I head out to the registration area. Families sit in clusters, chatting or toying with their phones. A woman facing the window knits. Three patients occupy the registration cubicles to sign consent forms and have hospital bands placed on their wrists. They all fade to the background when I spot Shair standing in the corner of the room, a row of windows to his left. His shirt is buttoned askew, his collar lopsided. I stiffen but do not hesitate to walk out from behind a counter to face him. Thanks to the two-inch platform of my clogs and the hunch of his shoulders, we stand eye to eye.

“Having trouble sleeping?” I say in the sweetest Dari I can muster.

“Are you the girl?” he asks, his voice gruff but muted. He searches my face for an answer.

“I have very simple questions for you,” I continue in the same language we spoke the night of the coup. “Who killed my family that night and where are the bodies of the murdered?”

His face softens, the lines melt away and the corners of his eyes crinkle with laughter. I do not flinch, not even as anger bubbles in me.

“You are the girl,” he says in Dari. There is a buoyancy in the rasp of his voice. “I knew she could help me save you. You were so determined to—”

He is a shadow of who he was then, the man who held me captive in his home, pushed me around at gunpoint, and threatened me in the night. I am close enough to see the thin, slight twitching around his eyes, to smell the scent that comes as one inches toward a century of life, and the more distant scent of the cancer that will stop him from getting there.

“You didn’t save me,” I fire back with my hands on my hips. “You were a traitor. You turned your gun on the very people you were meant to protect. You turned your gun on your own government. People put their trust in you.”

There is more I want to say, but my Dari is rusty and I don’t want to stumble in front of him.

“I was given orders. And those orders were meant to give our country a better future,” Shair insists. “You were a child. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“I was a child. You most certainly were not,” I say. Shair blinks slowly. “You were a cowardly man who, even now, is not man enough to admit his sins.”

Spittle collects in the corners of Shair’s mouth as he tries to find words. From the corner of my eye, I see a security guard approaching. He moves slowly, gauging the situation.

“This many years later, still . . .” Shair laments.