroke his ego, to make him feel safe. Enough to make him talk.

Amina: It was mad
Amina: I was messed up then tbh
Amina: Didn’t really know who I was or what I wanted
Amina: I’ve been thinking about it lately. About that night. About how it all blew up

The reply took a little longer this time, like he was considering his angle.

Daniel: I mean you did go nuclear 😂
Daniel: One minute we’re having a good time
Daniel: Next minute cops at my door saying rape like I’m some monster
Daniel: Proper headf**k

The word glared up at her from the screen. Used like a joke. Like an inconvenience.

Her pulse thudded in her ears. She dug her nails into her palm out of frame, the pain anchoring her to the chair.

“This is good,” Hassan said quietly from the doorway, having slipped in just as the messages started. “He’s already acknowledging the police were involved. It’s a link to the old case.”

Good.

The word felt strange next to the bile in her throat. But he wasn’t wrong.

Amina: I know
Amina: I’m not saying I handled it well
Amina: I didn’t understand myself then
Amina: Religion, family, guilt, all of it
Amina: I freaked out
Amina: Been in therapy since trying to untangle it

She hesitated. Then added:

Amina: I don’t want beef with you forever
Amina: It damaged me too

She sent it before she could overthink it. A small part of it was even true. It had damaged her to carry that hatred alone for so long. The lie was in the implication that she’d been equally to blame.

“Careful,” Hassan murmured. “Don’t give him too much ammunition about ‘you were confused’. Just enough to keep him relaxed.”

“Let me breathe,” she snapped, then immediately regretted the edge in her voice.

He lifted his hands in surrender. “Okay. You’re driving. I’m just the satnav.”

Daniel replied.

Daniel: Therapy??
Daniel: Damn
Daniel: Didn’t realise I was that deep in your head 😂

Her thumb hovered. She wanted to type, You’re not that important. It was the trauma that lodged in my nervous system like shrapnel. Instead, she swallowed the truth and fed his ego.

Amina: You were a big part of that time
Amina: I cared about you and hated you at the same time
Amina: Hard to carry that for 7 years

Another pause. Then:

Daniel: So what are you saying?
Daniel: You wanna talk about it now?
Daniel: Or just tell me I ruined your life and log off 😂

She took a breath.

Amina: I want to talk
Amina: Properly
Amina: No shouting, no police, no drama
Amina: Face to face
Amina: Just once
Amina: Then we can both move on

Samira squeezed her shoulder, fingers digging in.

“That’s it,” she whispered. “Hook is in. Now we reel.”

The dots appeared again.

Daniel: Brave
Daniel: Tbf I always thought you’d never want to see me again
Daniel: Thought you’d crossed me off your little halal list forever

Her lip curled.

Amina: Life’s not that simple
Amina: I’ve realised I need closure
Amina: Even if I was wrong about some things
Amina: Or we both were

Hassan winced. “That’s going to haunt me,” he muttered.

“It’s bait,” Amina said quietly. “He has to think I might admit fault too. Otherwise he’ll be defensive the whole time.”

Another reply.

Daniel: Okay
Daniel: When/where?
Daniel: I’m not doing some weird coffee shop therapy session though 😂

Her fingers moved almost on their own.

Amina: I hate coffee shops
Amina: Feels too public
Amina: And I don’t drink
Amina: Could we go somewhere outdoors?
Amina: Like a walk?
Amina: Neutral ground

“Here it comes,” Samira muttered. “Come on, Lickey Hills.”

Daniel: Outdoors?? In this weather? You’ve gone soft
Daniel: Where were you thinking?

She hesitated a fraction of a second. Then:

Amina: Lickey Hills?
Amina: I still go there sometimes
Amina: Feels calm
Amina: Away from the city noise

The dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared.

Daniel: Wow that’s random
Daniel: But tbf it’s decent up there
Daniel: Dog walks, views, all that
Daniel: Sure
Daniel: This weekend?

Amina’s heart kicked.

Weekend.

Soon.

Amina: Saturday? Afternoon?
Amina: Easier to get there
Amina: You free?

Daniel: Got work in the evening but daytime is fine
Daniel: 2pm?
Daniel: I’ll drive
Daniel: Pick you up?

A jolt of alarm shot through her.

“No,” Hassan and Samira said at the same time.

Amina was already typing.

Amina: No need
Amina: I can get the train/bus
Amina: You just tell me which entrance/parking bit
Amina: We meet there

Daniel: Independent woman, I see 😂
Daniel: Alright
Daniel: There’s a car park near the visitor centre
Daniel: Meet there 2pm Saturday
Daniel: Don’t ghost me this time

She forced herself to reply.

Amina: I won’t
Amina: Thanks for being open to it

Daniel: Don’t thank me lol
Daniel: I’m curious
Daniel: Might be good to clear the air
Daniel: Plus I wanna see if you still look the same 👀

“Eurgh,” Samira groaned. “I need to wash my eyes with Dettol.”

Amina: I’ve aged
Amina: Night shifts will do that
Amina: Anyway, see you Saturday

Daniel: See you then x

The tiny “x” at the end made her want to throw the phone across the room.

Instead, she locked the screen and put it face down on the table.

The kitchen felt suddenly too bright, too small, too loud.

“You did it,” Hassan said softly. “It’s on.”

“That doesn’t mean I can actually go through with it,” Amina replied, voice thin.

“You don’t have to,” Samira said immediately. “Just because you made the plan doesn’t mean you’re locked in. You can wake up on Saturday and say, ‘You know what, forget it.’ We’ll back you either way.”

Amina stared at the phone as if it might bite.

“If I run now,” she said slowly, “I’ll be running forever. From him. From Broad Street. From the whole city. I’m tired, Sam. I’m tired of organising my life around a man who probably doesn’t even remember the colour of my scarf that night.”

Samira’s face softened.

“Okay,” she said. “Then we make sure when you go, you’re as ready as you can be.”

The next few days moved in strange double-time.

On the surface, life carried on. Amina did her shifts, answered buzzers, coaxed frail patients to eat three more spoonfuls. She helped move a man with pneumonia onto oxygen, held a woman’s hand during a blood test, explained a care plan to a worried daughter.

Her body performed tasks it knew by heart. Her voice said the right reassuring things.

Underneath, a constant low hum of anxiety vibrated through her.

She replayed every possible version of Saturday in her head. Him being charming. Him being hostile. Him refusing to admit anything. Him bragging. Him crying. Her crying. Her freezing. Her screaming. The recording failing. Her phone dying. Him noticing.

In the break room one night, a nurse asked her if she was okay.

“You look zoned out,” she said, stirring her tea.

“Just tired,” Amina lied. “What’s new?”

At home, her mother eyed her suspiciously.

“You’re on your phone a lot,” she remarked. “Is there a man we should know about?”

Amina nearly choked on her rice.

“No,” she spluttered. “There is absolutely not a man.”

Her mum narrowed her eyes. “Hmm. That’s what girls say on dramas right before we meet the man.”

“Real life is not dramas,” Amina said, heart hammering.

If only, she thought. At least in dramas, villains got background music and dramatic lighting. In real life, they drank pints outside bars and made jokes about therapy.

On Thursday evening, she went back to Samira’s. Hassan was already there, laptop open, a cheap pair of wireless earbuds on the table next to a pile of tech guts – cables, a small power bank, a second-hand voice recorder he’d fished from somewhere.

“Welcome to Operation Ego Trap,” Samira announced as Amina entered. “Entry fee: your sanity.”

“Very funny,” Amina muttered, taking off her coat.

Hassan gestured for her to sit.

“Okay,” he said. “Tech rundown. None of this is James Bond level, but it’s more than most people have.”

He held up her phone first.

“One, we set this to record audio as soon as you get off the bus/tram/whatever near Lickey Hills,” he said. “I’ll show you the shortcut. Screen off, it still records. Battery-wise, you’re fine as long as you charge it fully before you leave.”

He tapped his laptop.

“Two, we turn on automatic cloud backup for audio. That way, if he smashes your phone or throws it in a pond—”

“Don’t say that,” Samira cut in sharply.

“—if he tries anything,” Hassan amended, “there’s still a copy somewhere that doesn’t depend on this physical device. I’ll also set it to upload to a shared drive I can access.”

He picked up the tiny black device on the table.

“Three, backup recorder. This can clip under your scarf, near your collarbone. It’s small, no lights, no beeps. Old school but reliable. You hit the switch when you get to the car park and it records until you turn it off or it runs out of memory. Between your phone and this, we should have decent coverage even if one fails.”

Amina touched the recorder gingerly.

“You’re sure he won’t see it?” she asked.

“Only if he’s uncomfortably staring at your neck the whole time,” Samira muttered. “And if he does, I hope he chokes on his own tongue.”

“We’ll hide the clip under the edge of your scarf or coat,” Hassan said, ignoring Samira’s bloodthirsty aside. “We’ll try it on and I’ll take photos so you can see how invisible it looks.”

He put the devices aside and opened a settings menu on her phone.

“Now, live location sharing,” he said. “You’re going to share your location with me from the moment you leave home on Saturday until you get back. That way, I can see if you’re moving somewhere unexpected. If I see your little dot leave Lickey Hills and head towards, say, a random hotel, I’m calling you. If you don’t pick up and don’t send the agreed phrase, I’m calling the police.”

Amina swallowed. The seriousness of it settled heavy in her stomach.

“What phrase?” she asked quietly.

Samira tapped her chin, thinking.

“It has to sound normal,” she said. “Not like a code word in some spy movie. Something you could plausibly say to him or in a voicemail to us without him getting suspicious. But something you’d never say otherwise.”

“‘The weather is nice’,” Hassan suggested. “You never say that. You hate British weather.”

Amina rolled her eyes. “Too obvious. It’ll be sunny and he’ll be like, yeah, it is nice.”

“Hmm,” Samira mused. “What’s something only we would clock as weird?”

“Something religious but off?” Hassan said. “Like you never quote random hadiths in conversation.”

“Or…” Amina said slowly, “something from when we were kids. Remember that stupid joke game? ‘Yellow car, you’re a banana’?”

Samira snorted. “That game was elite.”

“No one else in their right mind would say, ‘Yellow car, you’re a banana,’ in the middle of a serious conversation,” Amina noted. “If I say that in a voicemail or a call, you know I’m not okay.”

Hassan nodded. “Done. Safe phrase: ‘Yellow car, you’re a banana.’ You send that, I treat it as DEFCON 1.”

“Also,” Samira added, “if we call you and you answer and say literally anything about bananas, we know something’s up.”

“Got it,” Amina said, filing it away in the corner of her brain currently functioning as a mission control room.

“Now,” Hassan said, closing the laptop. “We practise.”

He straightened in his chair, rolled his shoulders back, and his whole body language shifted. It was subtle but uncanny – the lazy tilt of his head, the slight smirk, the casual sprawl. Suddenly, he wasn’t Hassan anymore.

He was channeling Daniel.

Samira cackled. “Wow, you’re good at this. I’m scared.”

“I’ve served enough lads like him in the restaurant,” Hassan said dryly. “Trust me, they’re all clones. Okay, Amina. I’m him. We’re at Lickey Hills. You’ve said hello. I’ve done my little ‘Wow, you look different but still fit’ speech. Now what do you say?”

Amina’s mouth went dry. She stared at the table.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “My brain is static.”

Samira reached over and squeezed her hand.

“Start simple,” she said. “Why did you agree to see me? What did you think when you saw my message. Whatever.”

Amina nodded, inhaled deeply, and then looked at Hassan-as-Daniel.

“Why did you come?” she asked hesitantly. “After everything that happened.”

Hassan smirked a little, slipping into character frighteningly easily.

“Curiosity,” he drawled. “I mean, one day you’re calling me a rapist, next day you’re in my DMs asking to meet in the woods. That’s a bit mad, innit?”

The words hit her, even though she knew they were pretend. This was exactly the kind of thing Daniel might say.

“I…” she started, stumbling. “I’ve been thinking a lot. About that night.”

“Of course you have,” Hassan-as-Daniel said, smirk widening. “I’m unforgettable.”

Samira threw a balled-up tissue at him. “Stop, you’re too good, it’s making me violent.”

“No, it’s good,” Amina said quickly. “I need it realistic.”

She took another breath.

“I’ve been thinking about… how it felt,” she said. “And how messed up I was. Religion, family, my own guilt. I overreacted.”

“Careful,” Hassan murmured, dropping the act for a second. “Don’t lean too hard into ‘overreacted’ or he’ll use that as ammo later. You want him comfortable, but you still need to push back.”

“Right,” she said. “Try again.”

They ran variations of the conversation for nearly an hour.

Amina practised steering from small talk to that night.

“So… do you remember much about that night?”
“What did you think was happening when we went back to yours?”
“You knew I’d never done anything like that before, right?”
“You could tell I was drunk though, yeah?”
“Did it not bother you when I said no?”

Hassan practised being slippery, playing defensive and cocky and “misunderstood”, so she could rehearse nudging his ego here, cornering him there.

“So you slept with a virgin Muslim girl who kept saying she felt guilty and thought that was normal?”
“So when I said, ‘I don’t want this,’ you thought that meant, ‘keep going’?”
“If you were so sure it was consensual, why didn’t you tell the police everything you’re telling me now?”

Again and again, they circled the key admission points she needed without making it too confrontational too soon.

“You’re not trying to win an argument on the hill,” Hassan said, slipping back into himself between runs. “You’re trying to get him talking. The more he talks, the more likely he slips. Your job is to be quiet longer than feels comfortable. People like him hate silence. They fill it with their own rubbish.”

“Yeah,” Samira said. “Let his ego dig his grave. You’re just handing him a shovel.”

By the end of the session, Amina’s head felt like it had been wrung out. But the static had a shape now. A script. A set of possible moves and countermoves.

It didn’t make Saturday less terrifying.

But it made it less unknown.

Friday night, she barely slept.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw trees instead of the cracked ceiling. Lickey Hills rose in her mind, taller than it was in real life. The car park stretched like an asphalt stage where she was about to perform something she’d never rehearsed in front of an actual audience.

In the early hours, when the house was quiet and the only sound was the boiler humming like a distant train, she sat on her prayer mat, the room dimly lit by the orange glow of the streetlamp outside.

She didn’t have fancy duas.

She just had her hurt and her fear and whatever scraps of faith she’d managed to hold onto through seven years of anger.

“Ya Allah,” she whispered, forehead pressed to the ground. “You know what he did. You saw it when no one else did. If I go tomorrow and this is wrong, stop me. If it’s right, protect me. Protect my iman. Don’t let my anger make me someone I don’t recognise.”

She stayed in sujood longer than she had in a long time. Her knees ached. Her toes went numb. She didn’t move.

When she finally sat back, her cheeks were damp. She wiped them roughly and blew out a breath.

In the dark, she imagined a different version of her life. One where she never went to the bar, never went to his flat, never had to learn the vocabulary of trauma before she’d finished her degree.

That life didn’t exist.

This one did.

And in this life, on this coming Saturday, she was going to Lickey Hills not as the girl who walked into his flat at nineteen, but as the woman who walked out of a police station and refused to let “No further action” be the last line of her story.

She lay down at last, exhaustion finally overriding adrenaline, and drifted into a thin, fractured sleep.

Outside, beyond the rows of terraced houses and the glow of the city, the trees of Lickey Hills stood there in the dark, indifferent and patient.

Waiting.

Chapter 6 – Into The Trees

Saturday arrived like a dare.

The morning light over Sparkhill was thin and grey, the kind that made the whole street look like it had been rubbed out and redrawn in pencil. The air was cold enough that her breath fogged when she opened her bedroom window a crack.

On any other Saturday, she would have slept late, drifted slowly into the day. Today, she woke before Fajr, heart ticking like a faulty clock, pulse already ahead of her.

Downstairs, the house was still. Her parents’ door remained shut. The boiler grumbled to life, radiators clicking like they were trying to talk each other into working.

She dressed more carefully than she wanted to admit. Not like she was going on a date – just… put together. Neutral.

Black jeans. Comfortable trainers. A long, dark green parka that zipped up to her chin. A soft black scarf wrapped snugly around her head, pinned in place so it wouldn’t slip. Under the scarf, near the hollow at the base of her throat, Hassan’s tiny recorder sat clipped to the inside seam, the switch already flicked to “on”.

She could feel it, a tiny weight. A secret heartbeat.

Her phone, fully charged, slid into the inside pocket of her coat. Hassan had set up the quick-record function last night. One swipe, one tap, and the mic would start listening, screen dark. He’d tested the cloud backup twice, making her walk up and down her street while he watched her little blue dot move on his laptop.

“This is so much effort just to catch one man saying what he already did,” she’d muttered.

“Yeah, well,” he’d replied. “Welcome to life as a woman in the criminal justice system.”

Now, in the dim bedroom, she opened WhatsApp briefly. Their last messages stared back.

Daniel: See you then x

Her fingers hovered.

She typed:

On my way.

Deleted it.

She didn’t owe him pre-game commentary. They’d agreed a time and place. That was enough.

Instead, she opened another chat.

Amina: Setting off now. Location shared. Recorder on.

Samira replied almost immediately, as if she’d been staring at her phone too.

Samira: 💪💪💪 May Allah be with you. If he even looks at you wrong I’ll manifest a pothole just for his car.

Hassan’s message came a second later.

Hassan: Got your dot. I’ll leave in 10. Meeting Romsley side car park. Stick to the plan. Call if ANYTHING feels off.

She sent a thumbs-up, then slipped the phone back into her coat.

By the time she crept downstairs, her mother was already in the kitchen, a shawl around her shoulders, making tea like her body couldn’t start the day without boiling water first.

“You’re up early,” her mum said, surprised. “No shift today?”

“Day off,” Amina said, forcing her voice into normal. “Going Lickey Hills. With Samira.”

It wasn’t a complete lie. Just… heavily edited.

Her mother made a satisfied noise. “Good. Get fresh air. Your face is going grey like London sky. Eat something first.”

She pushed a plate of toast towards her, the cheap sliced bread barely warmed and only half-buttered. Amina’s stomach was too tight to accept much, but she forced down a slice, washed it with tea that tasted more like steam than flavour.

“You’ll be back for dinner?” her mum asked, already planning, already slotting her daughter’s presence into the mental spreadsheet of lentils and leftovers.

“InshaAllah,” Amina said. “Before Maghrib.”

Her mother nodded, apparently appeased.

At the door, Amina pulled on her parka and tucked her scarf tighter under her chin.

“Make dua when you’re on the hill,” her mum called from the kitchen. “It’s high up. Your duas go quicker there.”

Amina managed a small smile.

“I will,” she said. “Make one for you too.”

Her mum clucked her tongue, affectionate. “Always.”

The cold hit her face as she stepped outside, closing the door quietly behind her.

For a moment, she just stood on the front step, the street stretching both ways, the day yawning open in front of her. She looked up at the overcast sky.

“Ya Allah,” she whispered under her breath. “Bismillah.”

Then she walked to the bus stop.

The journey to Lickey Hills took just over an hour door to door, but it felt like crossing into another life.

Bus to town first, the usual shuffle of half-asleep Brummies, someone’s kid complaining about the cold, a man in a hi-vis jacket dozing against the window. Then a short walk through the city centre, past Broad Street’s ghost in daylight – the bars looking oddly innocent with their lights off and their sick scrubbed away. Then another bus, this one gradually shedding shops and density until houses got bigger, gardens wider, sky more spacious.

All the while, her phone was a quiet presence in her pocket, sending her location out into the invisible airwaves. Hassan would be watching the little dot inch towards the green blob on his map.

She tried not to imagine his face, eyes flicking between screens, jaw tight like it had been in Samira’s kitchen. The idea of him worrying made her chest ache in a different way.

Still, it was better than being truly alone.

She got off near the visitor centre, the bus leaving her with a gust of exhaust and silence. They were a few minutes early; the car park wasn’t full yet. A handful of cars. A couple wrangling a toddler into a bright yellow raincoat. A small group of older walkers with proper boots and walking poles, already striding purposefully towards the trees.

The air up here was different. Colder, cleaner. It smelled of damp earth, last year’s leaves, the faint tang of pine.

Amina took her phone out, swiped the screen, and tapped the shortcut icon Hassan had created. The recording icon flashed briefly before the screen went dark again.

“Okay,” she murmured. “Rolling.”

She tucked the phone back into her coat, fingers grazing the recorder under her scarf. The little switch was still firmly in place.

She leaned against a wooden post and pretended to check something on a noticeboard about trail routes and conservation. Her heart hammered so loudly she was sure the birds could hear it.

Every car that pulled in made her jump.

A red hatchback. A silver estate. A white van that had no business on a hill.

Then a black Golf swung into the car park, exhaust slightly louder than it needed to be, music thumping just faintly through the closed windows.

She recognised it before she recognised him.

The car parked, a little crooked, two spaces over from where she stood. The engine cut. For a second, nothing happened. Then the driver’s door opened and he stepped out.

