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Bruno looked the same as he did when I first met him, many years before, in the hotel lobby of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo. He was a cameraman for the main French channel, France 2, and I worked for a major British newspaper. We were easily impressed, very green, and young enough to have real passion for what we believed in. I believed then, as I sometimes do now, that occasionally what you write or photograph or film can reach someone somewhere, and make some kind of difference. But I did it with more fire in those days.

Dr Anthony Feinstein

While I was actually there, I felt nothing. I never talked about what happened in those places, but I wrote about them. I disagreed that reporters suffered from trauma; after all, I argued, we were the ones who got out. It was the people we left behind that suffered, that died. I did not suffer the syndromes, I did not have the shakes. I did not have psychotic tendencies. I was not an alcoholic or drug addict who needed to blot out memories. I was, I thought, perfectly fine and functioning.

I began to hide cash around the house and took copies of our passports. I made lists of what I would grab if we had to flee, and I made Bruno make an exit plan if we had to leave Paris in an instant. Where would we meet? How would we get out? Bruno finally said, "Maybe you should talk to someone about this?"

I knew I had to fight it. I desperately wanted to feel at home, at ease, and I wanted to try to make this city – where everyone buzzed around so quickly and knocked into you with their skinny elbows – my home.

But I often feel as if I was in exile. One day I realized that the war with all its dangers, seemed perfectly normal to me.

My real life, my history with Bruno was behind closed doors in some conflict areas, safe from everything else, where we have our own history. It was what I understood about him best of all: falling in love in chaos.

The real life with all its sharp edges, was terribly difficult.

"Where do you think you would die? Where the fear was the greatest?" The Canadian psychiatrist, looked at me like a flea under a microscope. This was a while ago, and we had signs of post traumatic stress disorder meeting. We were in London, I had some lying on a couch, where close to Hyde Park, a few years before my son came into the world.

I told him about the cattle market in Abidjan, on 19 September 2002. I had changed my clothes in two days and they were stained with dirt and sweat. A government soldier stood a foot away from me out with an automatic gun at my heart. It was in the first days of the coup.

There was an African man near my foot, groaning in pain, bullet wounds in his legs. A moment before, I'd squatted in the dirt and tried to drag him into my taxi. I wanted to get him to a hospital. The soldier said the man on the ground was a rebel, and I knew if I left him behind, he would kill him.

"This is Africa," he said. "Are you crazy?" He dragged me back to the car, silently fuming. And I was angry too; because I knew they were going to kill that man, because I had not been able to do anything, and because it was so easy and so senseless, the way people's lives were extinguished as if they meant nothing at all.

"I wanted to tell you," she said, "that I am here with your husband and I am keeping him here under orders for several weeks." She said it was her belief that he was exhausted and suicidal.

I went to see my husband in hospital. He was on the bed. When he had grown so thin? When he saw me, his eyes did not quite register his wife. He was on Thorazine or something so powerful that when I looked at him it was not his eyes drugged and it was not his mouth or hands. He was somebody else.

He came home, that within a few weeks, but he was never really the same again, nor was our household. It was not that broken something, but contain the bubble of joy, the small unit in which we exist, was divided into two halves. The ghosts of the past, we were hunting. And she had managed to catch him.

"Inside, I feel like ash," said my husband

On the night Bruno did not sleep. Either he stayed awake at his computer playing a war game called Age of Empires – "Why is it that I only like films that are either completely violent or for children?" he asked me one night – or sat on the sofa smoking and watching television.

"Do you think," I said to Bruno one night, "that this stuff really fucked us up for good?"

"What stuff?"

He wove in and out of cars.

He saw a few people apart from Luca, he was the most wonderful and loving father and me. But when he spoke it was to speak at AA. His life was on the work that he attend meetings within the walls of the Church on the Quai d 'Orsay has centered.

I knew, in a sense, we would never be free of each other.

Even if I were a different life, a healthy, chose one, not by war or disease or disorder, or even Paris was spoiled, I always in my life: He was in Sarajevo, swore he would never lose me. And it was our son. But we were separated. We could no longer live together, not as a couple. He had changed and so had I.

One day on the road keeps Luca 's hand, I realized how to tell if the sun through a thick woolly cloud, that I no longer afraid. Maybe it was because my son was older, and I knew he would not keep his fingers in electrical outlets, or that I could tell him to be careful of cars, and not to go with stran-gers, but suddenly the metallic fear that seemed to me everywhere since his birth had disappeared. In its place was a lightness, a joy and a habitable place where I did without thinking about the backyard wars in the Balkans or Africa, where neighbors are neighbors with machetes or guns could rise. I was like everyone else. At a party I met a psychiatrist who I know can occur, such as trauma said - something happened in your past lies dormant, and then is activated by an event. Said Bruno 's trauma came with the wars, because something must be done with it sooner, unhealed wound.

But on the 41st day, life begins again. I decided that I had cried and mourned enough, that the funeral was over.

There was this child. What we had given could never be taken away.