I stop chasing my thoughts through this labyrinth and count to five hundred. My brother has fallen asleep, and I’m trying to figure out if I’m still in the real world or not.

I quietly fetch two ski-boot boxes from my wardrobe to help me decide. They contain two heavy files. I open the first one and flick through the headlines of the newspaper articles inside.

LOST IN EU ROPE: THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN OF THE BALKAN WAR

THE GIRL WITH A BOMB IN HER RUCKSACK

THE PHONY WAR: HOW THE US ARMY CENSORS JOURNALISTS

KIDNAPPED BY REBELS: REPORTERS AS BARGAINING CHIPS

And so forth. Frontline reports, essays, photos. Until my birth thirteen years ago my father was a war correspondent, and I have virtually every article he ever published. I printed them off the Internet or cut them out of old magazines I found at flea markets or on eBay. I also wrote to newspaper offices from school with requests for back issues.

The second file contains a portrait piece published in Time in 2002. My father’s face is on the front cover, surrounded by the famous red frame. The headline below the photo is “Mr. Fearless.” My father’s staring past the camera. His blue eyes suggest he’s probably gazing at something in the distance. His skin is deeply tanned and cracked, and his square chin is dotted with silvery stubble. A scar slashes across his left eyebrow, and no hair grows there. He says in the interview that he sustained the wound from a knife belonging to a drunken soldier in Vukovar. My father had to kneel in front of the soldier for two hours, being peed on and beaten, before being allowed to continue his journey. He’d hidden a Serbian orphan in his car and smuggled the boy across the border.

I once told Scott that story. He was silent for a long time and then something unusual happened: tears welled up in his eyes.

“Your father’s a real mensch, mon ami. Not showing off, not playing along with all that shit, like ‘I own this, I do this, I can afford such-and-such a watch.’ Your dad, my little smart-ass sidekick, is someone who lives life to the full.”

Time magazine had named Henri M. Skinner its “Person of the Year” to represent all the war correspondents worldwide who risk their lives to report on grim events.

My father stopped reporting from war zones when I was born. My mother said it had nothing to do with me, but it might have. She hasn’t read the interview in Time. I have. I can recite it by heart, including the passage in which my father says, “No war correspondent should have a family.”