He looked taller than she remembered, though she knew that was just the angle. Time had filled him out a little – broader chest, thicker waist, stubble tipped with the first hints of grey. He wore a padded jacket, jeans, trainers that looked new.

Her body reacted before her mind could finish its assessment. Pulse spike. Breath hitch. Muscles tensing as if waiting for impact.

She pressed her nails into her palms through the gloves, grounding herself.

This was not a flat. This was not Broad Street at 1am. This was a car park in daylight with families and pensioners and dog walkers dotted around. There were feet on gravel, birds in trees, children squabbling over crisps.

He couldn’t lock any door around her here.

When he spotted her, his face broke into a wide grin that made her stomach drop.

“Bloody hell,” he said, walking over, arms spread like they were old friends. “Look who actually turned up.”

“Hi,” she managed, forcing her lips into something approximating a polite smile.

He stopped in front of her, giving her a once-over that made her skin crawl. Not even trying to hide it.

“You look… different,” he said. “Older. In a good way. Less… baby-faced.”

“I am older,” she replied. “That’s how time works.”

He laughed.

“Still got the sass then,” he chuckled. “And the scarf. Gotta respect that consistency.”

She shrugged, adjusting the edge of it casually to cover the recorder. “Some things don’t change.”

He nodded towards the path leading into the trees.

“Shall we?” he said. “Before it starts pissing down.”

She nodded, falling into step beside him, leaving the relative safety of the car park for the softer, muffled world under the canopy.

The path wound gently upward, the gravel giving way to damp soil and a patchwork of old leaves. The trees here were tall and close together, their trunks dark and damp, branches forming a web overhead.

Other walkers dotted the trail at various distances – a teenager walking a Labrador, earbuds in; an older couple in matching waterproofs; a man with a camera taking pictures of moss as if it were rare art.

It was quiet enough that their conversation would be mostly private. Not so quiet that she couldn’t scream, if she had to.

“Been ages since I came up here,” Daniel said, hands shoved in his jacket pockets. His breath clouded in front of him. “Used to come with mates when we had cars and nothing better to do. Escape the city, you know?”

“Yeah,” Amina said. “I like the quiet.”

They walked a few more steps in silence. Leaves crunched softly underfoot. Somewhere deeper in the woods, a dog barked and someone whistled.

“So,” he said eventually, glancing at her. “Seven years. That’s a long time to hold a grudge.”

Her jaw tightened.

“This isn’t about a grudge,” she said. “It’s about… finishing a conversation that got cut short by lawyers and police and emails.”

He snorted. “Nice way of putting ‘you tried to get me locked up’.”

She exhaled slowly through her nose.

“You did get arrested,” she said. “I didn’t imagine that.”

“Yeah,” he said, tone shifting to something more resentful. “And that was fun, let me tell you. Coppers at my door, neighbours peeking out their curtains, me sat in an interview room like some criminal while they asked me why I ‘attacked’ a girl who came back to my flat willingly.”

He mimed quotation marks around “attacked”. The word landed heavy in the air.

“What did you tell them?” she asked quietly.

“The truth,” he said. “That we went back to mine. That we had sex. That you were keen at the time and weird afterwards. That you went home and your mum guilt-tripped you and next thing I know, I’m public enemy number one.”

Her grip tightened on the strap of her bag. “That’s not the truth.”

“That’s my truth,” he said, shrugging. “Yours is obviously different. That’s kind of why we’re here, yeah? To compare notes or whatever.”

They reached a fork in the path. One way led towards a more open clearing; the other dipped deeper into the trees, the ground muddier, the air cooler.

He nodded towards the quieter route.

“That way’s nicer,” he said. “Less kids, more views. You alright with a bit of mud?”

Amina hesitated, glancing ahead. She could still see occasional figures through the trees. It wasn’t completely isolated.

“I’m fine,” she said.

They turned left, their footsteps squelching slightly as they walked downhill then up again.

For a minute, neither of them spoke. The silence wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t entirely hostile either. Just… dense.

Amina could feel the recorder at her throat, like it was waiting too.

She cleared her throat.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Go on,” he replied.

“Do you remember that night,” she said carefully, “the same way you tell it to everyone else? Or does it look different in your head when you’re honest with yourself?”

He chuckled. “Straight in, yeah? No warm-up questions about my favourite colour?”

She looked at him, steady. “We’ve done small talk.”

He exhaled, a white burst of air.

“Alright,” he said. “I remember you coming to the club with your mates. I remember you looking different… hair down, new top. I remember thinking, ‘Okay, she’s finally loosened up.’”

“I’d had, what, one drink?” she said. “I was already out of my comfort zone.”

“You were buzzing,” he said. “Laughing more than usual. Less… stiff.”

Her teeth clenched. “I was trying to fit in.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. Then you came to the bar a few times, we joked around. At the end of the night, you came outside looking for your friend, who’d already disappeared with some bloke. You were freezing. You were tired. You didn’t want to go home yet. You said that, remember? ‘I don’t feel like going home yet.’”

She searched her memory. The words floated back, foggy.

“I said I didn’t feel like going home to my parents in that moment,” she countered. “That doesn’t translate to ‘I want to go to your bed.’”

He gave her a sideways look.

“Maybe not directly,” he said. “But you didn’t exactly say, ‘No, I won’t come to yours.’ I offered tea, warmth. You said yes.”

“Because you offered tea and warmth,” she said, heat creeping into her voice. “Not sex.”

He lifted his hands briefly, half-surrender, half-dismissal.

“You came back to mine,” he said. “You sat on my sofa. You drank my tea. You didn’t sit on the other side of the room like I was contagious. You laughed at my rubbish jokes. You let me sit close. You didn’t move away when I touched your face. Or when I kissed you.”

She stopped walking for a second, the ground squelching under her.

“I froze,” she said. “I was confused. Scared. My brain was screaming and my body didn’t know what to do.”

He turned to face her, expression somewhere between exasperated and defensive.

“Look,” he said. “I’m not saying I read your mind. I’m saying I read your body. You know how many girls say they’re ‘nervous’ or whatever but still go through with it? That’s normal. If I stopped every time someone said, ‘I’m not sure’, nothing would happen.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” she shot back. “You think ‘not sure’ is a green light.”

He rolled his eyes. “We’re not in a training video, Amina. Real life isn’t some tick-box consent form.”

She took a breath. Pushed down the anger just enough to keep her voice level.

“Do you remember me saying no?” she asked. “The word. Out loud. Multiple times.”

He hesitated.

There. The first crack.

“I remember you saying you felt guilty,” he said after a beat. “And that you shouldn’t be there. And something about your mum.”

“I said, ‘I don’t want this,’” she insisted. “I said, ‘Daniel, stop.’ I remember those exact words.”

He shifted his weight, gaze flicking away briefly.

“Maybe you said something like that,” he said. “I don’t know. It was seven years ago. It was… heated. People say a lot of things in the moment.”

“So my ‘no’ counted as… what?” she asked. “Pillow talk?”

He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face.

“You’re doing that thing again,” he said. “Making it sound like I held you down while you were screaming. You didn’t push me off. You didn’t hit me. You didn’t run to the door. You didn’t scratch. You just… laid there. You had your eyes closed. I thought you were into it. If I’d thought you were really freaking out, I would have stopped. I’m not a psycho.”

Her vision blurred with a mix of fury and hurt.

“I froze,” she repeated, enunciating each word. “That’s what some people do when they’re scared. They shut down. They leave their body. Most women who get assaulted don’t fight. There’s actual research on that. It’s a survival response.”

He let out a sharp, humourless laugh.

“Oh, right,” he said. “You did your research after, did you? Found the words to make it fit.”

A group of walkers passed them then, boots squelching, cheeks pink from the cold. They nodded politely at Amina, glanced briefly at Daniel, then moved on, their conversation about parking fines floating back faintly.

She waited until they were out of earshot.

“I did my research because the system made me,” she said, quieter now. “Because I had to learn how to explain to strangers why I didn’t fight you like an action hero. Why I didn’t run naked into the street screaming.”

He walked a few paces ahead, kicking a loose stone.

“The system didn’t believe you enough, did it?” he said, more bitter than smug. “They had all your research and all your tears and still didn’t lock me up. What does that tell you?”

“That it’s broken,” she said. “Not that you’re innocent.”

He snorted. “It tells me there wasn’t enough proof. End of. They literally wrote it, didn’t they? ‘Insufficient evidence.’ I got that phrase burned into my skull. You think they wouldn’t have loved to nail some bar guy if they could? Easy win. But they couldn’t. Because it was just your word against mine and the night could be read two ways.”

She swallowed. This was the damned circle she knew so well. Her experience versus his narrative. Circular arguments that went nowhere.

“I read that email too,” she said. “A hundred times. You know what else it said? That them dropping the case doesn’t mean they don’t believe me. Just that they couldn’t guarantee a conviction.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Legal waffle.”

They reached a slight rise in the path, trees thinning just enough to reveal a view over the city in the distance – a blurred patchwork of buildings and roads, the faint suggestion of the BT Tower poking up through the haze.

A bench sat just off the path, damp but empty. Daniel gestured to it.

“Sit?” he asked.

She hesitated. The open space felt both exposing and safer than being seen standing in the middle of the path arguing.

“Okay,” she said, perching on the far end, putting a sensible gap between them.

He flopped down, knees wide, elbows on his thighs, hands dangling.

For a minute, they just looked out at Birmingham.

“It’s mad, you know,” he said finally, voice softer. “Thinking how close we were to each other back then. Same city. Same campus. Same nights out. Then… boom. Police. Statements. Silence. Like you just got erased from my life.”

“You didn’t think about me?” she asked. “At all?”

He paused, considering.

“Course I did,” he said. “For a while. When I had to go in and answer questions. When they took my DNA. When they told me I could have a solicitor. I thought, ‘How the fuck did we end up here? We had one night.’”

“We had more than one night,” she said. “We had months of messages. Jokes. You knowing I was inexperienced. You knowing I was Muslim. You knowing I’d never been alone in a man’s flat before.”

He shrugged.

“We had banter,” he said. “You weren’t some random off the street, sure. But it’s not like we were in a relationship. It was casual. You knew that.”

“I knew I liked you,” she said. “I thought you liked me. I thought that meant you’d care about whether I wanted to have sex with you.”

He looked at her then, really looked, grey eyes more serious than they’d been all morning.

“I did like you,” he said. “Still do, in a weird way. You were… different. Funny. Smart. Not like the usual girls at the bar. That’s partly why it fucked me up when you went nuclear.”

“It fucked me up when you ignored the word no,” she said softly.

He sighed, leaning back against the bench, tilting his head up to look at the sky.

“Look,” he said. “If I could go back and put a bloody bodycam on myself that night, maybe we’d both be less messed up now. But I can’t. So all we’ve got is memories and vibes. In my head, we had a messy, drunk, too-fast, slightly guilty shag that you regretted in the morning because of your family and religion. In your head, I raped you. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.”

A cold anger bloomed in her chest.

“In the middle?” she repeated. “What does that even mean? That you half raped me?”

He winced. “That word…”

“It’s the word,” she said. “You don’t like it because it sounds ugly. It is ugly. But watering it down doesn’t change what happened.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face again, fingers digging into his temples.

“Fine,” he said, sounding tired. “Let me ask you this, yeah? If you were so sure I raped you, why come here now? Why not just block me forever and live your life?”

She took a long breath, feeling the cold air burn her lungs.

“Because blocking you doesn’t erase the night,” she said. “It doesn’t erase the way I still flinch when someone laughs like you. It doesn’t erase the emails. Or the panic attacks. Or the way my parents look at me and don’t know the full story.”

“And this will?” he asked, gesturing between them. “This little woodland therapy session?”

“No,” she said. “But I need you to hear this from me, not just through police reports and your own ego. I need you to look me in the eye and acknowledge that you knew I was drunk. That you knew I was scared. That you heard me say I didn’t want it and you kept going anyway.”

He went very still.

A robin hopped near their feet, completely unconcerned with human tension.

A dog barked in the distance. The wind moved through the branches overhead with a low susurration, like someone shushing a restless child.

“You’re asking me to call myself a rapist,” he said slowly. “With my own mouth. To your face.”

“I’m asking you to be honest,” she replied.

He shook his head, a small, disbelieving movement.

“You know what that word does to a man’s life?” he said. “Even if he never sees a cell? Even if the case gets dropped? It sticks. Rapist. Might as well tattoo it on his forehead.”

“You know what the act does to a woman’s life?” she shot back. “You don’t need a tattoo when it’s carved into your nervous system.”

He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, something had shifted. Not guilt exactly. Not yet. But a crack in the smooth, defensive shell.

“You were drunk,” he said, voice lower. “I’ll give you that. I knew that. I wasn’t exactly sober either, but yeah. You’d had enough. You were wobbling. You were chatty in that way… you know how drunk girls get.”

She listened, heart in her throat.

“And yeah,” he continued, staring out at the trees. “You said you felt guilty. You said you shouldn’t. You said your mum would kill you. I remember that. I thought that was about religion, not about me. Like… you were into it but you knew your family would freak.”

“That’s not what ‘I don’t want this’ means,” she murmured.

He swallowed.

“And I remember you saying ‘stop’ at one point,” he admitted. “Quietly. Not shouting. Not pushing. Just… small. I thought you were saying stop overthinking. Stop talking. I told you to relax. I thought I knew better. That I knew what you wanted more than you did in that moment.”

Her fingers curled into her palms, nails digging crescents into skin.

“That,” she said, voice trembling slightly, “is the part I need you to hear yourself say.”

He looked at her then, and for once, there was no smirk. Just a man in his early thirties who’d finally realised the story in his head might not be the only one that counted.

“I heard you,” he said quietly. “And I chose to keep going.”

The words dropped between them like something heavy and irreversible.

Her heart stumbled.

The recorder at her throat hummed on, capturing every syllable.

“What would you call that?” she asked, barely above a whisper.

He didn’t answer.

Not yet.

A gust of wind rattled through the branches, sending a small shower of water droplets down on them. She shivered, but not from the cold.

Somewhere deeper in the woods, Hassan’s phone would be vibrating with a live audio feed. He’d be sitting in his car, every muscle taut, knuckles white on the steering wheel.

He’d just heard it too.

“I’m not asking you to write a statement,” she said, softer now. “Not here. Not now. I’m not the police. I’m just… the person you did it to.”

He laughed once, harsh and self-directed.

“You always were good with words,” he muttered.

She took another breath, steadying herself.

“This isn’t about words anymore,” she said. “It’s about whether you can live with the truth. Because I’ve had to. Every day. Maybe it’s your turn.”

He stared at his hands, at the dirt under his nails, at the faint scar on his knuckle she remembered from years ago when he’d cut it on a broken glass at the bar.

When he spoke again, his voice was so low she had to lean in to catch it.

“If I say it,” he asked, “what happens next?”

Lightning flickered, not in the sky, but in her mind.

For now, in the cold air of Lickey Hills, with the city spread out beneath them and the trees bearing witness, she held his gaze and replied:

“Maybe, for the first time, something honest.”

Chapter 7 – The Edge Of The Cliff

The silence after her last sentence wasn’t empty.

It hummed.

Between the trees, under the low sky, between their two breathing bodies, something hung there – his words, her memory, seven years of unfinished business.

Daniel stared at his hands for so long that Amina wondered if he’d simply get up, laugh it off, make some joke about “heavy chat” and suggest a drink.

Instead, he let out a slow breath, the kind that seemed to deflate him from the inside.

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?” he said, not looking at her.

“No,” she replied. “Not anymore.”

He leaned back on the bench, metal cold against his shoulders, eyes closing briefly.

“I’ve spent years,” he said, “telling myself a version of that night that lets me sleep. ‘We were both drunk. It was messy. She freaked out after because of her mum and her religion. I’m not a bad guy.’”

He opened his eyes, staring straight ahead at the patchwork of city in the distance.

“And the thing is,” he went on, “if I keep telling it like that, most people believe me. Blokes down the pub. Even some girls. They hear ‘no charges’ and they go, ‘Ah, she was probably exaggerating.’ That’s just… how it works.”

“I know,” Amina said quietly. “I live in the same world you do.”

He snorted, a humourless sound.

“But sitting here,” he said, “listening to you talk about freezing and… whatever that survival-response stuff is… and hearing myself admit I heard you say stop and chose to treat it like background noise… it sounds… different.”

“How does it sound?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Like I took what I wanted,” he said, “and decided your fear was an acceptable price.”

Her breath caught.

He turned his head slowly then, met her gaze. His eyes looked older than his face; tired in a way she hadn’t seen at nineteen.

“And yeah,” he added, voice rough, “if some other bloke told me that story – that he heard a girl say no and kept going because he ‘knew what she really wanted’ – I’d tell him he was a prick at best and something much worse at worst.”

She heard the word he didn’t want to say echo anyway.

Rapist.

It didn’t matter if it left his mouth. It was already written between the lines.

For a moment, a strange, disorienting feeling washed over her – not relief, exactly, but a loosening. Like a knot that had been pulled so tight for so long it had become part of the rope, finally giving way a little.

Then another feeling rushed in right behind it.

Rage.

Not the panicked, flailing anger of fresh trauma.

A cold, sharp, surgical rage.

He’d just said it, in his way. Confirmed what she already knew in her bones: he’d heard her. He’d known. He’d chosen.

Her fingers tingled.

Somewhere far away – another life, another version of this story – that might have been enough.

An admission. A private acknowledgement on a cheap bench on a cold hill. A promise from him to carry the guilt properly now, to stop painting himself as the misunderstood guy from the wrong side of a miscommunication.

But this wasn’t that version.

This was the one where she’d sat in a white room under fluorescent lights while someone in a suit told her there wasn’t enough evidence. Where she’d watched him live loudly and easily for seven more years while she had panic attacks in side streets.

Words on a hill didn’t erase any of that.

They were a start.

Not the end.

She took a slow breath, felt it move all the way down to the base of her lungs, and stood up.

Daniel’s eyes tracked her, faintly wary now.

“Where are you going?” he asked, half-joking, half-not. “We’re not done, are we?”

“No,” she said. “We’re not.”

She nodded towards a narrow dirt track leading away from the bench, up towards a raised ridge she knew well – a viewpoint she’d visited a dozen times with Samira years ago, when the hill for them had been more about Instagram angles and crisps than confronting the past.

“I want to walk up there,” she said. “Talk while we walk. Is that okay?”

He hesitated, scanning her face as if looking for a trick. Then he shrugged.

“Lead the way,” he said.

They fell into step again, this time with her slightly ahead, boots finding the familiar footholds on the uneven ground. The path grew steeper, the trees thinning as they climbed. The air felt sharper up here, wind more insistent.

As they walked, he kept talking, words tumbling out now in a way that made it clear he’d been holding them in for years.

“After the case got dropped,” he said, “I told myself it was over. That email from the CPS… I clung to it. ‘Insufficient evidence.’ ‘No realistic prospect of conviction.’ I treated that like a certificate. Like a piece of paper saying, ‘You’re not one of the monsters.’”

“You carried it around?” she asked, glancing back over her shoulder.

“Saved it,” he said. “If any girl ever brought it up, I’d go, ‘Look, even the police said there was nothing there.’ I spun it so I was the victim. ‘Poor me, almost had my life ruined by a false accusation.’ People ate that shit up.”

He stepped over a fallen branch, breath puffing more heavily now with the incline.

“Did you believe it?” she asked.

“Some days,” he said. “It’s easier, you know? To believe you’re unlucky than to believe you’re… dangerous.”

She faced forward again, jaw tightening.

“It was easy for you,” she said. “You went back to work. Back to nights out. You got to talk about me like a story. I had to sit in therapy and peel my own skin back just to convince myself I wasn’t to blame.”

He didn’t argue.

They reached the top of the ridge sooner than her body expected, her feet knowing the way better than her head. The dirt path gave way to a rough, flattish area of rock and trampled grass. From here, the view opened up fully – Birmingham spread out like a toy city, grey and low and sprawling, the buildings softened by distance.

A few metres from the edge, the ground dropped away sharply. Not a sheer cliff, but steep enough that a wrong step would mean tumbling, rolling, breaking.

The last time she’d stood here, she remembered thinking how small the world looked. How insignificant her problems felt from this height.

Today, they didn’t feel small.

They felt very, very real.

Daniel whistled softly, hands on his hips.

“Forgot how sick this view is,” he said. “Makes the city look… almost pretty.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Almost.”

She walked closer to the edge, but not too close. Her trainers scuffed the damp grass.

Behind her, she heard his footsteps follow, slower now, crunching on gravel.

The wind up here was stronger. It tugged at her scarf, pushed cold fingers into the gaps of her coat.

For a moment, she let herself imagine the drop.

Not in a dizzy, “what if I jump” way. In a cold, calculated way.

One shove.

One second of unbalanced weight.

He would stumble. Maybe shout. Arms flailing, body not used to being utterly out of control. He’d go over. Down. Bones and rock and gravity doing the rest.

She wouldn’t even have to look.

Just feel the absence of him behind her.

