Sam is four when his mother moves to London. She still denies me any contact with the boy. Greg and Monica say I could sue her for access, but is that really the proper way to deal with such problems? By suing one another? I slept with the woman when she was lost and petrified. There’s no way I’m going to take her to court. Then again, perhaps I’m giving up too easily. Maybe I should keep on asking Marie-France, over and over again. Knowing my son is in the same city, my ignorance of his appearance fills me with a numbing pain. I see my son in a thousand boys’ faces in the street.

When I do manage to sleep, I dream of seas without coastlines, of long, dark Underground train carriages hurtling over me. Again and again, I dream about war.

Out of sheer force of habit, I continue to see the company doctor, Dr. Christesen. Alongside Greg, Monica, and Ibrahim, he’s the only constant in my life. He prescribes pills, but he’d rather prescribe me a different life. “Your sleeplessness, Mr. Skinner, is a sign of profound trauma. Your brain is full. You get lost because there’s no room left in your head for yourself.”

Ibrahim is now sixteen, going on seventeen. With his green eyes and reddish-brown hair he looks more like an Irishman than a former Afghan refugee. He explains to me that a father is the most important thing in a man’s life. I’m like a “little father” to him, and Greg is his “second father.”

“Little father, you too need someone who’s important to you.”

“That’s you, Ibrahim. I have you.”

“I’m not your flesh and blood.”

He still has the purple cap he wore in Kabul, back when he was a chai boy. Monica has put it away in a cupboard somewhere. It dates back to another time and a different life. If only life were as easy to discard as a cap.

It took Ibrahim three years to inquire about my father. He asked as we were setting off for his end-of-year speech. Every year the best pupil in the class had the honor of making the concluding speech in the school chapel. I told him how incredibly proud I was of him, and as the taxi drove through London, past houses glowing in the early spring sunshine, he asked me whether my father had ever told me he was proud of me.

“Yes, Ibrahim, when I was very small.”

“How about later on?”

“Later, it was my grandfather Malo who said it.”

Ibrahim senses that he really shouldn’t push the matter any further, but he’s excited and so he presses ahead.

“But why didn’t your father—”

“Because he was no longer alive when I was your age, Ibrahim.”

The young Afghan says nothing for a minute. He bends his head and says, “Please forgive me!”