DANIEL SAT ON the damp earth between two buttress roots of the massive fig tree. They rose up beside him like the walls of a confessional, obscuring parts of him, but not all. He imagined these stanchions closing around him in a wooden embrace – if he stayed there long enough they’d seal him inside the tree’s trunk like an embryo, one never destined to grow or even to be born.

And yet this tree had already birthed him once, sent a new version of a boy forth into the world, a version with no mother to show him the way. Sixteen years later and he was still looking for direction, still searching for a life not controlled by the crime that had taken his mother from him.