Her heart hammered at the thought, more from the possibility than the fear.

No police. No statements. No more careful words. No more “insufficient evidence.” Just a tragic accident in the hills. It happened. People slipped. People misjudged their footing all the time.

Her mother’s face flashed in her mind. Her father’s. Hassan sitting in a police station, jaw set, saying, “She wouldn’t…”

Her own face in a cell mirror.

Then another image – one from childhood, imams and Qur’an teachers talking about Qiyamah, the Day of Judgement.

The first cases to be judged between people on the Day of Resurrection will be those of bloodshed.

Her teenage self had sat cross-legged on a mosque carpet, only half listening, mind on homework. Now those words crawled out of some buried memory and sat in front of her, insistent.

“You know,” Daniel said behind her, oblivious to the storm in her head, “I did think about messaging you, once or twice. Years ago. Just to… I don’t know. Clear the air. But everyone said it was a bad idea. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ ‘Don’t poke the bear.’”

“Is that what I was?” she asked, not turning around. “A dog? A bear?”

He laughed awkwardly. “Figure of speech. You know what I mean.”

“What stopped you?” she asked, voice tight. “Messaging.”

“Fear,” he said simply. “I didn’t want to wake it all up again. I’d finally got to a point where I could go days without thinking about it. I thought you’d moved on too. Or I hoped you had.”

“I tried,” she said. “I really did.”

She took one more step towards the edge, just to feel the way the ground sloped.

Behind her, his footsteps came closer too. Careless. Trusting, in a way that almost offended her. He had no idea how much calculation was happening a metre away.

Her fingers twitched.

It would be so easy.

The wind gusted, harder now, making her rock back slightly. Her trainers gripped the ground instinctively.

She imagined the newspapers, if he fell.

Mystery fall at beauty spot.
Local man dies in tragic accident.
Maybe a quote from a mate about how he was “a top bloke, always up for a laugh”. Maybe one grainy picture of him holding a pint, borrowed from Facebook.

No mention of her. No mention of a nineteen-year-old girl on a sofa seven years ago.

The idea made her want to laugh and scream at the same time.

Her mind flicked to another kind of headline. One that involved her name instead.

Woman Charged with Murder after Man’s Death at Lickey Hills.
Hospital Worker Accused in Lover’s Fall.
Community in Shock as Quiet Daughter Faces Life Sentence.

Her mother crying in a courtroom, scarf slipping. Her father staring at the floor, shoulders collapsed. Aunties whispering, We always knew something was off after that uni business…

Her own wrists, handcuffed.

A judge’s voice pronouncing years like they were nothing.

And beyond all that, beyond earthly courts and headlines and prison food, something vaster.

Standing before Allah.

Trying to explain why she’d taken a life with her own hands.

Not in defence. Not in the chaos of an immediate assault. Later. Here. Planned. Deliberate.

Even with everything he’d done, even with every sleepless night and panic attack and ounce of trauma, she knew what that made it.

Murder.

A word that sat alongside “rape” in the same dark part of the dictionary. A word she didn’t want near her name either.

“Feels high, doesn’t it?” Daniel said, coming up to stand slightly behind and to the side of her, peering over the drop. “Imagine falling. You’d have time to think about it on the way down. That’s the worst bit, I reckon. The thinking.”

Her stomach lurched, not because of the height, but because he’d wandered so casually into the exact scenario she’d been turning over in her mind.

She made herself step sideways, away from the very edge, even as the urge to do the opposite tugged at her.

He didn’t notice. Kept his eyes on the city.

“You ever thought about it?” he asked suddenly. “You know. Jumping.”

She turned her head, startled.

“What?”

He shrugged.

“Loads of people do,” he said. “Don’t they? Not saying you would. Just… with everything that happened. Wouldn’t blame you if you had some dark thoughts.”

She stared at him, thrown by the unexpected flicker of… what, concern? Morbid curiosity?

“I thought about not being here anymore,” she said slowly. “In the worst times. When the nightmares were bad and my parents didn’t know what to do with me and the police had closed their file.”

“And?” he asked.

“And then I thought about my mum,” she said. “And my siblings. And Allah. And the fact that none of this was my sin to pay for with my life. So I stayed.”

He nodded once, surprisingly solemn.

“Good,” he said. “I’d feel like even more of a dick if you’d topped yourself.”

The way he framed it – his feelings at the centre of her survival – made something hot flare in her.

“You already are ‘more of a dick’ than you know,” she snapped.

He smirked faintly. “You really hate me, don’t you?”

“I hate what you did,” she said. “And what the world let you be afterwards.”

He shifted his weight again, gravel crunching.

“Look,” he said. “I’m not going to fall on my knees up here and beg you for forgiveness. I’m not going to pretend I’ve been lying awake every night crying over it. I haven’t. I compartmentalised. I told myself my version and I carried on. That’s… what people do.”

“At least one of us got to carry on without panic attacks,” she muttered.

He glanced at her.

“I’m not proud of it,” he said quietly. “Hearing myself talk today, I’m… not proud. I can see why you hate me. But I can’t change it. I can only… maybe stop lying to myself about it as much.”

Her throat felt tight.

“And what do you think that does for me?” she asked. “You having a slightly more honest internal monologue?”

He gave a small, helpless shrug.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe nothing. Maybe a bit. Maybe… maybe it’s the least shit thing I can offer at this point.”

The sheer smallness of it compared to the size of the wound made her want to scream.

Instead, she turned away from the edge fully, putting the drop behind her, the city now over Daniel’s shoulder instead of under her feet.

“Look at me,” she said.

He did.

“Do you understand,” she asked, voice steady now, “that what you did that night was wrong? Not just ‘morally grey’, not just ‘complicated’. Wrong.”

He held her gaze, jaw working.

“Yes,” he said, after what felt like an hour packed into a second. “I understand that more now than I did then.”

“Do you understand that no matter what the CPS said, no matter what your mates think, no matter how many times you tell yourself it was mutual, there was a part of you that knew I didn’t want it, and you did it anyway?”

His eyes flickered, then steadied.

“Yes,” he said again, even quieter. “I get that now.”

“Do you understand,” she continued, feeling the words burn, “that I will live with that for the rest of my life?”

He swallowed, throat bobbing.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I do.”

They stood there like that for a moment, two tiny humans on a hill under a vast, indifferent sky, held together by an invisible thread of shared knowledge and ripped apart by what that knowledge contained.

A dog suddenly bounded up the path, mud on its paws, tongue lolling. It skidded to a stop near them, gave them a joyful sniff, then tore off again after a stick thrown by an unseen owner.

Life, indifferent as ever, carried on.

“Now what?” Daniel asked, breaking the spell. “You got what you came for, yeah? The big confession. The evil guy admits he’s evil. You feel better?”

His tone was defensive again, the shell slamming back into place to protect the rawness that had peeked through.

Better.

The word in her mind looked nothing like the word in his.

“No,” she said. “I don’t feel better. I feel… angry. And sad. And a little bit vindicated. And also like I want to throw up.”

He snorted. “Honest. I’ll give you that.”

“And I also feel,” she added, “like what we just did – you saying those things to me – shouldn’t just stay between us and these trees.”

His eyes narrowed, suspicion flaring.

“What does that mean?” he asked slowly.

She took a breath. The moment had come sooner than she’d planned, but maybe that was okay. Plans rarely survived contact with reality intact.

“It means,” she said, “that you spent seven years telling your version of the story. I’m going to spend the next part of my life telling mine. Properly. With more than just my word.”

His face changed. The suspicion hardened into something sharper.

“You recording me?” he asked, voice suddenly edged.

Fresh adrenaline shot through her, but her body didn’t betray her this time. She held his gaze, forced her breathing to stay even.

“Do you think I’d risk coming up here alone with you,” she said carefully, “with no backup at all?”

His jaw clenched.

“Answer the question,” he said. “Are you recording me?”

She didn’t look at the scarf. Or her coat. Or her pocket. She didn’t glance away at the trees.

She just said, “Yes.”

For a second, he simply stared at her, as if he hadn’t fully considered that possibility until this moment, despite living in an age where people recorded everything from their breakfast to their breakdowns.

Then his face contorted.

“You sneaky little—” he began, stepping forward.

A jolt of fear slammed into her chest. Her heart leaped.

Her hand went to her coat pocket, fingers closing around her phone like a lifeline. She took two quick steps back, putting more space between them and the drop.

“Don’t,” she said sharply. “Don’t come any closer.”

He stopped, hands half-raised, as if suddenly aware of how this looked – him advancing, her retreating, the steep ground behind her.

“You set me up,” he spat. “Dragged me out here to stitch me up. That’s what this is. Some feminist sting operation.”

“This is me protecting myself,” she shot back. “From a man who already hurt me once and thinks his comfort is the main character in this story.”

His eyes flashed.

“Delete it,” he said. “Whatever you’ve got. Delete it now.”

“No,” she said.

He laughed, disbelieving and angry.

“You think that’ll hold up in court?” he demanded. “A recording where you bait me into saying regrettable shit? You think the CPS are going to do a 180 because you lured me to some hill and got me to admit I’m not perfect?”

“You’re right,” she said. “They might not. They might still shrug. But this time, if they shrug, it’ll be with more on the table than last time.”

He took a small step to the side, as if trying to angle himself closer without making it obvious.

Her pulse spiked. Her mind flicked to the safe phrase, bright yellow in her head.

Hassan’s voice from the kitchen: If you say it, I treat it as DEFCON 1.

She slid her phone out just enough to see the screen. The recording icon was still live. Her live location was still being shared. Messages from Hassan and Samira sat unread at the top of the notifications, like little beacons.

She hit the side button to wake the screen fully and swiped to the call log.

“Who are you calling?” Daniel asked, voice tight.

“A lift,” she said. “And a witness, in case you decide to get physical.”

She hit Hassan’s name and lifted the phone slightly, speaker on. The ringing sounded loud in the crisp air.

He stared at the phone, jaw clenched.

“Don’t be dramatic,” he said. “I’m not going to hit you.”

She didn’t answer.

On the third ring, Hassan picked up.

“Yeah?” came his voice, tinny but steady. “You good?”

She met Daniel’s eyes as she replied, loud enough for the mic to catch, for the trees to hear, for her own shaking legs to believe.

“Yellow car, you’re a banana,” she said.

There was a heartbeat’s pause.

Then Hassan’s tone changed completely.

“Okay,” he said, voice suddenly all steel. “Stay where you are. Do not hang up. I’m calling 999 right now. You’re near the ridge, yeah? Keep him talking. I’m five, ten minutes tops.”

Her throat loosened, just a fraction.

Daniel’s face twisted.

“What the fuck does that mean?” he demanded. “You two doing kids’ code words now?”

“It means,” she said, dropping the phone slightly but keeping the line open, “I’m done carrying this alone. And I’m done being scared of what happens when you’re uncomfortable.”

He scoffed. “You’re scared now? You dragged me up here with your recording devices and your little support team listening in the bushes. How do you think I feel?”

“Like a man,” she said, “who finally has to deal with even a fraction of the consequences of his actions.”

He took another small step back, hands up now, defensive.

“What, you going to send the police those recordings?” he said, sarcasm curling in his mouth. “Tell them you tricked me into a confession? You think they’ll thank you for doing their job?”

“They didn’t do it the first time,” she said. “Maybe this will force their hand. Or maybe it won’t. But at least I’ll know I used everything I had.”

“And if they don’t bite?” he pressed. “What then? You going to plaster my face all over Twitter? Tell every girl in Birmingham I’m a monster? Get me cancelled? That the plan?”

She thought of hashtags, of viral threads, of women finally being believed en masse not by institutions but by each other. She also thought of death threats, of pile-ons, of how quickly the internet turned victims into spectacle.

“I don’t know yet,” she said honestly. “I just know silence hasn’t protected anyone but you.”

His nostrils flared.

“You’re playing a dangerous game,” he said quietly. “You and your cousins or whoever the hell is listening in. You think I won’t fight back? You think I’ll just roll over and let you call me a rapist publicly?”

“You already said the important part,” she replied. “Into my mic. On my phone. In front of Allah and whoever else was listening.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again, something wary sliding into his gaze.

Far off, faint but real, came the sound of sirens.

Not loud yet. Not close enough to be sure they were for this hill and not some road miles away. But enough to make both of them still for a second.

The wind picked up, whipping her scarf, carrying a few stray leaves up into the air before dropping them again.

Down the path, tiny figures moved – a family in brightly coloured coats heading towards the viewpoint, a couple holding hands, oblivious.

This wasn’t a TV set. There would be no dramatic freeze-frame. Just the messy continuation of a day in which dozens of unrelated lives overlapped briefly on a patch of damp grass.

Daniel exhaled slowly, the fight leaving his shoulders fractionally.

“You don’t know what you’ve started,” he said, not angrily now. Just… resigned.

“Maybe for once,” she said, “that applies to you too.”

They stood there another few minutes, the distance between them measured now not just in metres, but in crimes acknowledged and futures diverging.

When the first police car finally appeared at the edge of the car park below – a white-and-yellow box against the muted greens and browns of the landscape – Amina felt something inside her unclench.

Not because she believed, suddenly, that the system would do everything right.

But because, for the first time in seven years, she wasn’t waiting passively for justice to either arrive or abandon her.

She had stepped towards it.

With trembling legs.

On a hill.

With a recorder at her throat and a safe phrase in her mouth and a God in her heart she was desperately trying not to disappoint.

“Time to go,” she said, turning away from the edge fully.

Daniel followed her gaze to the flashing blue lights now visible between the trees, then back to her.

“This isn’t over,” he said.

“I know,” she replied.

Then, without waiting for him, she started walking back down the path, towards the car park, towards Hassan, towards the officers who would have questions she was finally ready, if not to enjoy, at least to endure.

Behind her, his footsteps crunched on the gravel, no longer the only ones she had to fear.

Ahead of her, the hill sloped down.

The path wasn’t smooth.

But it was hers.

Chapter 8 – New Maps

The walk down from the ridge felt longer than the climb up.

Gravity wanted to pull Amina faster, but her legs didn’t trust the ground yet. Each step was careful, deliberate. Her heart was still hammering, though it was hard to tell now what part of it belonged to fear and what part belonged to adrenaline finally finding somewhere to drain.

The sirens grew louder as they descended. Not blaring, not dramatic like in films. Just that steady, rising wail that said, Something’s happened. People are coming.

Daniel walked a few paces behind her, distant but not far. She could feel his eyes on her back, on the phone still in her hand, on the path ahead that neither of them controlled anymore.

At a bend in the trail, the trees thinned, giving a view down towards the car park. Two police cars were there now, parked slightly askew, blue lights turning slowly, colour washing over the nearby trunks. A third vehicle – Hassan’s little silver hatchback – sat off to one side, hazard lights blinking.

Amina’s chest loosened when she saw him.

He was out of the car, standing next to one of the officers, phone pressed to his ear. When he spotted her through the trees, he dropped it to his side, relief flashing visibly across his face even from a distance.

“Remember,” Hassan’s voice said faintly from her phone, the line still open. “You’re okay. Just keep walking.”

She ended the call and slid the phone back into her pocket, the recorder still humming under her scarf like a tiny, stubborn witness.

By the time they reached the edge of the car park, two officers – one male, one female – had moved to meet them halfway. They didn’t run. They walked briskly, like people used to approaching situations that might escalate but hadn’t yet.

“Ms… Rahman?” the female officer asked, checking the name Hassan had given on the phone.

“Amina,” she said, voice surprisingly steady.

“I’m PC Lewis,” the woman replied. “This is PC Turner. Your cousin called to say you were in distress and there’d been an incident up here. Are you hurt?”

“No,” Amina said. “Not physically.”

The officers’ eyes flicked briefly to Daniel standing a few steps away, hands in his jacket pockets, jaw set.

“And is this…?” PC Turner began.

“Daniel Ward,” he supplied quickly. “I haven’t done anything. She asked me to meet her. We were talking. That’s all.”

PC Lewis’s gaze returned to Amina, inviting explanation, not demanding it. Not yet.

Amina felt Hassan come up beside her, a solid presence radiating something fierce and contained.

“You alright?” he murmured.

She nodded once. “Yeah.”

“Do you want to tell us what’s going on?” PC Lewis asked gently. “We can move to one side, away from the path. No rush.”

She gestured towards a nearby picnic table, currently inhabited only by a few damp leaves. The officers nodded and followed, Daniel trailing reluctantly, Hassan sticking like glue to Amina’s side.

They sat. Amina on one side of the table, Hassan next to her. The officers took the other side. Daniel remained standing a little way off, arms folded, like a sulking teenager forced to attend a parent–teacher meeting.

“Okay,” PC Lewis said softly. “From the top. Why did you ask your cousin to call us?”

Amina inhaled, the cold air burning again at the back of her throat.

“Because I didn’t feel safe,” she said. “Not in the immediate ‘he’s about to hit me’ way… but in the bigger way. The way I haven’t felt safe for seven years.”

She saw the officers exchange a look. Not of disbelief. Of recognition.

“This is about a previous incident?” PC Turner asked. “Your cousin mentioned an old case.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Seven years ago. I reported him for rape. It went to the CPS, but they dropped it. Not enough evidence. ‘No realistic prospect of conviction.’ I still have the emails.”

“And today?” PC Lewis prompted gently.

“Today I saw him in town,” Amina said. “By chance. It… triggered everything again. I realised he’s just been living his life like nothing happened. And I… couldn’t carry that anymore. So I contacted him. Asked to meet. To talk.”

“You arranged this meeting?” Turner checked.

“Yes,” she said. “Here. In public. And I didn’t come alone. My cousin’s been tracking my location. We set up a safe phrase. I wasn’t planning to… trap him. Not at first. I just wanted him to hear me. To acknowledge what he did.”

“And did he?” Lewis asked, voice calm.

Amina swallowed.

“Yes,” she said. “In his own words. He admitted he heard me say no. That he chose to keep going anyway. That he knew I was drunk. That he told himself a story afterwards that made him feel better, but he knew. Deep down.”

“You have this recorded?” Turner asked carefully.

“Yes,” she replied. “On my phone. And on a backup device. My cousin set it up. The call to him was on speaker. He heard part of it live.”

Hassan nodded, pulling out his own phone.

“I can confirm that,” he said. “I was listening in from the car once she used the phrase. I’ve started an audio backup on my end too. And her phone’s set to cloud backup automatically.”

The officers looked at each other again. This time there was something like thinly veiled professional interest in their faces. Not excitement – they were too used to complicated realities for that – but a small spark that said, We might have something more than usual.

“Alright,” PC Lewis said, turning back to Amina. “Firstly, thank you for telling us. I know this… can’t be easy. Second, I want to be clear: we’re going to treat this seriously. There are procedures we need to follow, especially given there’s a previous report. That means, at some point, we’ll need to get a formal statement from you at the station, and we’ll need copies of those recordings and any related messages.”

A familiar tightening grabbed Amina’s chest. The words “station” and “statement” brought back white rooms and ticking clocks and cheap instant coffee that tasted like despair.

But this time, she wasn’t nineteen and alone.

She was here, on a hill, with her cousin beside her, her faith still faintly warm in her chest, and a digital file in her pocket that meant she wasn’t walking in empty-handed.

“Okay,” she said. “I can do that.”

“What about him?” Hassan demanded quietly, tipping his head towards Daniel, who was now kicking at a bit of gravel like it had personally offended him.

“We’ll need to speak to him as well,” Turner said. “First here, then likely under caution back at the station, given the nature of the allegation and the fact there’s an existing report.”

“You’re arresting me?” Daniel cut in, voice sharp. “For a chat on a hill?”

“We’re not arresting anyone at this moment,” PC Lewis replied evenly. “We’re establishing what’s happened today and how it relates to a previous report of a serious offence. We’d like to talk to you about that. You’re not under arrest right now, but you are going to need to come with us to the station voluntarily. We’d strongly advise you get legal representation.”

Daniel let out a harsh breath.

“This is insane,” he said. “She lures me out here, secretly records me, then calls the police because she doesn’t like what she heard. How is that fair?”

“Mr Ward,” Turner said, “if you’d like to discuss fairness, the interview room is the appropriate place. Up here, our job is to ensure everyone’s safe and to gather initial information. You’ll have a chance to give your full account, with a solicitor, very shortly.”

Daniel muttered something under his breath that Amina didn’t catch. He ran a hand through his hair, clearly calculating his odds. The bluffing bravado from earlier had taken a hit but not vanished.

“Do I have a choice?” he asked finally.

“You do,” Lewis said. “You can decline to come in voluntarily. In which case, based on what we’ve heard already and the existing report, we may need to consider arrest. Which would be more unpleasant for you.”

He glared at Amina then, as if this whole scene was a performance she’d orchestrated solely to inconvenience him.

“This is what you wanted, then?” he said. “To drag me through it again. You think this ends with me in handcuffs and you finally sleeping like a baby?”

Her stomach twisted, but she held his gaze.

“I don’t know how it ends,” she said. “But I know how it’s been for seven years. And I’m not doing that version anymore.”

