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“I notice everything about you.”

I closed my fingers around the little lioness. It was warm from his hands. “Did the Armenian help?”

“He found the jeweller. I chose the pose.” He paused. “She is looking at the horizon. She is not afraid.”

“It’s perfect,” I whispered.

He hesitated. I felt his chest rise and fall beneath my head. Then he said, “You told me once that my name suits me.”

I held still.

“Tau means lion.”

For a moment I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the gold lioness in my palm, and then at him. A laugh burst out of me, and then a sob, and I pressed both hands to my face.

“Of course it does,” I said. “Of course it does.”

He waited, patient. When I could speak again, I touched his cheek. “I wore a lioness on a chain, and I never knew it was your name.”

“You told me about it on the road,” he said softly. “The chain. Your sisters. I wanted you to have her back.”

My heart turned over. “And the rest? Where are you really from?”

His eyes went to the sea. I watched him decide.

“I was born in the north of South Africa,” he said. “In a province of mines and farms. A neighbour took me across the border when I was small. Botswana is where I grew up. South Africa is where my family is buried.”

“Your family—”

“There is no one left.” His voice was flat, careful, a door held closed. “My grandfather died in the mines. My parents did not survive the years before the change. My sister was the last. After her, there was no one.”

The words dropped into me like weights.

“Only you know, Zuri. I never speak of my past.”

He closed it again, but I thought of every time he had gone still. The question about siblings, and the silence that had slammed down so fast I felt the draught. The way he had looked away when I said Kenya. The bread he had named as his favourite food, and the long pause before it.

I thought of Auntie and Uncle and all my cousins, the loud, loving crowd, the aunties who commented on everything, the group chat that never slept, my parents stretching every shilling to keep me in school.

Everyone I had ever had was still there. And he had no one at all.

Tau carried wounds I would never have survived. Now I understood the yard. The roar. Why he had run toward the screaming and not away.

Guilt rose in my throat, sharp and ugly. I wanted to say something. Anything. I was sorry. I understood. I wanted to share them, give him a cousin, a mother, a seat at the table. But every word I found was too small.

So I said nothing.

I laid my head on his chest and held on. The tears came quietly, slipping over my cheeks and into his shirt, soaking us both. His heart beat steady beneath my ear.

Tau did not tell me not to cry. He did not tell me it was fine. He simply rubbed my back in slow circles, and patted it gently, over and over, as if he had never learned any other way to say it.

The ship rolled softly beneath us. The moon followed us across the water. And for a long time, we stayed exactly like that.

Epilogue

Tau

Ten Months and Sixteen Days Later