As we touch cheeks for an extra kiss, I whisper, “Thank you,” and even as I pronounce those two words I’m flooded with relief. Relief that she genuinely doesn’t want me to stay and that I don’t have to lie and say I do.

“I think it’s better this way,” replies Marie-France, and shakes her head again, as if these words too have caught her off guard.

As I take a couple of steps away from the baggage conveyor belt where she stands, rubbing her stomach absentmindedly with one hand, she calls, “Henri!” and when I turn around, she asks, “Do you sometimes think, I’ve already had this experience or I’ve stood on this exact spot before?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Like now?” she asks.

“No,” I lie, although it’s true. I have an intense feeling of having already been here.

She shrugs again and walks away.

I fly back to London. My editor in chief Gregory wants me to be one of twelve reporters interviewed by Time magazine to represent war correspondents worldwide. I know the other eleven, and all of us are familiar with the rules of our profession as messengers of horror.

1. Do not take sides, simply observe.

2. You cannot save anyone.

3. Get out of this business before it’s too late.

The interviews take place one after the other at Claridge’s hotel in a suite hired specially for the occasion. I find this both fascinating and repulsive because all I can see are Akol’s frail hands clinging to the hot barrel of a gun.

Time asks each of us to say something about the others. Sia of the Washington Post calls me “Mr. Fearless.” If she only knew that the sole reason I jet from one war zone to the next is to escape. I’d rather not survive and that’s why I’m so cruel to myself. What would she call me if she knew? “Mr. Lifeless”?

One day later a bomb goes off in a street in Kabul. A seven-year-old girl is suspected of carrying it. Greg immediately sends me out to investigate. I try to establish the facts and in the process I make the acquaintance of a chai boy called Ibrahim, an orphan who was searching for his sister when the explosion happened. Ibrahim’s twelve, and his younger sister had been kidnapped.

The Taliban forbade her from going to school, and instead the girl blew herself up with a bomb in a Hello Kitty rucksack, killing twenty-four other people.

Ibrahim doesn’t have his hair cropped short like pupils at a Koranic school. His reddish-brown locks are longer and peek out from under an embroidered purple cap. His eyes are two shiny green marbles in his emaciated yet beautiful face.