He shook his head slowly, a bitter smile curling.

“You’re going to ruin my life,” he said.

“You already ruined mine,” she replied quietly. “I’m just trying to get some of it back.”

The station smelled the same as last time.

Disinfectant, tired upholstery, paper. That underlying sterility that never quite masked the human stories soaked into the walls.

But this time, when Amina stepped through the sliding doors, she wasn’t flanked by officers, fragile and alone, clutching a plastic bag of her clothes. She walked in with Hassan on one side, Samira on the other – her cousin having arrived at the hill car park in record time, breathless and furious and so proud she kept squeezing Amina’s hand until their knuckles cracked.

A liaison officer from the Sexual Offences Unit met them in a side room – a middle-aged woman with soft eyes and a hijab pinned with a tiny silver leaf. Her name badge read “DCI Khan”.

“Amina,” she said gently. “I’ve read the summary from the attending officers and I can see there’s some history here. I’m really sorry you’re having to go through this again. I’m also glad you came to us.”

Amina blinked. She hadn’t expected to feel… seen. Not this early.

“You were involved in the first case?” she asked.

DCI Khan shook her head. “No. That was a different team. But I’ve reviewed the file on the way in. Procedures have changed since then. Not everything, but some things. I can explain as we go.”

In a quieter interview room – softer chairs, a box of tissues, a tray with untouched glasses – DCI Khan took a fresh statement. This time, Amina had the right to a support person in the room; she chose Samira. Hassan waited just outside, pacing, probably scripting furious speeches for Daniel’s imaginary face.

The questions were similar to seven years ago, but the tone felt different. Less perfunctory. Less like boxes being ticked and more like threads being gently but firmly pulled.

They covered the old night briefly – the flat, the tea, the sofa, the freezing. Then they focused on today. The messages. The plan. The walk. The bench. The ridge. The words.

“You understand that the defence may argue you entrapped him,” DCI Khan said carefully. “That you manipulated him into saying things he wouldn’t have otherwise said.”

“I didn’t put words in his mouth,” Amina replied, fingers twisting tissues into soft, shredded clouds. “I asked questions. He answered. If those answers make him sound guilty… that’s not because I wrote the script. It’s because he knew.”

DCI Khan nodded slowly. “I agree. But I have to prepare you. This will not be straightforward. It rarely is.”

“When is it ever?” Samira muttered.

They handed over the recordings. Hassan’s tech obsessiveness paid off; he’d already exported the audio files, backed them up twice, and written brief descriptions of each.

“There’s one from the start of the walk,” he explained when they called him in. “One at the bench. One up at the ridge. Timelines roughly match the locations. You can hear ambient sounds – dogs, wind, distant voices. It’s messy, but it’s there.”

“Messy is fine,” DCI Khan said. “Real life is messy. Juries know that.”

Juries.

The word lodged somewhere between Amina’s ribs. She’d never got that far last time.

“We’re going to re-open this,” Khan said at the end, tone firm. “As a new case, linked to the old one. We have your previous statements, the CPS decision, the forensic evidence from back then. Now we also have these recordings and the digital trail leading up to today. We’ll send the whole package back to CPS. They’ll have to re-assess in light of the new material.”

“Will they charge him?” Amina asked, the question she’d been circling since she first hit record.

“I can’t promise that,” Khan said, honest instead of comforting. “The threshold is still what it was – realistic prospect of conviction. But I can tell you this: this is a stronger file than many I’ve seen. And whatever CPS decide, you won’t be left in the dark this time. You’ll have a named contact. We’ll keep you updated.”

Amina nodded, absorbing it like someone taking sips of water after days in the desert. Helpful, but not enough to fill the whole thirst.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Of course,” Khan replied.

“Why does it feel,” Amina said slowly, “like the system cares more about not risking a failed conviction than about telling men like him, ‘What you did is not okay’?”

DCI Khan’s eyes softened.

“Because,” she said, “the system was built with certain priorities. Protecting defendants. Avoiding costly trials. Maintaining ‘public confidence’ in conviction rates. Survivors’ truth… wasn’t at the centre of the design.”

“How can that change?” Amina asked, a flicker of anger warming her again.

“By people like you,” Khan said quietly, “refusing to disappear. By making cases messy for them. By complaining when things are mishandled. By voting for people who push for change. By supporting organisations that stand beside survivors. It’s slow. It’s infuriating. But it’s movement.”

Outside, on some other floor, she knew Daniel was in another room, perhaps with a solicitor, perhaps cracking jokes to cover his cracks, perhaps, for the first time, hearing his own words played back to him with no soundtrack to soften them.

She pictured his face when he’d said, I heard you… and I chose to keep going.

She hoped he hated the sound of it.

Telling her parents was harder than talking to the police.

Not because they blamed her this time. They didn’t.

Because they loved her.

Love made it heavier.

She sat them down at the dining table one evening when the house was quiet, the window steamed from her mum’s cooking, the air thick with cumin and dread.

Her father listened with his hands folded, eyes fixed on them like they were the only thing keeping him anchored. Her mother’s fingers moved over her tasbih beads without her seeming to know she was doing it.

Amina told the story in two layers.

The past: what really happened in that flat, beyond the edited version she’d given them at nineteen. The words she’d said. The arguments with police. The email. The hollow aftermath.

The present: seeing him. The panic. The plan. The hill. The recording. The station.

By the time she finished, her mother’s tasbih beads were still and her father’s knuckles were white.

“I didn’t tell you everything before,” Amina said, voice hoarse. “I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to see me differently. I thought… if I just pretended it was ‘over’, it would stop hurting. It didn’t.”

Her father swallowed, eyes shining.

“My daughter,” he said slowly, in a mixture of English and Sylheti, “nothing that man did makes you less. Not in my eyes. Not in Allah’s. The shame is his. Only his.”

She remembered the version of him from seven years ago, shoulders stiff, face a mask of shock and helpless anger, saying, We move on. We forget this boy. Allah will deal with him.

This was different.

“I should have fought harder then,” he continued, voice thick. “Asked more questions. Sat in the police station with you. I didn’t know how. I was… embarrassed. Scared. I failed you in that way. Forgive me.”

Tears blurred her vision.

“You didn’t fail me,” she said. “You were trying your best in a world that doesn’t explain itself properly. We all were.”

Her mother, who had been silent until then, spoke up.

“I used to think,” she said slowly, “that if we wrapped our daughters tight enough, kept them home, kept them good, the bad things would stay outside. I see now… sometimes the bad thing is already inside the spaces we think are safe. In people who smile nicely. In boys who say ‘tea’ but mean ‘something else’.”

She reached across the table and took Amina’s hand, grip surprisingly firm.

“You went back to that pain,” she said, “not to worship it, but to bring it into the light. That is bravery. I am proud of you.”

Amina thought of the hill, the edge, the pull. Of the moment she’d stepped away from the drop instead of into it. Of the recorder, the safe phrase, the decision to trust process over revenge, even when process had already betrayed her once.

“I was angry,” she admitted. “I still am. Part of me… wanted him to disappear. For good.”

Her father closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again, gaze steady.

“We are all capable of dark thoughts,” he said. “Allah sees them and still keeps the door of mercy open. For you. For him. For all of us. Justice belongs to Allah. And some of it we can seek here, with these imperfect systems. The rest…” He looked upwards. “He weighs.”

Her mother nodded, eyes glistening.

“You didn’t choose the haram road,” she said. “That is enough for me. Whatever happens now, we stand with you.”

Something in Amina’s chest, long-hardened, cracked and softened at the same time.

She hadn’t realised how much she’d been expecting them to say, Why did you go? Why did you meet him? Why didn’t you leave it? Even now, a part of her was braced for the subtle blame that women learn to anticipate like weather.

It didn’t come.

Instead, her father asked a question she hadn’t anticipated.

“How can we help?” he said simply.

She thought of meetings with DCI Khan. Of possible court dates. Of media. Of whispers.

“Just… be there,” she said. “When it gets messy. When people talk. When the case update email comes and my hands are shaking. When I feel like I can’t do it.”

Her mother squeezed her hand tighter.

“We already are,” she said. “Even when we didn’t understand. Now we will try to understand better.”

Weeks passed.

Real life refused to pause for the drama of a re-opened rape case. Patients still needed meds. Laundry still needed folding. Bus timetables still refused to align neatly with shifts.

In between, there were appointments.

Meetings with DCI Khan and her team. Calls with an independent sexual violence adviser from a local charity, who explained her rights in calm, practical language and offered support that was stubbornly unromantic and exactly what she needed.

“There is no ‘perfect victim’, Amina,” the adviser said in one session. “You were drunk. You went to his flat. You’d kissed before. None of that cancels out your right to say no. Or to have that no respected.”

Workshops on giving evidence. On cross-examination. On how defence barristers sometimes twisted narratives and how to hold her ground without collapsing into rage or silence.

Samira attended most of these with her, taking notes on her phone, occasionally whispering scathing commentary about certain legal phrases.

“Realistic prospect of conviction,” she muttered once. “What about realistic prospect of trauma? Of course that part is guaranteed.”

Hassan focused on the tech side, liaising with police digital teams. At one point, he discovered that an early version of the cloud backup had failed at a key moment. For a terrifying afternoon, Amina thought they’d lost the most damning part of the recording.

Then the small backup device under her scarf, the one she’d almost doubted was worth the effort, yielded a clearer copy.

“You always overdo it,” Samira told Hassan, hugging him fiercely. “I’ve never been so grateful for your nerdiness.”

Through all of it, Daniel became quieter in her mind but louder in the world.

He was suspended from his job pending investigation. The bar quietly removed his name from the rota. The group chats that had once been full of his memes and weekend plans were now, she imagined, full of awkward silences and people slowly distancing themselves.

Once, through a mutual acquaintance, she heard he’d moved back in with his parents temporarily.

“Apparently his mum cried,” the acquaintance said, not unkindly. “Said she didn’t raise a monster.”

Amina’s feelings about that were complicated.

She didn’t want his mother to suffer.

She did want him to sit with his reflection somewhere quieter than a club toilet mirror at 3am.

One evening, Samira sent her a screenshot.

A text, sent from an unknown number.

Daniel: I know I’m not supposed to contact you but I just…
Daniel: I don’t think I’m the person you say I am
Daniel: But I’m starting to realise I’m not the person I told myself I was either

There was no apology. No magic redemption arc.

Just a crack.

Amina stared at it for a long time.

She didn’t reply. She forwarded it to DCI Khan, who filed it where it needed to be – somewhere between “potential breach of bail conditions” and “useful insight into defendant’s mindset”.

The CPS decision took time.

Of course it did.

The email, when it finally came, arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, just as Amina was putting on her shoes for the late shift. Her phone buzzed on the hall table. She glanced at the screen, saw “CPS” in the preview, and her stomach plummeted.

Her first impulse was to ignore it. To pretend the world hadn’t moved.

Then she remembered Broad Street. The hill. The recorder.

She picked up the phone, tapped the notification, and read.

The words were dense with legal phrasing, but the key sentence stood out like it had been highlighted, even though it hadn’t.

“In light of the new evidence, we have decided that there is now a realistic prospect of conviction. We are therefore authorising a charge of rape against Daniel Ward.”

She read it three times, as if it might morph like the last email had, the one that had said the opposite.

It didn’t.

Her legs went weak. She sat down hard on the stairs.

Her mum, passing through the hall with a basket of laundry, paused.

“Ami?” she asked. “What happened?”

Amina looked up at her, eyes flooding.

“They… they’re charging him,” she said, voice shaking. “It’s going to court.”

Her mother’s hand flew to her mouth.

“Alhamdulillah,” she whispered, tears springing to her own eyes. “Alhamdulillah. Whatever happens now, you did what you could. The rest is with Allah.”

Amina nodded, the world spinning slightly.

She knew this wasn’t the end. A charge was not a conviction. Court would be long and brutal. Cross-examination would dig into parts of her she’d rather leave buried.

But this time, she’d walk into that courtroom with more than just her word and a detective’s weary sympathy.

She’d have his words. Recorded on a cold hill, under a grey sky, with gravity and God as witnesses.

She texted Samira a screenshot. Samira replied in all caps, then sent twenty crying emojis, then, bizarrely, a gif of a woman throwing confetti in a courtroom.

Hassan’s reply was simpler.

Hassan: Good. We keep going. One step at a time. Proud of you.

That night, on her break at the hospital, Amina sat in the staff room with her tea, watching condensation bead on the window. The city lights blinked outside, small and relentless.

She opened a blank note on her phone.

Her fingers hovered.

Then she began to type.

Not about legal processes, or evidential thresholds, or CPS letters.

About a nineteen-year-old girl on a sofa. About a hill. About a safe phrase. About how justice in this world might always feel partial and patchy, but how the act of standing up, of saying this was wrong out loud, did something to the soul that silence never could.

She didn’t know yet what the writing would become. A blog. A series of anonymous posts. A talk at a community centre. A resource for other Muslim girls who’d been told their worth was tied to the intactness of something a man could take without their consent.

She just knew she had words now. And a story. And a voice she’d used in the woods that she wasn’t willing to tuck away again.

On her way home, exhausted but wired, she got off the bus one stop early and walked to the mosque.

The women’s prayer room was almost empty at that hour. A single aunty in the corner, reading Qur’an in a quiet, melodic murmur. A girl in a hoodie and wide-leg trousers scrolling on her phone, thumb moving slowly, eyes heavy.

Amina made wudu. The water was cold, almost shockingly so, but clean.

On the carpet, she raised her hands and said, Allahu Akbar, feeling the words settle into her bones.

Her prayer wasn’t fancy.

It was gratitude and fear and plea.

Ya Allah, I did what I could. Keep my heart clean. Don’t let this case swallow me. Don’t let hatred become my ibadah. Let me be a means of protection for others, not just punishment for him. Put khair in whatever verdict comes, even if I don’t understand it. You are Al-Adl. I am just someone trying to walk straight on a path that keeps tilting.

After salah, she sat for a while, fingers moving over invisible tasbih beads again.

Outside, buses screeched, people argued, shop shutters rattled.

Inside, in that rectangle of worn green carpet, the air felt a fraction lighter than it had before.

The story wasn’t neatly wrapped.

It was still messy, still ongoing, still capable of surprising her.

But the map of her life had changed.

Where there had once been a blank space labelled Here Be Monsters, there was now a marked route. Not a safe one. Not an easy one. But a path.

From Broad Street to a hill.

From a “no” ignored to a confession recorded.

From “insufficient evidence” to “realistic prospect”.

From victim to witness to protagonist.

As she stepped back out into the Birmingham night, scarf pulled tight against the cold, she thought briefly of Daniel – wherever he was – sitting perhaps in some quiet room, confronted at last by the fact that the story he’d told himself for seven years was no longer the only version in circulation.

For the first time, the thought didn’t send her into a panic or a revenge fantasy.

It just… sat there.

Part of a bigger picture that no longer made him the central character.

The wind was sharp, but it cleared her head.

She walked home on streets that were no less dangerous than they’d been yesterday, no more magically safe.

But she walked them differently now.

Not as someone waiting for justice to show up accidentally.

As someone who had gone into the trees, stood at the edge of the cliff, and chosen not to push, but to speak.

The city hummed around her, indifferent and alive.

Her story moved forward anyway.

Chapter 9 – The Day In Court

The courtroom was smaller than the ones on TV.

No towering ceilings. No echoing footsteps. Just a rectangular room with cream walls, hard benches, worn carpet and that faint, stale smell of recycled air and paperwork.

Still, when Amina stepped inside, her knees felt like they’d turned to water.

The judge sat at the far end, raised above everyone else, robes and wig giving him an air of impersonal importance. The crest behind him – lion, unicorn, Latin words she’d memorised once for a citizenship test – watched everything with dead eyes.

On one side sat the jury. Twelve strangers in different versions of smart-casual, clutching notepads like shields. On the other side, in the dock, behind a short glass barrier, sat Daniel.

He wore a suit. A blue one. Tie slightly crooked, hair shorter than she’d ever seen it. Without the bar, without the pint, without the music, he looked… smaller. Not physically. Just less inflated.

He didn’t look at her as she came in. Or if he did, she didn’t let herself see it.

Her seat was in the public gallery at first, next to Samira and Hassan. Her parents were behind them, her mother murmuring quiet duas under her breath, her father sitting so upright he looked carved from wood.

“You don’t have to watch every second,” the independent sexual violence adviser – Farah – had told her. “Be kind to yourself. Come in for what you feel you can manage: opening, evidence, your own testimony, verdict. The rest… we can update you on.”

But Amina had wanted to see this with her own eyes. After so many years of imagining courts as abstract places where things happened to her, she wanted to look directly at the room where her story was being dissected.

The prosecution barrister stood to address the jury. A middle-aged man with kind eyes and an accent that made “my learned friend” sound less mocking than it did on TV.

“Members of the jury,” he began, “this is a case about consent.”

He said the word plainly. No flourish.

He talked about nineteen-year-old Amina. About a bar, a flat, a sofa. About alcohol, about power dynamics, about the CPS’ earlier decision and the new evidence.

“You will hear,” he said, “from the complainant herself. You will hear about what this has done to her life. You will also hear a recording. The defendant’s own words, recorded during a meeting that he voluntarily attended, where he acknowledges hearing her say no and choosing to continue.”

No one gasped at that. The room was too practised for gasps.

Still, Amina felt something shift in the air. Like the temperature had dropped by a degree.

The defence opening was exactly what she’d expected and still hated hearing.

“This case,” the defence barrister said smoothly, “is not about a brutal stranger attack in an alleyway. It is about two young adults, both drunk, both wrestling with cultural pressures, who had sex they later experienced very differently.”

He talked about “regret”, about “mixed signals”, about “the complainant’s religious guilt”. He called the hill meeting “a calculated attempt to entrap Mr Ward”. He called the recording “deeply unreliable” and “devoid of context”.

Amina’s nails dug half-moons into her palm.

“Remember,” Farah whispered gently beside her, “opening speeches are performances. They’re not the truth. The truth comes out in the evidence.”

When it was her turn to give evidence, Amina’s mouth went dry in a way no amount of water could fix.

The usher swore her in. She chose the Qur’an. The small hardback felt heavier than its size.

“I swear by Almighty Allah that the evidence I shall give,” she recited, voice only trembling on one word, “shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

From the witness box, the courtroom looked different. The judge was closer. The jury’s faces were clearer. She realised one of the women on the front row wore the same cheap mascara she bought from Boots.

The prosecution took her through the story gently, almost like DCI Khan had in the interview rooms. The bar. The messages. The walk. The flat. The words she’d said. The freeze. Reporting. The email. The years in between. Seeing him again.

“And why,” he asked carefully, “did you decide to contact him and arrange the meeting at Lickey Hills?”

“Because I couldn’t carry it alone anymore,” she said simply. “Because seeing him laughing in town made me realise he’d never had to sit with what he did. I thought… if he could hear himself, maybe other people would finally hear me too.”

He nodded.

“Did you ever threaten him?” he asked. “At any point during that meeting?”

“No,” she said. “I was scared of him, not the other way round.”

“And did you, at any point,” he continued, “tell him what to say?”

“No,” she replied. “I asked questions. He answered. Sometimes he talked without me asking anything at all.”

They played the recordings next.

Hearing her own voice in that wood-panelled room was surreal.

“Do you remember me saying no?”
“I remember you saying you felt guilty…”
“I heard you… and I chose to keep going.”

The jury listened. Some wrote notes. One man stared at the floor for the whole clip. A woman on the back row blinked rapidly, her jaw clenched.

The defence tried to pick holes in it during cross-examination.

“You were calm,” the barrister said, peering at Amina over his glasses. “Measured. One might say rehearsed. Isn’t it true you’d practised this conversation with your cousins beforehand?”

“Yes,” she said. “We practised what I might say so I didn’t freeze. I’ve been freezing for seven years. I didn’t want to freeze with him again.”

“Quite,” he said. “And isn’t it true that you brought not one, but two recording devices to this meeting?”

“Yes,” she said. “Because the system had already told me once that my word wasn’t enough. I wanted more this time.”

He pounced gently.

“You say ‘the system’ told you your word wasn’t enough,” he repeated. “Is it fair to say you feel deeply let down by the police and Crown Prosecution Service?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I did. Less so now.”

“So when this opportunity arose,” he said, gesturing vaguely, “you were determined to make sure the CPS had no choice but to charge, regardless of what Mr Ward actually intended on that hill, weren’t you?”

She tilted her head slightly, forcing herself to stay calm.

“I was determined,” she said slowly, “to make sure the CPS heard more than just one frightened nineteen-year-old’s memory against a confident man’s denial. I wasn’t determined about the outcome. I can’t control that. I was determined to show them who he really is.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Isn’t it true,” he pressed, “that you went there hoping Mr Ward would incriminate himself?”

“Yes,” she said. “Because I knew what he did. I knew it seven years ago. I was hoping he would finally be honest about it.”

He tried another angle.

