“Tell me what you saw. Tell me what you thought.” Pascal stroked her hair very gently. It was still long, still uncut. He pushed it back from her face and made her turn toward him. “Darling, you have to do that. If you shut it away inside yourself, you’ll never be free of it. Gini, please believe me. I know.”

“You know what I saw.” She found it hard to shape the words. “You saw it too.”

“No.” He took her hand quietly in his. “In that situation, no two people see exactly the same thing.”

She allowed herself to look at him then. She could see the fatigue in his much-loved face; she could see regret and resignation but also strength in his eyes. Whatever I have seen, she thought, he has seen worse—many, many times.

“Gini, it isn’t a cure, I’m not saying that.” His hand tightened around hers. “There is no cure. You know that. You live with me. Once that door’s unlocked, you can never close it again. There’s a divide, Gini, between people who’ve been through that doorway and those who have not. I warned you of this before.”

“I know you did.”

“But for us there’s no divide.” He drew her toward him. “Gini, don’t create one. Tell me, darling. Let me see what you saw.”

So Gini tried. She tracked it, that former municipal building, on the outskirts of Mostar, a place surrounded by the shells of buildings, a place that had, for the past two months, housed the city’s improvised hospital wards.

They had been in the long room reserved for the seriously injured. At one end were the soldiers, at the other, civilians. There were only a few children in this ward, and Gini, entering it, had been relieved. She had been interviewing a nurse, then one of the local doctors, who had been up all night operating on patients without benefit of anesthetic. She was joined by one of the volunteer doctors, a Frenchman Pascal knew from Médecins sans Frontières. With him had come a much-needed supply of painkillers and antibiotics. Gini helped him unpack these, then allowed him to lead her over to the end bed. He introduced her to the ten-year-old boy who lay there, for whom he had brought a chocolate bar. Both the boy’s parents had been killed two weeks before. The boy’s leg had been amputated at the knee; his right arm had sustained a minor shrapnel wound. By his bed crouched his seven-year-old sister, who refused to be parted from him. She was physically unhurt, but had spoken to no one except her brother for fourteen days.

Gini sat by the boy and talked to him, the French doctor translating. The pain and compassion she felt were so deep, they felt as eloquent as any language. The conversation faltered to an end; she hoped, passionately hoped, that this boy, with his thin face and dark, watchful eyes, would understand the concern for him she felt, even if that concern was useless and could bring him no ease.