STARS OVER KABUL

The lid is bedecked with hundreds of stars, large and small, overlapping as if fallen from a careless sky. Grace opens the box and touches the jigsaw pieces inside. This is her fourth puzzle, the largest, the one she has put off while mastering the art of joining those tricky pieces with three other pictures. In the past 93 days she has created the original World Trade Center, the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower, one hour at a time, from 30,000 unpromising pieces; in only a week she must now rebuild the sky.

Holding a piece of gold, she imagines Brent in the gloss and strokes where her husband’s spiky chin would be.

The day he left, he leaned against the fridge, in T-shirt and jeans as though Spain – not Afghanistan – beckoned, gave her the jigsaw boxes and said, ‘I’ll be home before you complete them, it’s only a six-month tour remember.’ Requiting his optimism, Grace kissed Brent’s smooth cheek, thinking how soon it would chafe. ‘Don’t be sure,’ she said. ‘I’m a talented girl.’

When he put his head on her shoulder, the calendar fell off the fridge with a disruptive rustle, landing open on a snowy January scene. They married on New Year’s Day 2005; confetti colourful against white landscape. Now it was June 2011. She was used to losing him to the Army. ‘Hurry home,’ she whispered. And then Brent was gone. Alone, Grace ripped cellophane from the World Trade Center puzzle box, scattering windows and steel and sky on to the coffee table. It had collapsed 10 years ago now, but she still imagined in the pattering pieces, cries of ‘ help me’. She had no clue where to begin. The answer came after a glass of wine. When faced with such chaos, it made sense to build from the edge. Then, once she had a border, the pieces stayed safely inside, and Grace found she could sleep and the sadness was contained.

Brent phoned as she constructed the gleaming expanse of tower one.

‘ What are the buildings like in Kabul?’ she asked, a miniature glass door between finger and thumb.

‘ Wouldn’t make much of a postcard.’ The words were sombre, reluctant, then gone. Grace whispered, ‘I miss you’ across the ocean and clicked his silences together to see what they formed.

Identical pieces are the hardest to find a partner for. Soon jigsaws filled the lounge, like paintings in various stages of completion. Joining the pieces made time pass faster, one day snapping to the next until it formed a month. Grace learned with each box that you can’t build a picture without studying every segment. She crossed off the calendar days in red and coupled the pieces until Brent’s homecoming.

‘I wish I could see you in your combats,’ she said during their October exchange. When Brent paused and asked what she was wearing, Grace felt his smile. Eyeing the threadbare slippers and jogging bottoms that was her evening attire – the uniform she wore to conquer world architecture – she lied.

The Taj Mahal puzzle began as 10,000 insignificant parts and grew from the infamous path where Princess Diana sat without her husband, into white marble domes and the main gate (which the box said imitated a bride’s veil on her wedding night) and a cloudless sky. It spread slowly across the dining table, swallowing teak expanse in its domination of the room. Grace picked up her wine glass and took it into the kitchen, leaving a circle of moisture, like a watery Moon.

‘ When the Moon’s full here, is it full there too?’ she asked in November. ‘Of course, silly.’ When Brent laughed, unsociable gunfire punctuated his better mood with exclamation marks. ‘It’s the same sky here as there. One sky.’ She said the stars must be the same then and when he didn’t respond, imagined him nodding. After 10 pieces of silence, he asked how the

She was used to losing him to the Army. ‘Hurry home,’ she whispered

puzzles were coming along. ‘I finished the Taj Mahal,’ she said. ‘Next the Eiffel Tower, and then the stars.’

Grace discovered halfway into the Eiffel Tower that it’s best also to build by shade, and easier if those shades vary. Pieces of similar colour, like metal, are tiresome and impossible to mate without great patience. When she clicked in the last piece, completing a string of lights that made the French monument resemble an iron Christmas tree, it came to her.

‘Do you remember Paris?’ she asked in December, the fireplace bare, her wine glass empty. ‘I do,’ he said softly. Brent promised that one day he’d take her again to a hotel, where the staff called her Mademoiselle and left chocolate on the pillow. Grace laughed down the telephone because she’d clapped her hands when she saw that treat at bedtime. She’d opened the window wide to reveal the western edge of the Eiffel Tower, and the lights had winked like they were laughing too. ‘Let’s go in spring,’ she whispered.

Now the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and the World Trade Center dominate the dining table. Only the stars are in bits, being the toughest to recreate, and why Grace has left them until last. Tonight, her fingers touch one segment and the next and the next, but nothing distinguishes them, no variation in gold gives a clue as to their place in the final puzzle. On BBC News At Ten, buildings fall in Kabul, soldiers run, women cry and children scream and Grace builds her sky even faster.

She has space left in the centre of the puzzle for one more star. Brent should be home tomorrow. But there have been no phone calls for five weeks. The Christmas tree died long ago; the fireplace is still cold. Grace has no heart for the wine that warmed her heart as she waited. Sixteen pieces that form the last star lie on the coffee table, separated from one another by Grace’s choosing. She turns off the lamp and goes to bed.

In the morning the light is already there. Sun touches the bed where Brent sits, holding the remaining gold pieces in cupped hands.

His smile is surrounded by a beard, his eyes by weariness. ‘ You said you’d be finished when I got home,’ he says, touching her hair.

‘It’s only one star,’ says Grace. ‘ Why don’t you put it in the sky?’