“You’ve read about trauma, haven’t you, Ms Rahman?” he asked. “About freeze responses. About the way memory can be reconstructed.”

“Yes,” she said. “Because I wanted to understand myself better. Not because I wanted to invent anything.”

“Invent, no,” he said smoothly. “But is it not possible that, over seven years, with therapy, with research, with girl-talk, your memory of that night has… solidified into something more black-and-white than it felt at the time?”

She met his gaze.

“The only thing that’s solidified,” she said, “is my understanding that ‘no’ means no, whether I whispered it or shouted it, whether I pushed or froze, whether I was drunk or sober. That’s not therapy talking. That’s just… basic empathy.”

A tiny muscle in his cheek twitched.

“No further questions,” he said.

She stepped down from the witness box on legs that felt like they were made of cotton. As she passed the public gallery, Samira’s hand brushed hers briefly, squeezing three times.

I. See. You.

Daniel gave evidence too.

They’d offered her the option not to be in the courtroom while he spoke, to watch on video or not at all. She wrestled with it.

In the end, she chose to stay.

She needed to hear the story he’d tell now that his own voice on the hill was in the mix.

He walked to the witness box with less swagger than he’d shown on the hill. No smirk now. Just that defensive set to his jaw.

His barrister walked him through his version gently. The “banter”, the flirting, the decision to go back to his flat. He admitted the police interviews, admitted the previous investigation.

“I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong,” he said, when asked directly. “I thought she was conflicted. Guilty. But I thought that was her issue, not mine. I thought she wanted it really.”

“And now?” the barrister asked. “With the benefit of seven more years of life and some… intense reflection, how do you see that night?”

His eyes flicked briefly, instinctively, towards Amina. Then he forced them back to the barrister.

“I see that I was selfish,” he said. “That I didn’t take her feelings seriously enough. That I put my desire over her confusion. I regret that, deeply. But I still don’t believe I’m a rapist. I don’t believe I forced her.”

The prosecution’s cross-examination was merciless in its politeness.

“You say you regret not taking her feelings seriously,” the barrister said. “Is that why, for years afterwards, you told your friends she was a crazy Muslim girl who ‘cried rape’ because of her strict parents?”

Daniel flinched.

“I… I might have said things like that,” he conceded. “I was angry.”

“You saved the CPS email,” the barrister continued. “You showed it to people as proof that she was lying. You made jokes about ‘nearly being ruined by a false accusation.’ Is that an example of taking her feelings seriously?”

He swallowed. “No,” he admitted. “It’s not.”

“On the recording,” the barrister said, voice growing softer, “you say, ‘I heard you… and I chose to keep going.’ What did you mean by that?”

Daniel shifted in the box, clearly wishing, for the first time, that he’d been less honest on that hill.

“I meant…” he said, searching, “I heard her say she felt guilty. That she was worried. That she shouldn’t be there. I chose to… push past that. I thought if I could just get her to relax, she’d enjoy it.”

“She also says,” the barrister continued, “that she remembers saying, ‘I don’t want this,’ and ‘Daniel, stop.’ Do you remember those words?”

His jaw worked.

“I… remember her saying she shouldn’t,” he said. “I remember ‘I shouldn’t’ more than ‘I don’t want this.’”

“Which is more convenient for you,” the barrister said dryly. “Because ‘I shouldn’t’ is, in your mind, about religion. ‘I don’t want this’ is about you.”

“Objection,” the defence barrister cut in. “Speculation.”

“Withdrawn,” the prosecutor said mildly. “Let me rephrase. Mr Ward, if we accept for a moment that she did say those exact words – ‘I don’t want this’ – do you agree that continuing after that would be wrong?”

A long pause.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “If I’d understood it that way, it would be wrong.”

“And if you heard it and chose to interpret it as ‘stop overthinking’ instead of ‘stop touching me’, whose responsibility is that?” the barrister asked.

His shoulders slumped, just a fraction.

“Mine,” he said.

The prosecutor let the silence after that answer hang for a moment.

“No further questions,” he said.

The jury retired on a Tuesday morning.

By then, Amina had given up trying to guess what they were thinking. Their faces were masks most of the time. Little flickers slipped through – a raised eyebrow here, a tight mouth there – but nothing she could hang hope on without it feeling like gambling with her own sanity.

Farah had warned her.

“Don’t read too much into anything,” she’d said. “Juries have acquitted men we were sure would be convicted. They’ve convicted when we thought the case was borderline. You can’t predict it.”

Her parents wanted to go home and wait.

Hassan wanted to pace outside the court.

Samira wanted to sit in the canteen and drink endless bad coffee.

Amina found herself drawn, strangely, to the mosque around the corner from the court. It was small compared to their one in Sparkhill, tucked into a side street, squeezed between a vape shop and a nail bar.

Inside, on a slightly fraying carpet, she prayed two rak‘ahs that were probably some of the most distracted of her life.

Her dua afterwards was simple.

Ya Allah, if a guilty verdict is good for my iman, for my healing, for this dunya and my akhirah, then bring it. If an acquittal is somehow better for me in ways I can’t see, then give me the sabr to bear it. Don’t let this case be the thing that breaks my trust in You, whatever the jury says. You know the truth already. I’m just asking them to catch up.

When they were called back into court hours later, her mouth was desert-dry again.

Everyone stood as the jury filed in.

The foreman, a woman with short grey hair and a no-nonsense expression, held a slip of paper.

“Madam Foreman,” the judge said. “Has the jury reached a verdict on which you are all agreed?”

“Yes,” she replied. “We have.”

Amina’s heart pounded so hard she thought the whole courtroom might hear it.

“On the charge of rape,” the judge said, “how do you find the defendant, Daniel Ward? Guilty or not guilty?”

Silence stretched.

A lifetime fitted itself into the half-second pause before the answer.

“Guilty,” the foreman said.

The word hit her like a physical thing.

Guilty.

Not “insufficient evidence”.

Not “no further action”.

Not “it’s complicated”.

Guilty.

Her vision blurred. Her knees almost buckled. Samira’s hand grabbed her forearm, Hassan’s hand pressed between her shoulder blades, holding her upright without making a fuss.

Behind the glass of the dock, Daniel went very still. His face drained of colour. For a second, he looked like an overgrown boy who’d just been told off in school.

His solicitor leaned in, whispering furiously. He barely reacted.

“Members of the jury,” the judge said, “thank you for your careful consideration of the evidence in this distressing case. Sentencing will be adjourned to a later date to allow for reports to be prepared.”

The rest was a blur.

Legal jargon. Dates. A request for a pre-sentence report. Talk of custody thresholds and guidelines.

Amina heard phrases like “starting point” and “years” and “aggravating factors” without being able to attach them to anything real.

What cut through, oddly, was the moment the judge turned to her.

“Ms Rahman,” he said, “your courage in reporting this offence and giving evidence has been noted by this court. Whatever sentence I pass, it cannot undo what happened. But I hope today’s verdict offers you some measure of validation.”

Validation.

The word sounded small compared to the years she’d lost. But it was still something.

Outside, on the court steps, cameras were waiting.

Because of course they were.

Rape convictions against acquaintance attackers were still rare enough to count as news.

Amina froze when she saw the cluster of lenses and microphones.

Farah leaned in.

“You don’t have to speak to press,” she said. “We can walk you out the side.”

Amina thought briefly of headlines. Of her name in waiting rooms and group chats. Of her face in strangers’ hands as they scrolled.

Then she thought of other girls. Other Amina’s. Sitting at home, scrolling, the way she had once, seeing stories that made them feel less alone, even if temporarily.

She nodded.

“I’ll say something short,” she said. “No details. No names except mine.”

Samira squeezed her hand. “We’ve got you.”

A reporter stepped forward as they approached.

“Ms Rahman,” she called. “How do you feel after today’s verdict?”

Tired, Amina wanted to say. Vindicated. Sad. Relieved. Afraid. All of the above.

Instead, she took a breath and spoke clearly, voice carrying just enough over the noise.

“I feel like the truth was seen,” she said. “And heard. That’s all I ever wanted.”

“Do you have a message for other women who’ve been assaulted and are afraid to come forward?” another reporter shouted.

She did.

So many messages, all fighting to get out.

But space was limited. Attention was short. Headlines were brief.

“Two things,” she said. “One: whatever happened to you, it wasn’t your fault. No amount of drinking or flirting or going back to someone’s flat cancels out your right to say no. And two: the system isn’t perfect. It can fail you. It failed me once. But there are people inside it and outside it who care. You don’t have to go through it alone.”

A final question, shouted from further back.

“And what would you say to your attacker?”

She paused, considering.

So many unsaid things bubbled there. All the insults, the curses, the fantasies of him feeling even a fraction of the fear he’d caused.

In the end, she picked one simple line.

“I would say,” she replied, “that I hope he understands now that being found guilty in a court doesn’t make him what he is. His actions did that. This just put a name to it.”

Flashbulbs popped. Her eyes prickled. Hassan gently steered her away, towards a patch of pavement that wasn’t full of cameras.

They ducked into a side street. The air felt cooler there, away from the building’s heat and the press pack’s jostling.

For a moment, they all just stood there.

Her father was the first to speak.

“Alhamdulillah,” he breathed, wiping his eyes openly. “Alhamdulillah.”

Her mother kissed her forehead, whispering duas, hands shaking.

Samira grinned through tears.

“You did it,” she said. “You actually did it. You dragged him into the light.”

Amina let out a breath she’d been holding since she’d seen him laughing outside that bar months ago.

“I didn’t do it alone,” she said. “You dragged me there first.”

Hassan snorted. “You did the hardest part,” he said. “We were just tech support.”

She smiled weakly.

For the first time in a long time, the future in her mind didn’t stop at a closed police file or a hill.

It stretched. Still messy. Still unclear. But open.

Sentencing came weeks later. She chose not to attend.

Her victim impact statement was read in court by DCI Khan instead.

In it, she talked about panic attacks. About walking with her keys between her fingers. About flinching at smells and sounds. About the way faith had been both a comfort and a point of tension.

“I no longer measure justice just by years in a sentence,” she wrote at the end. “Whatever term the court decides, my real healing will not come from watching Mr Ward be locked in a building, but from the ways I learn to inhabit my own life fully again, without his shadow.”

He got eight years.

People would argue about whether that was too much or too little. They always did.

Amina filed the number away in some mental drawer marked “background noise”. It wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t everything.

Life went on.

She kept working. Patients still needed bedpans and reassurance and blood pressures taken at 3am.

She started volunteering once a month with a small local group that ran workshops on consent and healthy relationships in schools and mosques. It felt strange at first, standing in front of teenage girls and boys, talking about “enthusiastic consent” and “coercion” and “freeze responses” with diagrams and anonymised stories.

But then she’d see a girl in the back row straighten up. A boy frown, really thinking. An adult survivor come up afterwards and say, “I didn’t know what to call it before. Now I do.”

She started writing too. Not a full blog at first. Just anonymous pieces in online spaces for survivors, sometimes intertwining faith and trauma, sometimes just describing a single moment – a hill, a bench, a safe phrase.

Her story wasn’t the only one.

It never had been.

But it was hers. And she was finally holding the pen.

One Sunday afternoon, months after the verdict, she went back to Lickey Hills.

Alone this time.

The car park was busier than that day. Kids with kites. Couples with thermos flasks. Dogs everywhere.

She walked up the familiar paths, breath puffing, legs warming. The trees felt less like witnesses now and more like… scenery.

At the bench, she paused.

Sat for a moment.

Listened to the wind. The birds. The faint hum of the city below.

No recording devices this time.

No safe phrases.

Just her.

At the ridge, she didn’t go all the way to the very edge. She didn’t need to.

She stood close enough to see the drop and remember the pull. Close enough to feel the old temptation whisper, It would have been easier…

“And wrong,” she said quietly, finishing the sentence out loud. “So, so wrong.”

She thought of another Amina, somewhere else, balancing on her own metaphorical cliff edge. Deciding between silence, self-destruction and an attempt at imperfect justice.

She whispered a dua for her. Whoever she was.

“Ya Allah, make it easy for her,” she said. “Send her people. Give her courage. Protect her heart.”

The sky above Birmingham was its usual patchy mix of grey and almost-blue.

From up here, the city looked small again.

Her life inside it didn’t.

She put her hands in her pockets, felt the familiar weight of her phone, now free of old CPS emails. She’d archived them all the day of the guilty verdict. Not deleted. Just moved. Out of the front of her mind.

In their place now were new things – workshop dates, article drafts, reminders to buy her mum dates, memes from Samira, messages from other survivors saying thank you.

She smiled, a real one this time.

“Time to go,” she murmured to herself.

She turned away from the drop and started walking back down the hill, boots finding their own rhythm on the winding path.

Gravity still existed.

But it no longer felt like the only force in her life.

Chapter 10 – The Story She Chooses

The email sat in her drafts for three days before she found the courage to hit send.

The subject line was simple:

Workshop proposal – “What No Really Means”

The recipient list was short: the youth worker at the local mosque, the safeguarding lead at a community centre, a teacher from her old college who’d once quietly slipped her a leaflet about support services for survivors.

In the body, she wrote:

I’d like to run a session for our young people – especially our girls, but the boys too – about consent, boundaries, faith and culture. I can bring a professional from a local charity. I will also share my story (without details) as a British Bangladeshi Muslim woman who reported sexual violence, was initially failed by the system, and later saw justice in court. I believe our kids need to hear this from someone who looks like them, sounds like them, and still loves their deen.

She read it twice, checking for anything that sounded like begging.

It didn’t.

It sounded like an offer.

She hit send.

Then she put her phone face down on her bed and went to make tea before she could spiral about it.

By the time she came back, the first reply was already in.

From the youth worker at the mosque – Fatima, in her thirties, with trainers under her abaya and a talent for making chaotic teenagers laugh.

Fatima:
Amina, YES. I’ve been trying to get the committee to approve something like this forever. They listen to doctors and lawyers when we talk about careers, they should listen to you about this. Let’s meet after Asr this Sunday and plan.

A warmth spread through Amina’s chest that had nothing to do with the mug in her hands.

She sat cross-legged on her bed, took a sip of tea, and let herself feel it fully.

Not just relief.

Purpose.

The first workshop was rough around the edges.

The mosque’s small hall was half-full of girls in hoodies and long skirts, some in full hijab, some with their hair in messy buns. A handful of boys sat on the other side of a loose gender divide, slouched on metal chairs, pretending indifference and failing.

At the front, a whiteboard. A PowerPoint slide. Amina, in her usual long coat and scarf, hands slightly damp with nerves, next to a woman from the local rape crisis centre – Jenna, who wore a loose shirt, jeans and a nose ring, and had practised saying “Bismillah” three times so it wouldn’t sound too clumsy.

“What do you think consent means?” Amina asked the room.

Silence.

Then, hesitantly:

“Saying yes?” from a girl near the back.

“Signing a form?” one of the boys joked weakly.

“Not saying no,” another muttered, eyes sliding away when Amina looked at him.

They wrote it on the board. Talked. Drew diagrams. Did a role-play where one person wanted to borrow a phone charger and the other kept saying “maybe later” and “I’m not sure” and “I feel bad, you’re my friend”.

By the time they reached the anonymous question box at the end, it was overflowing with folded bits of paper.

“What if you say no at first but then say yes because you feel bad?”
“What if he says he’ll tell everyone you’re a tease if you don’t do it?”
“What if he’s your husband?”
“What if you didn’t fight back and now you hate yourself?”

She answered as many as she could in the time.

Some with practical advice.

Some with “I don’t know” followed by, “But I can find out with you.”

Some with a simple, firm, “That still wasn’t your fault.”

Afterwards, as the room emptied in a swirl of trainers and whispers, one girl hung back.

Hijab pulled low over her forehead. Hands shoved into the pockets of an oversized hoodie. Eyes older than her years.

“Miss?” she said quietly, though Amina had never asked them to call her that.

“Yeah?” Amina replied.

“What you said…” the girl began, voice thin. “About freezing. About your brain going somewhere else. I thought… I thought I was weird. Or lying to myself. That part… helped.”

Amina felt something in her throat tighten.

“What happened to you was real,” she said gently. “Even if your body didn’t fight back the way movies say it should. You survived the way you could. That’s not weird. That’s… clever, even, in a horrible situation.”

The girl blinked quickly, then nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

She started to walk away, then turned back.

“And… thank you for saying you’re Muslim and you still… went through all that,” she added in a rush. “Makes me feel less… haram.”

Amina almost laughed, or cried, or both.

“Being hurt,” she said softly, “is not haram. Hurting someone else is.”

The girl nodded once more, then slipped out of the hall, swallowed by the tide of other young people and the smell of chips from the takeaway next door.

Fatima came up beside Amina, blowing out a breath.

“That went well,” she said.

“Did it?” Amina asked, half-dazed.

“There were no chairs thrown and no aunties storming in shouting ‘hayaaa’,” Fatima said. “By mosque youth-work standards, that’s a success.”

They both laughed.

Then Fatima’s smile softened.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For not waiting until you felt completely ‘healed’ to do this. If we all waited for that, we’d die before we started.”

At home, life was still gloriously mundane.

Her mum complained about the price of tomatoes. Her dad watched Bangla news at a volume that suggested the anchor was hard of hearing. Her brother argued about football with Hassan on family WhatsApp.

Sometimes, the case would slip into conversation like a stone in a river.

“You know so-and-so’s daughter?” an aunty would say at a gathering. “She got married to a man everyone said was religious. He hit her. She came back home. Before, they would have forced her to stay. Now they say, ‘No, your safety matters.’ Things are changing, slowly.”

Sometimes, a cousin would ask quietly, “Does it feel different, knowing he’s inside?”

Amina would think about it.

“It feels like someone put a lid on a boiling pot,” she’d say. “It’s still hot. But at least it’s not spilling everywhere all the time.”

At work, she joked with colleagues about patients who insisted on calling her “doctor” despite her corrections. She made mistakes, apologised, learned. Some nights, she still froze briefly when a male patient raised his voice or a drunk man came into A&E smelling of stale beer.

But the freezes were shorter now.

The grounding quicker.

Once, during a night shift, a junior doctor snapped at her in front of others, his stress spilling over into rudeness. Her chest tightened, old scripts about male authority and female patience trying to reassert themselves.

She took a breath.

“Can we talk outside?” she said.

He blinked, surprised.

In the corridor, she said, calmly, “I know you’re under pressure. But don’t speak to me like that again. We’re a team. And I deserve basic respect.”

He apologised.

It wasn’t a big scene. No dramatic music.

Just a small, quiet rewriting of an old script.

She didn’t talk to Daniel again.

Not directly.

Bail conditions, then custodial rules, drew legal lines on the map between them, like someone had taken a marker and written “no contact” across the routes that had once led from Broad Street to his flat.

But he drifted into her life sometimes in second-hand ways.

A newspaper article shared in a group chat (she muted it quickly).

A rumour from a mutual acquaintance who ran into his mum at the market.

“She looked… tired,” the acquaintance said. “But she said, ‘We accept God’s judgement. We pray for forgiveness for everyone involved.’”

Amina’s feelings about that were layered.

She didn’t want his mother to be crushed under shame.

She did want accountability to live in their living room as well as hers.

On some nights, she’d lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, and think about him in a cell somewhere.

Did he replay the hill sometimes? The bench? The moment she’d said “yes” to recording, “no” to silence?

Did he read anything she might have anonymously written, stumbling on a story that felt like his but carried no names?

Did he ever sit on a prison mattress and whisper, “I heard her… and chose to keep going,” and feel something like genuine tawbah crack open in his chest?

She didn’t know.

She’d probably never know.

She learned to live with that.

Not everything needed a neat epilogue.

On Eid morning, a year after the verdict, Sparkhill buzzed with that unique blend of chaos and sweetness.

Men in jubbahs and kids in new trainers spilled out of mosques onto pavements suddenly too narrow. Aunties in embroidered abayas and glittering shawls held each other’s faces, kissing cheeks, admiring bangles. The air smelled of perfume and frying onions.

Amina stood in front of the mirror in her room, fixing the last pin in her Eid scarf.

The woman looking back at her had the same eyes as the nineteen-year-old girl who’d once done eyeliner for a night out, heart flipping at the thought of seeing a man behind a bar.

The difference was in the set of her shoulders.

Firmer now.

Not invincible.

Just… anchored.

Her phone buzzed on the bed.

Samira, of course.

Samira: EID MUBARRRRAAAKKK 😘 stop taking 3 hours to get ready, the food is going cold and my kids have destroyed the living room

A second message, a moment later.

Samira: Proud of you every day. Just thought Eid was a good day to remind you.

Amina smiled, thumbs moving.

Amina: Eid Mubarak 💛 save me some biryani or our friendship is over

Downstairs, her mother’s voice floated up, half-scolding, half-affectionate.

“Ami! We’ll be late for the second Jamaat! Come down, people will think we didn’t pray!”

She grabbed her small handbag – wallet, keys, phone, a folded copy of a short dua she’d started reciting more often:

“O Allah, make me content with what You decree, make me patient with what You withhold, and grateful for what You give.”

