I sit back in the chair. An inexplicable laugh escapes my lips. I should not be surprised. Hormones rise and fall in cycles. The earth spins round and round on an axis and moves in an elliptical course around the sun. Nearly everything with momentum ends up back where it started.

I’ve imagined this moment. I’ve also feared this moment. I have even searched for him on the internet but didn’t get far with only a first name. I have created a hundred different scenarios in which we would meet again, but none of them looked like this.

Abdul Shair Nabi. He’s taken on a last name he didn’t have in Kabul, but I have no doubt it’s him. Shair, the guard who turned his gun on my family, is sitting in a small exam room, waiting for me to see him.

I am shaking, just slightly. The walls of the clinic look like they might fold.

I breathe deeply. I have prepared for this, not knowing when or if the moment would ever come. I can stand before him now as an adult, as a person he cannot silence at gunpoint. For three decades, I have wanted to hold him accountable. I have craved the chance to make him answer my simple questions.

Did you pull the trigger? Where did you take their bodies?

I stand, ready to march into the room and squeeze the answers out of him. But a flicker of doubt flashes across my mind. I can’t make a mistake, especially not here. But just seeing his name on the computer screen, I can almost feel his hand clapped over my mouth.

I walk to the exam room, take a deep breath, and compose myself. I am here to ask questions.

“Sorry about that, Mr. Nabi,” I say, careful to pronounce the name as if I weren’t born with those vowels on my tongue. “I had to check on something rather urgently. Could you come to the exam table please?”

Shair rises and repositions himself at the end of the table. I remain standing.

“So you work in a parking garage?”

“Yes, I have ten years with same company,” he says with a note of pride.

“That’s a long time. What did you do before then?” I ask, throwing breadcrumbs.

“Before then, I am security guard. I work in office building. Thirty floors,” he says. He draws a line from his lap to the ceiling to show the height of the building, and thereby the importance of his job. I nod in appreciation. “But now, I have pain every day,” he says, pointing to his sternum. He tells me his doctor sent him for a CT scan that showed it wasn’t simply heartburn.

“Have you lost weight?”

He nods.

“Before I am eighty kilos. Now I have seventy kilos.”