continued, already well oiled with drinks and oblivious to her stony stare. ‘She’s in bits, apparently.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, why go to all those lengths to have a baby – for him to just bugger off to Syria with a few weeks to go?’
‘What?’ It was Mila who cried the word, but Lee felt the colour draining from her cheeks, the blood pooling in her feet. ‘Syria?’
Liam looked across at Mila. ‘Yes, Harry’s gone jungle again.’
Lee reached for the door frame, needing to feel connected to something. It felt like the world was tipping on its side, everything sliding off. ‘But he’s injured,’ she said slowly, as though self-control would somehow make this okay. ‘His leg . . .’
Liam frowned as he saw how pale she had grown. ‘Didn’t you know? I just assumed—’
She ignored the question. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. There had to be a mistake. ‘You’re sure he’s gone to Syria?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where in Syria – Homs? Damascus? Aleppo? Raqqa?’
‘I don’t know. Syria’s just . . . Syria, isn’t it? There’s no good places there.’
It was the sort of comment that made her want to scream, the sort of comment that made her feel it had all been for nothing. People still knew nothing. They were ignorant. They didn’t care.
She walked over to the table and knocked back the rest of her drink, needing something to take the edge off her nerves; they felt aflame. Cunningham was back in Syria. That was why he’d really come over the other day, she realized. It wasn’t just to tell her about the pregnancy – he knew she wouldn’t care about that; his happy personal life was none of her concern. But he’d been to Afghanistan and the Rohingya region and Iran since she’d quit and he hadn’t notified her of his movements then. So why now? Why come over to tell her he was going back there?
She closed her eyes, remembering how they’d first met in Sirte, when Colonel Gaddafi’s grip was failing. She’d been a freelance rookie desperate to make her name, he was the senior correspondent for the Washington Post, both of them choosing the same small pile of sandbags to hide behind as sniper bullets zipped past their heads. Later, when they’d escaped, both shaking like tambourines, he’d taken her to a hotel bar where whisky was served in eggcups, and he’d introduced her to all the other reporters and journalists out there. He’d taken her under his wing and it had been like a sparrow being sheltered by an eagle; at twenty-one years older than her and a living legend in the war-reporting community, he knew everyone, and that meant that pretty soon they all knew her. Friendships formed fast in situations like that, becoming at once both deep and yet also transitory – your life might rest in that person’s hands the very next day, hour, minute. On the other hand, people did die every day, hour, minute and you somehow had to keep going; there was no time for grief. Not getting shot whilst getting the shot was all that mattered.
She was brave, he was experienced and something about them just clicked. People were constantly moving about, losing track of one another for weeks, even months at a time, but always somehow converging again in unexpected predicaments, meeting by chance in the most unlikely scenarios; she always remembered Cunningham telling her how he had once met a woman he’d photographed in Bosnia – weeping by the bodies of her father, uncle, two brothers and teenage son – crossing the road seven years later in London with Sainsbury’s shopping bags. That was how it had been for the two of them, meeting time and again in random coincidences until finally he had asked her to be his exclusive photographer – no more freelancing, hawking her images to the highest bidder. They had officially become a team.
The last time she had worked with him had been in Syria, six years ago; but the last time she had actually seen him had been here in Amsterdam a few years later, when she’d seen him walking with his pretty soon-to-be wife, Gisele. She had tried to cross the street but it was too late by the time she saw them, Cunningham already breaking away and jogging ahead to catch her attention. She had spent several minutes engaged in polite small talk in which she revealed nothing at all about her life and gave all her attention to Gisele, sensing his