On the way out, her father patted her shoulder, eyes crinkling.

“You’re taking your notebook?” he asked, nodding towards the edge of a small journal peeking out of her bag.

“Yeah,” she said. “Might write something later.”

He smiled.

“Good,” he said. “Write less about that boy now. Write more about you.”

Later, after prayers and hugs and jokes about whose Eid outfit was the most outrageous, after kids had been bribed with cash and sweets to pose for photos, Amina slipped away for a bit.

Not far. Just to the little park at the end of their road.

She sat on a slightly rusty bench, the metal warm from the weak sun. Children screamed happily on swings that were probably older than them. A teenage boy practised fancy football tricks and fell over, laughing at himself.

She pulled her notebook from her bag.

On the first blank page, she wrote:

This is not a story about a rapist.

She paused.

Then, underneath:

This is a story about a woman who refused to disappear.

Words flowed.

Not neat chapters.

Just fragments.

The smell of cheap perfume in a bar. The white corridor of a police station. The orange glare of a Broad Street streetlight on wet pavement. The feel of damp grass on Lickey Hills under her trainers. The sound of her own voice saying “yellow car, you’re a banana” into a phone like a strange incantation.

Her mother’s tasbih beads. Hassan’s cables. Samira’s onion tears.

The moment the foreman had said “guilty”.

The moment she’d stood on that ridge and stepped back instead of forward.

The moment a girl in a mosque hall hoodie had said, “I thought I was weird. That part… helped.”

She didn’t know yet if this would be a book, a blog series, a private document that lived only in her drawer for years.

She just knew that telling it felt less like ripping a wound open now and more like… cleaning it properly.

Painful.

Necessary.

Healing.

Across the park, a little girl in a sparkly Eid dress tripped and fell. She sat there for a second, shocked, bottom hitting the grass. Then she looked around. Her eyes found her dad. He smiled, held out his hand.

“You’re okay,” he called. “Up you get. Try again.”

The girl hesitated.

Then, slowly, she got up. Brushed grass from her dress. Took three wobbly steps. Ran.

Amina closed her notebook, pressing the pen between the pages.

She stood up.

The city wasn’t safer because of her case. Men didn’t become saints because one of them had been convicted. Girls didn’t suddenly become untouchable because of one workshop.

But somewhere on the map of Birmingham – and in the quieter maps of her own mind – new routes existed now.

From mosque prayer rooms to police stations.

From family shame to family solidarity.

From silence to sentences.

She walked back home through streets that held both danger and joy, her scarf catching the breeze, her shadow stretching and shrinking on the pavement.

At the door, her mother’s voice greeted her again.

“There you are,” she said. “Come, eat. I saved you the best piece of meat before your brother took everything.”

Amina laughed, stepping into the familiar warmth.

“I’m coming,” she said.

And for the first time in a very long time, when she said the words “I’m coming” in response to someone waiting for her, there was no fear attached.

Just movement.

Forward.

Chapter 11 – Quiet Revolutions

Three years later, the email subject line was short enough to look harmless.

Victim Liaison – Communication Request from Offender

Amina stared at it in her inbox for a full thirty seconds before she clicked.

The body of the email was careful, neutral.

Dear Ms Rahman,

We are writing to inform you that Daniel Ward, currently serving a custodial sentence for the offence against you, has expressed a wish to write you a letter of apology. This is entirely your choice. You are under no obligation to accept or read any communication from him. If you consent, the letter will be screened by our team before being forwarded. If you decline, no message will be passed on and he will be informed of your decision.

Please let us know how you wish to proceed.

At the end: a name, a phone number, the word Officer.

Amina leaned back in her chair, the laptop screen throwing a pale rectangle of light onto her face.

It was a Friday morning. The flat was quiet. She’d taken the day off from the hospital – not for anything dramatic, just to catch up on life admin and finish the draft of a new article she’d promised Fatima for the mosque newsletter.

Healing and Justice: An Honest Conversation for Our Community.

Apparently, she was now that person. The one people asked to write about healing, like it was something you ticked off a to-do list.

She snorted softly to herself.

“Of course,” she murmured. “Just when I think we’re done with plot twists.”

On the coffee table, her half-drunk masala tea had developed a thin skin. The washing machine hummed in the background, the predictable thud of wet clothes hitting metal.

She read the email again.

Apology.

The word sat oddly in her chest.

At nineteen, she’d fantasised about him saying sorry as if it were a magic spell that would rewind time. Later, she’d wanted something harsher – not apology, but punishment, humiliation, erasure.

Now… it felt like a rock she wasn’t sure she wanted to pick up.

She grabbed her phone and opened the family WhatsApp group.

Typing in Mum, Dad, I got an email… felt wrong.

She backed out and opened a different chat.

Amina: Hassan. You free for a quick call?

Hassan: At work but on a break. Call.

He picked up on the second ring.

“Yo,” he said. “What’s up? You sound like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Not a ghost,” she said. “Just… government email.”

“That’s worse,” he said automatically. “What now? Jury duty? HMRC? Parking tickets?”

She huffed. “A letter request. From him.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Ward?” he asked, voice flattening.

“Who else?” she said. “Victim Liaison say he wants to send me an apology. They want my consent to pass it on.”

Hassan exhaled, the sound crackling slightly through the speaker.

“Of course he does,” he muttered. “Nothing like a bit of remorse to look good at parole hearings.”

“You think that’s all it is?” she asked, trying to keep her tone neutral.

“I think,” he said slowly, “he’s capable of both. Genuine guilt and self-interest. Doesn’t mean you owe him an audience.”

She chewed her lip.

“I know I don’t owe him,” she said. “I just… part of me is curious. Part of me is like, if I don’t read it, is that me staying stuck? And part of me wants to print it out and use it to line the cat’s litter tray.”

“You don’t have a cat,” he pointed out.

“I might get one just for this,” she shot back.

He laughed softly. The sound steadied her a little.

“Look,” he said, “you’ve done everything the hard way already. Police, court, workshops, writing. There’s no right answer here. If you read it and it messes with your head, we deal with that. If you don’t read it and later wonder, ‘What if there was something I needed to hear?’, we deal with that too.”

“Helpful,” she said dryly. “Thank you, Dr Phil.”

“Seriously though,” he added, voice softening. “Ask yourself something simple: will reading it add to your healing or take away from it? Not in a dramatic movie way. In a boring, day-to-day, sleep-and-breathing way.”

She closed her eyes briefly, feeling the question settle.

Add or take away.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly.

“Then don’t rush,” he replied. “The email won’t self-destruct.”

Another pause.

“You could also set conditions,” he added. “Tell the liaison officer you’ll only accept it if it doesn’t challenge the verdict, if it doesn’t ask you for anything, if it’s just him taking responsibility. If he can’t manage that, you’ve got your answer.”

She nodded, even though he couldn’t see it.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll… think. And call Samira and get the emotionally unfiltered version of your advice.”

“Brace yourself,” he said. “She’s been in a mood all week because her youngest drew on the living room wall in permanent marker.”

“Perfect,” Amina said. “I’m in the mood for permanent opinions.”

Samira’s reaction was, as predicted, spectacular.

“He wants what?” she demanded when Amina told her, voice jumping half an octave. “A letter? From you? After all this time? Wallah, the male audacity is a renewable energy source.”

“Technically, it’s from him,” Amina said. “To me.”

“Worse,” Samira said. “Guilt recycling. I don’t like it.”

They were in Samira’s kitchen, as usual. Onions softened in a pan, garlic and ginger perfuming the air. One of the kids ran past, cape tied around his shoulders, shouting, “I’m Batman!” at the top of his lungs.

Samira lowered her voice slightly.

“What do you want?” she asked, more gently. “Forget what I want to do with his letter.”

Amina traced a circle in a small pool of spilled water on the table.

“I don’t want to be curious,” she said. “I don’t want him to occupy any more space in my head. But… part of me wonders if there’s something in there that might… I don’t know. Close something.”

Samira snorted. “You’re expecting closure from a man who once said ‘if I’d known she’d react like that I’d have worn a bodycam’. I’m not optimistic.”

“That’s harsh,” Amina said. “But also weirdly accurate.”

She looked up, met her cousin’s eyes.

“Do you think reading it would be going backwards?” she asked. “Like… reopening a door I finally managed to shut?”

Samira thought for a moment, stirring the onions absently.

“I think,” she said slowly, “you’ve already moved that door. It’s behind you now, even if it’s not fully bricked up. Reading a letter won’t teleport you back to nineteen. You’re not that girl anymore. You’re…” She waved the spoon at her. “This woman. Who went into the trees and came back with evidence.”

Amina smiled despite herself. “You make me sound like a forest witch.”

“I mean,” Samira said, “if the broom fits.”

She put the spoon down and leaned on the table.

“Here’s my unfiltered opinion, since you called me,” she said. “If you want to read it because you think there might be something in there for you – an apology that actually lands, a sense that he’s not out there telling a new set of lies – then say yes, with boundaries. If you want to read it because you think you should, or because you feel guilty for not giving him a chance to perform his remorse, say no and block that shit.”

Amina considered that.

“I don’t care about his parole board,” she said slowly. “I don’t care if this makes him look good to them. That’s between him and the system. I… I think I do want to know if he can say it on paper. Without me prompting. Without leading questions.”

Samira tilted her head.

“Then you say yes,” she said. “And we turn it into homework. You don’t read it alone. You read it with me and a cup of tea and at least three chocolate biscuits. If it’s trash, we shred it and you get to pick a cathartic movie to watch. If it’s… not trash, we still shred it eventually. Because you don’t need his words lying around your flat like a cursed artefact.”

Amina laughed. The image of a letter sitting on her dining table, exuding bad vibes, was too vivid.

“Okay,” she agreed. “That’s the plan.”

“And Amina,” Samira added, eyes suddenly fierce, “remember this: forgiving someone in your heart – if you ever choose that – doesn’t mean letting them back into your life, or saying what they did was small. It just means you’re tired of carrying their poison. That’s between you and Allah. Not you and him.”

Amina nodded, the distinction settling somewhere deep.

“I know,” she said. “Or… I’m learning.”

“Good,” Samira said. “Now help me chop. Talking about men who ruin things has made me hungry.”

The letter arrived two weeks later.

It came in a plain envelope with the prison’s return address printed in small, official type in the corner. The Victim Liaison Officer had attached a short note:

Content checked. No challenges to verdict. No requests for contact. No blame attributed to you. You may wish to read with support present.

Amina held it between her fingers like something fragile.

Samira came over that evening with a packet of biscuits and a look that said, I’m fully ready to set this thing on fire if necessary.

“Ready?” she asked, once they were both settled on the sofa.

“No,” Amina said. “But let’s do it anyway.”

She slid a finger under the flap and opened it.

The handwriting inside was surprisingly neat. Blue ink on lined paper. No greeting like Dear. Just her name.

Amina,

Her eyes skated quickly ahead, checking for phrases that would make her slam it shut.

There were none of the red flags she’d dreaded: no if you felt, no I’m sorry you think, no we both know.

She took a breath and read properly.

It feels strange to write your name knowing you’ve asked for my words to be put through a filter before they reach you. I understand why. I’m writing this not to ask you for anything, not to defend myself, not to make you less angry. I’m writing because if I don’t say these things, they’ll sit in my throat forever.

Her shoulders tensed, but she kept going.

When I first got here, I told myself the same story I’ve been telling since that night. “We were both drunk. She sent mixed signals. The police couldn’t prove anything. I nearly had my life ruined by one bad decision and a girl who regretted going against her family’s rules.”

In here, you meet a lot of men who tell themselves stories like that. Every last one of them thinks he’s different. Better. “Not like the monsters.” For a while, I believed mine more because the CPS dropped the case the first time. I wore that like a badge.

Samira snorted. “He did,” she muttered. “Waved it like a degree.”

Amina kept reading.

But then I heard my own voice in that recording in court. Heard myself say, “I heard you… and I chose to keep going.” No editor. No pub lighting. Just those words. It was like having a mirror shoved in my face with all the flattering filters switched off.

I can’t un-hear it. I’ve tried.

Her throat tightened.

I have had three years to sit with that sentence. Three years of learning words like “coercion” and “freeze response” that I used to laugh off. Three years of hearing other men’s stories and, for the first time, feeling my stomach drop because I recognise myself in the ones I hate most.

I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I don’t expect any. I know I loom large in your nightmares and small in your compassion. That’s fair. I just want you to know that the man walking around outside that bar the day you saw me – the one laughing with a pint in his hand – he’s not the man in this cell now. Not because prison made me noble. It didn’t. It just took away a lot of my distractions and excuses.

Amina blinked, the words blurring for a second.

She realised she’d been holding her breath and forced herself to exhale.

Samira nudged her.

“Tea,” she whispered. “Sip.”

She took a mechanical sip and continued.

I thought for a long time about how to frame this letter. My instinct was to explain. To say I was young, drunk, stupid. That I didn’t understand what I was doing. That I never meant to “be a rapist.” I’ve put those in quotes on purpose. Because for years, that word was the thing I ran from. I thought if I could stay one step to the left of it, I’d be okay.

But what I did that night doesn’t change depending on what I call it. I heard you say you didn’t want it. I saw you freeze. I felt you go somewhere else. I decided my desire was more important than your fear. That’s the part I can’t explain away. That’s the part I’m sorry for.

The word sorry landed differently this time.

Not like a magic spell. Not like an Instagram caption.

A statement, flat and heavy.

I am sorry for what I took from you. I am sorry for every panic attack, every sleepless night, every time a laugh like mine made you flinch. I don’t expect this to undo any of that. I know it won’t. I know it might even make you feel worse, reading this. I waited a long time before asking to write because I knew I was doing it partly for me – because the guilt lives in me like rust and I needed to put some of it somewhere. That’s not fair on you. I know that too.

Amina let the page rest on her lap for a moment.

“I hate him,” she said quietly.

“I know,” Samira replied. “Me too.”

“And I…” she added, voice catching, “I believe him. That he’s sorry. At least partly.”

Samira sighed, long and low.

“Yeah,” she agreed reluctantly. “I hate that too.”

“Keep going?” Amina asked.

“Up to you,” Samira said. “We can stop. We can feed it to the shredder gods.”

Amina thought of the girl in the hoodie at the workshop. Of the boys who’d come up to her afterwards, awkward and earnest, asking questions like, How do we make sure we don’t mess up like that?

She nodded.

“Let’s finish,” she said.

I used to think forgiveness meant you had to say “it’s okay” or talk to the person again or tell the world it wasn’t that bad. I don’t think that anymore. I don’t dare ask you for forgiveness. That’s between you and Allah. I’m trying to ask Him for it in my own clumsy way. I don’t know if it will be accepted. I know the scales are heavy.

I also don’t expect you to be happy that I’m eligible for parole in a few years. Or that one day, if I live, I’ll walk on streets again that don’t have bars in front of them. I know that might feel like a slap. I know freedom is a word that lands differently for you than it ever will for me now.

“Good,” Samira muttered under her breath. “Be uncomfortable.”

If I do get out, I don’t want my life to go back to what it was. I don’t want to be the man organising lads’ nights out and laughing at “borderline” stories. That man should have been stopped before he got to you. Before he got to anyone. I’m trying in small ways – inside, with the men here – to challenge the old talk. To not let them sit comfortably in the stories I used to tell myself. It’s not much. It’s not heroics. It doesn’t cancel anything. It’s just… something that isn’t nothing.

Amina felt a strange, reluctant flicker of respect. Not for him, exactly. For the concept of a man in prison telling other men, That’s not banter, that’s violence.

I know this letter might never leave this room. The officer might bin it. You might read it once and shred it. That’s your right. I won’t write again. I won’t try to contact you when I’m out, if I get out. I won’t show this letter to anyone else and say, “See? I apologised. I’ve done my part.” This is not part of my defence. It’s just something I needed to say while I still can.

You owed me nothing. I owed you respect and safety and didn’t give it. I don’t have a neat last line for this. Just that I am sorry, and that I accept the word that describes what I did, whether or not my ego likes it.

— Daniel

The final dash before his name did something weird to her. It made him look small on the page. A line, then a name. A punctuation mark and a person.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

The fridge hummed. A distant car horn honked on the main road. Upstairs, a neighbour’s toddler thudded across the floor with the rhythm of a tiny, angry drummer.

“Well,” Samira said eventually. “I was ready to mock it. But… it’s not the worst letter I’ve ever heard.”

Amina gave a short, humourless laugh.

“High praise,” she said. “Put that on a poster. ‘Not the worst letter, says my victim.’”

She folded the pages carefully along their creases.

“How do you feel?” Samira asked quietly.

Amina searched for the answer.

“Not…” she started, then stopped. “Not lighter. Not heavier. Just… more… aware?”

“Of what?” Samira prompted.

“That this is… messy,” Amina said. “That he can be both the man who hurt me and the man who now sits in a cell telling other men not to hurt women. That my anger and my weird… pity?… can co-exist without cancelling each other.”

Samira made a face. “Pity is a strong word.”

“I know,” Amina said quickly. “I don’t mean like, ‘Poor him, he’s in prison.’ I mean… pity for the version of him that never learned how to see women as fully human until prison forced him to. That is… sad. Not more sad than what he did. But sad in its own right.”

Samira sighed deeply, then nodded.

“I get that,” she admitted. “Still hate him, though.”

“Same,” Amina said. “I can hold many things at once.”

She looked down at the folded letter.

“I don’t want to keep this,” she decided. “I don’t need it hanging around.”

Samira brightened. “Bonfire?”

“We live in a flat,” Amina reminded her. “We’d set off the fire alarms and traumatised neighbours.”

“Fair,” Samira said. “Shredder, then. And maybe we bake something afterwards as a ritual. Cookies of catharsis.”

Amina smiled.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

The shredder whirred cheerfully in the corner of Amina’s living room, chomping through the pages line by line.

They watched the strips curl into the transparent bin, ink sliced into tiny, illegible fragments.

“Feels symbolic,” Samira said.

“It is,” Amina replied. “Not of deleting what he said. That’s already in my head now. It’s symbolic of not letting his words become some sacred text I obsess over.”

The last corner disappeared into the blades.

The shredder hummed once more, then fell silent.

Samira dusted off her hands.

“Amen,” she said. “Now, cookies.”

That night, after Samira had left and the flat smelled of cooling chocolate and sugar, Amina sat at her desk with her notebook open.

The page she’d left blank earlier beckoned.

She picked up her pen.

At the top, she wrote:

What Forgiveness Is Not

Underneath, she began to list.

It is not withdrawal of your statement.
It is not pretending it wasn’t that bad.
It is not answering his message.
It is not letting him marry your friend’s cousin because “he’s changed now.”
It is not attending his parole hearing to say, “He’s a good guy really.”

She paused.

Then, under that, she added:

What Forgiveness Might Be

Letting go of the fantasy of doing harm to him with your own hands.
Allowing yourself to feel something other than rage without calling it betrayal.
Leaving some of the justice to Allah without giving up on earthly justice.
Making dua for your own heart more than for his fate.

The last line sat there, heavy and true.

She closed the notebook partway, leaving the pen tucked inside.

On her bedside table, her phone buzzed.

A message from Fatima.

Fatima: We’ve had three mums ask if we can run your workshop again but for them 😅 apparently they learned more from their daughters than from twenty years of lectures.

Amina smiled.

Amina: Bismillah. Let’s do it. Different slide on “aunty gossip as a weapon”, though.

Fatima: 100%. Also, someone asked if you’ve thought about turning your story into a book. I may have accidentally told them you’re already writing it.

Amina rolled her eyes fondly.

Amina: You and Samira are going to manifest a whole book out of sheer peer pressure.

She put the phone down and looked at the notebook.

It didn’t feel like a burden.

It felt like a seed.

Months later, sitting in a small independent bookshop on the Moseley high street, she would hold a paperback in her hands with her name on the front.

Into the Trees: A Story About Consent, Faith and Fighting Back.

She would do a reading, voice trembling only on the first page. Samira would cry loudly in the second row. Hassan would “accidentally” knock over a display when someone in the back muttered something about “girls these days”.

But that was still ahead.

For now, on this quiet Friday night, she stood up, switched off the lamp, and walked to the window.

Outside, Birmingham glowed its usual patchy orange and white. Sirens somewhere far off. Laughter from a group of teenagers heading to the bus stop. A couple arguing half-heartedly about who’d forgotten to buy milk.

The city hadn’t transformed because one case reached conviction.

Men still did terrible things.

The system still failed people.

She still had bad nights, sometimes, when a smell or a song dragged her back to a sofa she’d long since left behind.

But there were quiet revolutions happening too.

In workshops and living rooms.

In WhatsApp groups and court corridors.

In tiny, stubborn choices – to report, to record, to stand up, to sit down, to shred a letter, to write another.

She rested her forehead lightly against the cool glass.

“Ya Allah,” she whispered. “Thank You for bringing me this far. Keep me steady. Keep me soft where I need to be soft and firm where I need to be firm. And protect all the girls walking into nights they don’t know are dangerous yet.”

She didn’t know if forgiveness, in the full, spiritual sense, would ever flower in her chest for the man who’d written that letter.

She didn’t rush it.

Some things were between her and Allah, timed on a scale she didn’t control.

What she did know, with a clarity that no verdict or apology could touch, was this:

Her life was no longer a reaction to his choices.

It was a series of her own.

Tomorrow, she’d wake up, go to the mosque, maybe sit with a group of anxious mums talking about daughters and sons and the word no.

Next month, she’d draft another chapter.

Next year, who knew?

For tonight, she turned away from the window, slipped into bed, and for the first time in a very long time, sleep came not as an ambush, but as something she walked towards willingly.

Not because everything was fixed.

But because, finally, she trusted herself to handle what would come next.

The story, after all, was still being written.

And this time, the pen was firmly in her hand.

Chapter 12 – After The Echo

The book looked smaller in her hands than it had in her dreams.

A5. Soft cover. Matte finish. The title – Into the Trees: A Story About Consent, Faith and Fighting Back – sat in clean, simple font above an illustration of a dark green ridge under a grey sky, a faint outline of a girl walking away from the edge.

Her name underneath.

Amina Rahman.

Not Ms. Not anonymous. Not “the complainant”.

Her name.

The small independent bookshop in Moseley smelled like paper, coffee, and faint incense. Fairy lights zigzagged across the ceiling. Stacks of books turned the space into a gentle maze.

Around her, chairs had been set up in a rough semi-circle. Twenty-five, maybe thirty. Some already filled; some still empty. A handwritten sign near the front door read:

Author Event – Local Writer Amina Rahman in Conversation

Samira stood near the refreshments table, rearranging samosas like they were a work of art, wearing a “Support Your Local Bookshop” T-shirt loud enough to be seen from space. Hassan lurked by the back wall, arms folded, pretending to be relaxed and failing. Her parents sat together in the second row, her mother’s scarf pinned extra neatly, her father holding his tasbih between thumb and forefinger like a grounding device.

Fatima waved from the side, surrounded by a cluster of girls from the mosque workshops, all in variations of hoodies, eyeliner and curiosity.

The shop owner – a tall man with round glasses and a jumper that looked like it had seen every book launch since 1998 – clapped his hands.

“Alright, everyone,” he said, voice carrying easily. “We’re about to start. If you’d like to grab a seat, now’s a good time. Phones on silent, hearts open.”

A soft ripple of laughter moved through the room.

Amina sat on a small folding chair at the front, one copy of the book on the table beside her, a glass of water within easy reach, a microphone she hoped she wouldn’t have to lean too close to.

Her stomach fluttered.

She’d done workshops. Talks. Panels. Court.

This felt different.

More personal, somehow.

Less about evidence.

More about narrative.

The bookshop owner introduced her with a short spiel about “powerful, important stories from our own city” and “the courage to turn trauma into change”.

Amina smiled politely, even as the word courage made her want to look behind her to see who he was really talking about.

Then it was her turn.

“Assalamu alaikum, hi,” she began, adjusting the mic. “Thank you all for coming. I know there were at least three other things you could have done on a Saturday afternoon that involved less emotional risk and more Netflix.”

A gentle chuckle.

She breathed.

“I wrote Into the Trees because I was tired of my story living only in police reports and my own chest,” she said. “Because I wanted a version of it that belonged to me. To my community. To girls who might one day be where I was, and to boys and men who might be where he was, and need another way to think about power.”

She opened the book, the pages already soft from being thumbed through during edits and late-night rethinks.

“I’m going to read you a small section,” she said. “Not the worst bit. We’ve heard enough worst bits on the news. This is from a chapter about the hill. About the day I decided to stop waiting for someone else to fix what he broke.”

She found the page, the words familiar and still faintly surreal.

Her voice shook a little on the first paragraph, then steadied.

*“The path wasn’t smooth. But it was mine.

Gravity still existed.

But it no longer felt like the only force in my life.”*

She read for maybe five minutes. Not long, but enough. When she finished, the shop was quiet in that attentive way that meant people weren’t just being polite.

“Thank you,” she said, closing the book. “Now I’ll take questions, as long as they’re not about how much money I’m making from this, because the answer is ‘not enough to quit my job’.”

That got a proper laugh.

The questions came.

Some expected.

“How did your family react when they found out you were writing about it publicly?”

“What was it like seeing him in court?”

“Did you ever want to drop the second case?”

Some less so.

A teenage boy with a shaky voice: “What would you say to guys my age so we don’t… become like that?”

She answered as best she could.

To the boy, she said, “Start by believing women when they tell you something was wrong. Ask for consent like it’s normal, not awkward. Learn to hear ‘no’ without making it about your ego. And challenge your mates when they tell stories that sound like the ones in my book, even if they dress them up as ‘banter’.”

A middle-aged woman in a floral scarf asked, “Did writing the book make you relive everything? Was it worth it?”

“It did,” Amina answered. “It brought things up I thought were done. It also put some of them down in a way they hadn’t been before. Was it worth it? Ask me on a day when my nightmares are quiet and I’ll say yes. On bad days, the answer is more complicated. But I know I don’t regret it.”

At one point, someone asked, “Where is he now?”

The question hung there.

She could have dodged.

She didn’t.

“He’s still inside,” she said calmly. “For now. One day, he won’t be. That’s how sentences work. My safety doesn’t come from him staying locked up forever. It comes from the web of people and practices and boundaries around me, and from Allah.”

Farah, her old ISVA, sat in the back, invisible to most, but when Amina’s eyes met hers, she saw the small nod that said, You answered that one well.

After the Q&A, there was the signing.

She hadn’t thought there’d be many copies to sign.

She was wrong.

The queue snaked between shelves.

Girls from the workshops clutched copies with sticky-note bookmarks.

Mums and aunties held them differently, fingers careful on the covers, like the book might bruise.

A young man in a tracksuit stood near the end, head down, book turned so the title didn’t show. When he reached the table, he cleared his throat.

“I’m, uh… I’m here with my sister,” he said, nodding vaguely toward a girl mid-queue. “She’s the one who wanted to come. But I… I read some of your posts online. About freeze responses. It… explained some stuff about my cousin. So… thanks.”

His cheeks flushed.

Amina smiled at him.

“Thank you for reading,” she said. “And for coming. That matters more than you think.”

He nodded quickly, took the signed book, and retreated like a startled deer.

Later, when most people had drifted away, a woman in her late fifties approached. She wore no scarf, her hair streaked with grey, her eyes watery but bright.

“I’m not from your community,” she said, accent more Yorkshire than Brummie. “But I heard about the book from a friend. I came because… well, because I’m from a different time. When we didn’t have words for things. When we thought if we weren’t dragged into an alley, it didn’t count. I wanted to say thank you. For giving old ghosts names.”

Amina swallowed.

“It’s never too late to name them,” she said gently.

The woman smiled, tears spilling over.

“No,” she agreed. “But it helps when someone younger starts the sentence.”

After everyone had gone, after her parents had kissed her cheeks and gone home with a signed copy “for the coffee table, so people see it and talk”, after Fatima had dragged the girls off for chips as a debrief, after Hassan had declared himself “emotionally drained but proud”, Amina stayed behind with the shop owner to help stack chairs.

“You know,” he said, balancing three metal chairs in one hand, “we host a lot of events. Crime writers, poets, politicians flogging their memoirs. This is the only one where the queue for the toilet was full of people crying and also buying extra copies ‘for a friend’.”

“I’ll take that as a good sign,” Amina said wryly.

“It is,” he said. “People needed this. You should be proud.”

She thought of all the people who had contributed to the book in unseen ways – Samira’s ruthless edits, Hassan’s insistence on clear tech explanations, DCI Khan’s quiet fact-checks to make sure nothing compromised anyone’s privacy.

“I am,” she said softly. “In a way that doesn’t feel like arrogance. Just… relief.”

He nodded, understanding.

As she left the shop, the sky had started to spit that fine Birmingham drizzle that didn’t look like much but somehow soaked everything.

She pulled up her hood and headed to the bus stop, book tucked into her bag, hands shoved deep into her coat pockets.

Her phone buzzed.

A message from an unknown number flashed on the screen.

She froze for a fraction of a second, instincts spiking.

Then she opened it.

Hi, Amina. It’s DCI Khan. Saw the event on the shop’s Instagram. Congratulations. I also thought you should know – Daniel Ward had his first parole hearing last month. They deferred a decision. Cited “work in progress” on insight and accountability. Whatever happens next, I wanted you to hear it from someone who actually cares about the impact on you, not the news or rumours.

Amina stared at the message.

Rain dotted the screen.

Work in progress.

It felt oddly apt.

She typed back.

Thank you for telling me. And for everything. Truly.

She slipped the phone back into her pocket.

The news didn’t undo the book launch. It didn’t cancel the queue of readers or the workshops or the fact that somewhere, right now, a girl was underlining a paragraph in her story and feeling less alone.

Parole hearings were part of the aftershocks.

They would come at intervals, like tremors.

She’d feel them.

But she also had anchors now.

That night, at home, she curled up on her sofa with a blanket and opened her own book.

People always asked her if she’d read it, cover to cover, as a finished product.

She hadn’t.

Bits, yes.

Whole chapters, many times in drafts.

But not the finished thing, in one go, like a reader.

Tonight, she didn’t plan to either.

She flipped to a random page near the end.

Her eyes landed on a passage about forgiveness.

“I don’t know if forgiveness, in the full, spiritual sense, will ever flower in my chest for the man who hurt me. I don’t rush it. Some things are between me and Allah, timed on a scale I don’t control. What I do know is this: I’m not required to wait for forgiveness to start living fully.”

She exhaled, a long, slow breath she hadn’t noticed she’d been holding.

The words felt like both past and present.

She closed the book gently and put it on the table.

Her phone buzzed again.

A voice note from Samira.

She pressed play.

“Okay,” Samira’s voice boomed, slightly distorted, “now that Miss Big-Time Author has had her fancy book launch and signed everyone’s copies, when are you going to write the sequel?”

Amina groaned, laughing.

“Sequel?” she muttered. “What, Into the Trees 2: The Trees Strike Back?”

The voice note continued.

“I’m serious,” Samira said. “Not about trees. About… other stories. Not just yours. You’ve opened a door, Ami. There are a thousand aunties and girls and quiet men with things they’ve never said. Someone needs to hold a microphone while they talk. Might as well be you. No pressure. Okay, a little pressure. Love you. I’m stealing another samosa from your mum’s stash as tax.”

The message ended with the rustle of foil and a satisfied “mmm”.

Amina shook her head fondly.

She didn’t know about sequels.

She did know the idea didn’t scare her as much as it once might have.

Her laptop sat on the coffee table, lid closed.

She looked at it.

At the book.

At the shredder in the corner, still half full of the last batch of “things that don’t need to live on paper anymore”.

At the Qur’an on her shelf.

At the small, framed card on the wall with the ayah she’d clung to during the worst months:

“Indeed, with hardship [will be] ease.”

Not after.

With.

Side by side.

She got up, fetched the Qur’an, and opened it at that ayah, tracing the words with her finger.

“Ya Allah,” she murmured, “You kept Your promise. The hardship didn’t vanish. But the ease arrived too. Sometimes late. Sometimes in weird packaging. But it came.”

Her phone buzzed one more time.

This time, it was a DM request on one of her anonymous social media accounts.

She almost ignored it.

Then she saw the preview.

Hi, I’m 18. I read your book. I think something happened to me like what happened to you. I’ve never told anyone. Can I… ask you something?”

Amina felt the familiar mix of sorrow and purpose.

She sat down at her desk, opened her laptop, and replied.

You can ask me anything. I might not have all the answers. But I believe you. Start wherever you can.

As she typed, the world outside carried on – buses, sirens, laughter, arguments, rain on windows.

The story she’d told had joined the noise now.

Not as the loudest sound.

Just as one more thread in a fabric that, slowly, stubbornly, was being rewoven.

Later, when she lay in bed, she thought briefly of Daniel again.

Of the letter she’d shredded.

Of the men he might be talking to inside and out, now that he had fewer excuses left.

She didn’t make dua for him specifically.

Not that night.

She made dua for something broader.

“Ya Allah,” she whispered into the darkness, “protect the vulnerable. Break the cycle. Make men see women as amanah, not conquest. Heal the ones like me. Guide the ones like him, if guidance is written for them. And if not… protect us from their harm.”

She turned onto her side, pulling the duvet up to her chin.

Sleep came, steady and unhurried.

In her dreams, there was a hill again.

But this time, she wasn’t walking towards the edge or away from it.

She was sitting halfway up, on the grass, under a tree, surrounded by other women and a few men, all holding notebooks, all talking.

The trees listened.

The wind carried their words down to the city, into bedrooms and buses and bar stools and prayer rooms.

When she woke, the dream faded, but the feeling didn’t.

The day ahead waited.

Work, maybe.

A workshop next week.

An email from a school asking if she could come speak.

A text from her mum about frozen parathas on sale.

A life.

Not perfect.

Not trauma-free.

But hers.

She got up, made wudu, laid out her prayer mat, and smiled to herself as she stood.

The story was still being written.

But for the first time in a long time, the headline that floated in her mind wasn’t about the worst thing that had happened to her, or the man who’d done it.

It was simple.

Quiet.

Almost mundane.

Amina Rahman woke up, prayed, and carried on.

Sometimes, in a world that didn’t always have space for women like her, that was the most radical chapter of all.

Chapter 13 – Beyond The Trees

The train slid out of Birmingham New Street with a low, familiar shudder, carrying Amina south.

She watched the city recede through the scratched window – graffiti, warehouses, snatches of back gardens – until the view flattened into fields and pylons and sheep that looked like misplaced clouds.

It had been almost seven years since the verdict.

Ten since Broad Street.

A lifetime and also… not that long at all.

On the table in front of her sat a conference lanyard, her name printed in bold under the words:

National Summit on Faith, Justice and Gender-Based Violence

Underneath, in smaller font:

Speaker: Amina Rahman – Author, Advocate, NHS Healthcare Assistant

She’d refused the word “expert.” That still made her flinch. It implied an end-point, a finished thing. She was very much not finished.

Her phone buzzed.

Family group chat.

Her mum had sent a photo: a big pot of pilau, steam fogging the camera lens. Caption: “For when you come back. I know conferences don’t feed you properly.”

Her dad had replied with three thumbs-up emojis and a zoomed-in picture of the same pot, as if to confirm its reality.

Samira had added: “I am also available to provide post-conference debrief and steal at least two plates of that.”

Amina smiled, thumbs moving.

I’ll be back tomorrow in time for Zuhr inshallah. Don’t let Samira eat everything before I get home.

Another ping from a different chat – a group she’d made with three other women she’d met through the work, all survivors, all at different stages of their own journeys.

You on the train?

That was from Leila, a solicitor from London who’d once said, “I spend my days arguing with barristers about consent and my nights trying to convince myself I’m allowed to rest.”

Yep, Amina replied. On my way. Got my slides, my masala tea, my nerves.

A string of supportive emojis came back – hearts, flexed arms, a tree.

The tree emoji had become their quiet symbol. A little nod to her book. To all the times they’d gone “into the trees” metaphorically, and come back with something – a strategy, a phrase, a boundary.

She put her phone aside and glanced at her notebook.

The first page of her talk outline was covered in her handwriting. Messy, but legible.

Opening

• say my name, where I’m from
• name what room we’re in: “faith & GBV” – not an easy combo
• mention my mum’s dua: “Make dua on the hill, your duas go quicker there”

Core points

• consent in faith language – amanah, ihsan, trust
• how silence protects perpetrators more than it protects “honour”
• what “community response” should look like (not “did you tell your husband to be patient?” type nonsense)

Closing

• “I’m not here because I did everything right, but because I refused to stay disappeared”
• short dua

She’d given versions of this talk before.

At mosques.

At schools.

At a women’s centre where the heating barely worked and the biscuits were always slightly stale but the listening was fierce and undistracted.

This conference was… bigger.

A hotel ballroom somewhere near Euston. Name badges. Panels. Plenary sessions with titles like “Reimagining Accountability in Faith Communities” and “Deconstructing Shame”.

A younger Amina would have rolled her eyes at the jargon.

This Amina still rolled her eyes a bit, but she’d learned to translate.

She knew what they were actually trying to talk about: how to stop pretending that abuse only lived in other people’s houses, other people’s cultures, other people’s mosques and churches and temples.

“Ticket?” the conductor asked, gently knocking at the table.

She handed it over, mind already half in London, half somewhere else.

The ballroom was colder than she’d expected.

Conference spaces always were. Air conditioning for invisible men in suits, even when the room was mostly women in cardigans and hijabs and sensible shoes.

On stage, there were four chairs and a small table with water bottles. A large screen behind them displayed the session title:

“Faith, Power and Speaking the Unspeakable”

Leila sat on the far left, legs crossed, blazer sharp. Next to her, a priest in a collar, a social worker with locs piled in a headwrap. Amina’s seat was next to the small table, nearest the lectern.

As the session chair introduced them, Amina scanned the room.

Faces.

So many faces.

Some in clerical collars or religious dress. Some in smart blouses and blazers. A handful of young people, pens poised as if they’d miss something crucial if they blinked.

Every time she did this, she wondered: Who in here has their own hill? Their own Broad Street? Their own letter they shredded?

Probably more than anyone wanted to admit.

The chair nodded at her.

“Amina, would you like to start by telling us a bit about your journey?”

She adjusted the mic, feeling the familiar flutter in her chest.

“Assalamu alaikum, peace be with you all,” she began. “My name is Amina. I’m from Birmingham – Sparkhill, specifically, which any Brummie in the room knows tells you a lot in one word.”

A small ripple of recognition-laughter.

“I’m here as a British Bangladeshi Muslim woman,” she continued. “As a healthcare assistant, as a daughter, as someone who once loved Broad Street at night and now prefers it at midday. And as a survivor of sexual violence who went through the criminal justice system. Twice.”

She saw a few heads snap up slightly at the “twice.”

“The first time,” she said, “the CPS told me there was ‘insufficient evidence’. The second time, they charged. There was a trial. A conviction. A sentence. If you’ve read the stats, you know how rare that is.”

She let that hang for a second.

“I’m going to say something that sometimes surprises people in rooms like this,” she went on. “Getting a conviction did not cure my trauma. It didn’t rewind the night. It didn’t erase the panic attacks. It did, however, plant something important in me: a sense that my ‘no’ wasn’t just a private scream. It was heard, publicly, by twelve strangers and entered into a record that wasn’t written by men in suits alone.”

She spoke about the hill without giving every detail. The safe phrase. The recorder. The choice not to push. The choice to record instead.

She spoke about the mosques and mothers and young men who’d turned up to her workshops.

“Young boys have asked me,” she said, “in shaky voices, ‘What if I mess up?’ Not in a ‘I might be falsely accused’ way – though that fear is definitely there in the culture – but in an, ‘I don’t want to hurt someone and only realise later’ way. That tells me something is shifting. Slowly. Painfully. But shifting.”

She talked about faith.

“How many of us,” she asked, “were raised on khutbahs about zina and hayaa and ‘protecting your honour’… but never heard a khutbah about what consent actually looks like in a marriage? About what it means when the Prophet ﷺ said, ‘None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself’? That has to apply in bedrooms as well as boardrooms.”

She saw a few older men in the audience shift, uncomfortable.

Good, she thought.

“Faith, for me,” she said, “was both the thing I thought I’d lost and the thing that ultimately held me together. Religion didn’t assault me. A man did. A system failed me. Religion didn’t. Holding that distinction saved my iman.”

She finished with a story.

Not Broad Street.

Not the hill.

A small one.

“A few months ago,” she said, “an aunty came up to me after a workshop. In full salwar kameez, dupatta over her head, hands hennaed like she’d come straight from a wedding. She said, ‘We used to hide these things. We thought if we didn’t speak, they’d go away. They didn’t. Our silence just protected the wrong people. Don’t let your generation repeat our mistake.’”

She paused.

“That’s why I’m here,” she concluded. “Not because I enjoy reliving my worst night in rooms like this, but because I have an opportunity my mum’s generation didn’t have. To name things. To build different reflexes in our communities. To make it normal to say ‘he hurt me’ in the same breath as we say ‘Allah is Just’ without feeling like a hypocrite.”

Applause followed. Not polite. Solid.

She sat back down, heart still racing but in that strange way that now felt almost… functional. Like a muscle remembering a workout.

Leila spoke next, weaving case law and compassion together. The priest talked about confession and complicity in his church. The social worker spoke about burnout and boundaries.

During the Q&A, a young woman in a niqab raised her hand.

“I want to ask,” she said, voice steady despite the fabric over her face, “how you deal with… people in the community who say you’re making us ‘look bad’ by talking about this publicly. That you’re washing our dirty laundry in front of non-Muslims.”

A murmur of recognition rippled through the crowd.

Amina took the mic.

“I tell them,” she said, “that the laundry is already visible. Survivors are already living with stains they didn’t choose. The only thing that makes us look bad is pretending we don’t care about cleaning it. Silence doesn’t protect us from Islamophobia. It just protects abusers from accountability.”

The woman nodded, eyes bright.

“Thank you,” she said.

On the train back to Birmingham that evening, the carriage was half-empty.

Commuters scrolled. A kid in a school blazer half-asleep against the window. A woman in a business suit eating crisps with the kind of exhaustion that suggested she’d skipped lunch.

Amina sat by the window, forehead resting lightly against the cool glass.

The conference had been draining and energising at once.

She’d had difficult conversations in the corridors, sipped too-strong coffee, smiled at women who whispered, “I read your book,” with that look survivors have when they recognise a fellow traveller.

She’d also had moments of quiet joy.

At lunch, a group of young men in kufis had approached her table, plates in hand.

“Um, sister,” one of them had said, “we just wanted to say… thank you. We came because our imam told us we needed to listen more. He was right. We didn’t realise how much we didn’t know.”

Their awkward earnestness had made her want to hug the whole group. She’d settled for saying, “Thank you for coming. Start with your own circle. Your mates. It matters.”

Now, as fields rolled past, she thought of the long arc of it all.

Broad Street.

The hill.

The trial.

The letter.

The shredder.

The book.

The conference.

And all the ordinary days in between – work, laundry, dinners, Eid, bad TV, good conversations.

Her phone buzzed.

A notification from a news app.

“Government Announces Review of Rape Prosecution Guidelines Following Survivor-Led Campaigns”

She clicked it, skimmed.

Some of the names quoted were familiar. Women she’d sat on panels with. Men who’d quietly changed their khutbah content. Campaign groups she’d lent her story to anonymously.

She wasn’t mentioned.

That sat right.

Her ego, once attached to being seen as the face of a story, had learned to be content with being one of many voices in a choir. Sometimes singing lead. Sometimes singing harmony. Sometimes just humming in the back.

Another buzz.

A WhatsApp message from an unknown number with a Birmingham area code.

Salaam, Amina. I got your number from Sister Fatima. I’m an imam at a small mosque in Smethwick. I’d like to invite you to speak to our elders’ circle. We have many uncles who think “rape” is only something that happens with knives in alleyways. I think they need to hear otherwise. I will protect you from any uncle drama, inshallah. Let me know if you’re willing.

She smiled, imagining “uncle drama” as its own storm system.

Wa alaikum assalam, Imam. Thank you for reaching out. Yes, I’m willing. Let’s talk dates. And I’ll bring biscuits as emotional incentives.

The train dipped into a tunnel, screen reception flickering.

In the brief darkness, she caught her reflection in the window.

Same eyes.

Same face.

New lines around her mouth from laughing and frowning.

A scarf pinned neatly. A small gold leaf stud in one ear – a gift from her mum when the book came out. “For all the leaves on all the trees,” she’d said, half-joking, half-profound.

Amina lifted a hand and touched it lightly.

She thought of Daniel, not with the raw, burning anger of earlier years, nor with simple pity.

With a kind of cautious distance.

She knew he’d had his second parole hearing.

Knew, from DCI Khan’s brief message, that it had been granted this time.

He was out.

Somewhere.

There’d been no dramatic run-ins. No bumping into him in town. No letters.

She’d set clear boundaries with the victim liaison officers: no contact, no updates beyond “he is out and under these conditions,” no invitations to participate in restorative meetings.

She didn’t need that.

What she needed, she’d already taken and built with.

His shadow was part of her story.

But it was no longer the main frame.

As the train emerged from the tunnel, the lights of Birmingham glowed ahead.

She felt a familiar sensation in her chest.

Not fear.

Not entirely ease, either.

A grounded something in between.

The train pulled into New Street.

She stood, slung her bag over her shoulder, stepped onto the platform.

The station smelled like coffee, metal, and humanity.

Her phone pinged again as she climbed the stairs.

From her mum.

“Where are you? Pilau getting cold.”

From Samira.

“I told the kids their famous activist Khala is coming. They asked if that means you’re on TikTok. I said yes. Don’t ruin this for me.”

From a number saved as Young Hoodie Girl (Now Uni):

“Just wanted to tell you… I reported. It was hard. But I remembered your line about my ‘no’ not being a private scream. They believed me enough to investigate. Whatever happens, thank you.”

Amina stopped for a second in the flow of people, letting the message sink in.

One girl.

One more voice no longer entirely alone.

She typed back.

I’m proud of you. Whatever they do, you did the brave part. Make sure you’ve got support around you. Remember to eat. And breathe. And laugh sometimes, even in the middle of it. That’s allowed.”

She hit send, then slipped the phone away.

Outside the station, the city noise wrapped around her – buses, street vendors, a busker playing something vaguely recognisable on a trumpet.

She tightened her coat, adjusted her scarf, and headed for the bus stop that would take her back to Sparkhill.

Back to pilau.

Back to “Did they listen properly?” from her dad and “Did you drink enough water?” from her mum.

Back to maybe scribbling a few more pages tonight before sleep.

As she waited for the bus, a gust of wind sent a swirl of leaves across the pavement, rust-coloured and brittle.

She watched them dance for a moment.

Not a metaphor.

Just leaves.

But if she wanted, she could read meaning into them. She could see the way they were rooted once and then weren’t and still found a way to move gracefully as they fell.

When the bus arrived, she stepped on, tapped her card, took a seat upstairs at the front like she always had as a teenager, pretending she was on top of the world.

Maybe, in a small way, she was.

Not because everything was safe now.

It wasn’t.

Not because harm wouldn’t find people she loved.

It might.

But because she’d carved out a space in this messy, unjust world where her voice carried.

Where her faith held.

Where her trauma was not the only interesting thing about her.

She pulled her notebook out of her bag, flipped to a clean page.

At the top, she wrote:

New project ideas – not trauma-only.

Underneath:

• Short stories about Bangladeshi aunties with secret talents
• Funny essays on “uncle drama” (anonymous, to avoid disownment)
• A children’s book about consent as “kindness + listening”
• A cookbook of survivor recipes – comfort food that got us through

She smiled as she wrote.

The bus rolled through the city, past places that held ghosts and memories and new possibilities.

Lickey Hills was just a patch of green on the horizon now, half-forgotten to most people on this route.

To her, it would always be more than that.

But it was no longer a looming monument.

Just one landmark among many on a map that kept expanding.

She closed the notebook, watching her reflection blur and sharpen in the window as streetlights passed.

Beyond the trees, beyond the trial, beyond the book, beyond the conferences and the messages and the letters, there was this:

A woman on a bus going home.

Hungry.

Tired.

Loved.

Still healing.

Still walking.

Still, quietly, stubbornly, refusing to disappear.

Chapter 14 – Brave Enough For Joy

The retreat brochure had promised “woodland tranquillity” and “creative renewal.”

It had not mentioned the smell of damp socks.

Amina stood in the doorway of the old converted manor house in Shropshire, a weekend bag slung over her shoulder, watching a group of people negotiate whose suitcase got which step in the narrow hallway.

Outside, the February air was sharp and clean. The ground glittered with a thin dusting of frost. Inside, radiators clanked half-heartedly, and someone’s wet trainers steamed gently near a shoe rack.

“Name?” a woman with bright red glasses and an even brighter scarf asked from behind a fold-out table stacked with lanyards.

“Amina Rahman,” she replied, pushing her hood back.

The woman checked a list, then smiled.

“Ah, yes. Our local celebrity,” she said. “Book on consent, right? Into the Trees? My daughter devoured it in one sitting. She’s here somewhere, pretending to be too cool to be impressed.”

Amina felt her cheeks heat.

“Just Amina is fine,” she said. “And this weekend I’m here as ‘writer who doesn’t know what to do with a second book’, not as ‘whatever the internet says I am’.”

The woman laughed and handed her a lanyard.

“Welcome, ‘second book’,” she said. “You’re in Room 4B. Up the stairs, turn left, last door. We’re starting with a group circle in twenty minutes. Tea is in permanent production in the dining room.”

Amina thanked her and made her way up the creaky stairs, hand gliding along the cool wooden banister.

In her room, she threw her bag onto the narrow bed and went to the window.

The view outside looked like something from a postcard: trees, bare but beautiful; a small pond edged with reeds; fields stretching out beyond, dotted with cows that looked mildly offended by the cold.

Trees.

Always trees.

She stared at them for a moment, feeling that old, familiar pull in her chest. Not the dizzy, dangerous pull of the ridge at Lickey Hills now – more like a thread connecting past and present.

“I see you,” she murmured under her breath. “But you’re not the point of this weekend.”

On the desk by the window, she placed three things carefully in a row.

Her notebook. A battered, beloved object at this point, stuffed with loose sheets and sticky notes.

A pen with the words “Write Anyway” printed along its side – a gift from Samira.

And a slim folder containing pages of a new project: a novel that, for the first time, wasn’t primarily about trauma.

At least, not in the obvious way.

It was about three generations of Bangladeshi women running a corner shop in Birmingham and secretly writing letters to each other in a notebook hidden behind the rice sacks.

There was romance.

And aunties.

And a subplot about a fox that kept stealing samosas from the back yard.

“You’re really doing this,” she told herself. “You’re allowed.”

The opening circle took place in a large room with mismatched chairs and a fireplace that looked like it wanted to be comforting but had been outgunned by the radiator.

Twelve people sat in a rough circle.

Amina clocked them quickly in the way she’d learned to do – not to judge, just to orient herself.

A woman in her sixties with silver hair cut into an elegant bob and a notebook that screamed “has had a book deal since the 90s.”

A man in his twenties with a moustache trying to be ironic and failing, hoodie reading “Write Or Die”.

A middle-aged guy with tattoos on his knuckles, scribbling in a pad with the focus of someone who’d done prison time and discovered metaphors inside.

Two younger women who looked like they’d come straight from a university creative writing seminar – nose rings, oversized jumpers, eyes wide and hungry.

And, in the corner, a girl in a black hoodie with familiar, guarded eyes.

Hoodie Girl. Or, well, one of many.

This one noticed Amina looking and smiled, small but real.

“I’m Tasha,” the retreat facilitator said, perching on the arm of a chair. “Pronouns she/her. I’ll be leading the workshops this weekend. Let’s introduce ourselves. Name, what you write, and what you’re hoping for from these few days. You can be honest. ‘I’m hoping for a miracle and a six-figure deal’ is acceptable.”

Polite laughter.

Introductions went around the circle.

“Poetry about grief and birds.”

“Fantasy novels with too many maps.”

“Memoir about my time as a street preacher.”

“A thriller about a woman who fakes her own death and moves to Dundee.”

When it was her turn, Amina cleared her throat.

“I’m Amina,” she said. “I’m from Birmingham. I wrote a non-fiction book about consent and faith and… not disappearing. Now I’m trying to write a novel about Bangladeshi aunties and a corner shop.”

A few heads turned, interested.

“Oh, I’ve seen your book on my friend’s Instagram,” one of the uni-age women blurted. “I mean—” She flushed. “Sorry. That sounded like I only know you from the internet.”

“It’s okay,” Amina said gently. “Most people do. The auntie novel is my attempt at… widening my CV.”

“And what are you hoping for?” Tasha asked.

Amina thought for a moment.

“Permission,” she said finally. “From myself, mainly. To write about joy and small dramas and foxes stealing samosas without feeling like I’m betraying the bigger story I’ve already told.”

The room went very quiet for a second.

Then Tasha nodded.

“Good,” she said simply. “We can work with that.”

Workshops filled the next two days.

Morning sessions on character and structure. Afternoon sessions on setting and dialogue. Evening free writes by the fire, people slumped in armchairs with mugs of tea, scribbling, pausing, staring into space like their brains were buffering.

In one exercise, Tasha asked them to write a scene that contained no obvious conflict.

“Just people existing,” she said. “Cooking. Talking about nothing. Sitting. And yet, something under the surface is happening. Let your characters be soft. The world is hard enough.”

Amina wrote a scene of three aunties sitting at a kitchen table peeling potatoes, gossiping about a wedding. The “something under the surface” was a secret divorce they all knew about but pretended not to.

It felt… good.

Light.

Not shallow.

Afterwards, Tasha came around and glanced at everyone’s work, offering brief comments.

When she reached Amina, she read a few lines, then tapped the page.

“You’re funny,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve marketed yourself as funny enough.”

Amina blinked.

“I write about rape law and auntie gossip,” she said. “Funny feels… dangerous.”

“So does vulnerability,” Tasha replied. “And yet, here you are. Let this be part of the story too. Survivors are allowed to be hilarious.”

Later, in a one-to-one session, they talked more deeply.

“Be honest,” Tasha said, leaning back in her chair. “Is there a part of you that thinks your legitimacy as a writer rests on your pain?”

Amina stared at a knot in the wooden floor.

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes. The world listened when I talked about the worst thing that happened to me. I’m… scared it’ll get bored if I talk about aunties and corner shops instead.”

Tasha tilted her head.

“The world will always line up more quickly for stories of blood than for stories of biryani,” she said. “That’s not your problem to fix. Your job is to tell the truth of your characters’ lives. Sometimes that truth is horrific. Sometimes it’s just… someone trying to hide how much chilli they put in the curry from their mother-in-law.”

They both laughed.

“Also,” Tasha added, softer now, “writing joy after trauma isn’t betrayal. It’s reclamation. It says, ‘You tried to make my life one note. I’m making it a whole song.’”

Amina let that sink in.

A whole song.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “I’ll try.”

In the evenings, after workshops, people gathered in the common room.

They read bits of their work aloud.

Argued about adverbs.

Made tea.

In one pocket of the room, the tattooed man with the knuckle art and the hoodie girl with the guarded eyes sat together, heads bent over a page.

Amina was too far to hear, but she recognised the intensity.

The way survivors sometimes found each other without needing to say the word.

On the second night, the girl in the hoodie approached her.

“Hi,” she said, hands stuffed deep into her pockets. “I’m Sana. I… your book… it…”

She trailed off, eyes shining.

Amina smiled, not the tight, professional smile she sometimes wore at events, but a softer one.

“It helped?” she offered.

Sana nodded vigorously.

“I got out,” she said. “Of… a situation. The workshops you do? My mosque did one. I saw myself in your story and… yeah. I left. Now I’m… trying to write something that isn’t just about him.”

Amina’s chest ached in that familiar way.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said gently. “And that you’re writing. Even if the first draft is angry, that’s okay. You can write towards the softer stuff later. Or not. Both are allowed.”

Sana hesitated.

“Do you ever feel… guilty?” she asked. “For being happy? Like… some days I have jokes and I’m like, ‘Should I be allowed?’”

Amina laughed, startled by the resonance.

“Yes,” she said. “All the time. I still sometimes feel like there’s a grief tax on my joy. Like I owe the universe a certain amount of visible suffering. I’m slowly learning that’s not how Allah works.”

Sana exhaled, shoulders dropping a fraction.

“Cool,” she said. “Okay. I’ll… try not to pay the grief tax today.”

They shared a grin.

On the last morning, Tasha gathered them in the circle again.

“Final exercise,” she said. “A quick one. Ten minutes. I want you to write a letter from your future self – ten years from now – to your current self. No rules about content. Just… what do they want you to know?”

People shifted.

Some rolled their eyes.

Some already started scribbling.

Amina stared at the blank page for a moment.

Then her pen moved.

Salaam, Amina,

I’m writing this from a kitchen table that is slightly sticky because one of your future kids has no respect for boundaries when it comes to jam. Yes, I said kids. Don’t panic. You’re okay. You didn’t break them with your trauma. They’re loud and annoying and beautiful.

Her hand stuttered at that.

Kids.

She hadn’t written much, publicly, about her decision to open herself up to love again.

To proposal meetings with men who sometimes knew her story and sometimes didn’t. To one who’d quoted her book in the first conversation and made her want to hide under a table. To another who’d said, “I’m not intimidated by your past,” in a way that proved he absolutely was.

She’d met Yusuf two years ago at a talk she gave at a community centre in Handsworth.

He’d been standing near the back, leaning against the wall, listening with that quiet focus she’d learned to recognise.

He was thirty-eight, a youth worker, with laugh lines around his eyes and a tendency to over-season everything he cooked.

He’d asked her out for coffee through a mutual friend.

“Nothing weird,” he’d said. “Just… I like what you’re doing. I’d like to know who you are when you’re not on a microphone.”

She’d been wary.

She’d said yes.

Now, two years later, they were engaged.

Wedding plans were slow, deliberate. Therapy was built into their pre-marriage process, not as a fix, but as a foundation.

In the letter, the future version of her kept writing.

You’re still doing talks sometimes. You’re also writing weird little stories about foxes and aunties and space-travelling Bengalis. Some people love them. Some people wish you’d stay in the “serious survivor lane.” You politely ignore the second group.

Your parents are older. Your mum finally let you teach her how to use emojis properly. Your dad cries at random YouTube videos about daughters getting married. You should call them more, by the way. Trust me on this.

You still have bad days. The hill still shows up in your dreams sometimes. He shows up too, but less often, and when he does, he’s foggy around the edges. Like the part of your brain that used to draw him in high definition has moved on to more interesting projects.

You haven’t “forgiven” him in some grand, cinematic way. You have, however, stopped checking prison news or parole policies. One day you realise you haven’t thought about where he lives now for months. It feels… like space clearing in a crowded room.

Mostly, I want you to know this: you were right to chase joy. It didn’t erase the work. It didn’t betray the other girls. It gave them permission. Every time you laugh loudly in a room where people know what you’ve been through, it writes a small, rebellious footnote next to your trauma: “She lived.”

Amina swallowed, blinking away unexpected tears.

The room around her was quiet except for the scratch of pens.

She kept going, faster now.

So write the aunties. Write the foxes. Write the love story where the tension isn’t “will he hurt her?” but “will they learn to share duvet space?” You’ve done your time in the dark chapters. You’re allowed to write light without auditioning for it through pain every time.

“Okay,” Tasha said gently. “Pens down.”

Amina put her pen down reluctantly.

“Anyone feel like sharing?” Tasha asked.

A few people did.

Letters about bestseller lists. About quietly happy lives with allotments. About being sober for a decade. About publishing nothing but still writing, and that being enough.

Sana read hers last.

Her future self wrote from a tiny flat with too many plants and no men who made her shrink.

She finished, cheeks flushed.

The group clapped softly.

“Thank you,” Tasha said. “Remember: these letters aren’t prophecies. They’re possibilities. They remind us that our current situation is not the end of the story.”

For Amina, the words echoed in a familiar, deeper place.

Not the end of the story.

Never had been.

That afternoon, as people packed and swapped social media handles and promises to share drafts, Amina stood outside under a tree, breathing in the cold air.

The branches above her were bare, the sky the kind of pale grey that made everything look like it had been washed too many times.

Her phone buzzed.

A photo from her mum: the living room, decorated with a modest but earnest string of fairy lights.

Caption: “For when you bring that man to visit properly again. House must look nice.”

Another message, moments later, from Yusuf.

How’s tree camp? Did they make you hug any?

She smiled.

No hugging. Just writing. And soup. And one intense girl called Sana who might be running the world in ten years.

So, competition, he replied. Good. You like a challenge.

How’s your weekend?

Youth drop-in. Three fifteen-year-old boys asked me what “consent” actually means in marriage. You know you’re a bad influence, right?

She laughed out loud.

The best kind. Tell them it means listening, kindness, and never using hadith as a weapon.

Already did. Teacher’s pet.

She leaned back against the tree trunk, feeling the rough bark through her coat.

“Ya Allah,” she whispered, almost without meaning to. “You really did bring ease with the hardship.”

Not after.

With.

Side by side.

Inside the house, Tasha called out that a group photo was happening.

Amina walked back towards the noise.

Towards the camera.

Towards a picture that would show her not as a “victim” or “complainant” or even as “the woman who wrote that book about rape,” but as one writer among many, in a ridiculous borrowed jumper, smiling in a group of people who loved stories.

Later, much later, years down the line, that photo would sit in a frame on a shelf in a house that smelled of pilau and baby shampoo and printer ink.

A curious child would point at it and say, “Mum, why is your hair different there?”

And she would answer, “Because that was the weekend I decided to be brave enough for joy as well as survival.”

For now, back in the chill of a Shropshire afternoon, she just stepped into the frame.

The shutter clicked.

An ordinary sound.

Another small, defiant chapter added to a life that refused to be summarised by its worst night.

Beyond the trees, beyond the echoes, beyond even the second book, there would be more.

Not all of it tidy.

Not all of it noble.

Just human.

Messy.

Sacred, in its own, quietly stubborn way.

---

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This story, published on mujiburrahman.com is a purely fictional work. All characters, places, communities, and events described are products of imagination or used in a fictional context. Any resemblance to actual individuals or real-world events is entirely coincidental. The purpose of this content is storytelling and entertainment only and should not be taken as factual or representative of any real person or community.

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