“Have you talked to Goca Igrić? I think she’s who you’re looking for.”

Goca is also a journalist. She is Serb and chain-smokes Marlboro Reds and drinks several pots of Turkish coffee a day and was, at the time, under threat of death from all manner of political and criminal organizations after spending the war years defiantly speaking out against Slobodan Milošević.

I once asked my uncle when he fell in love with Goca.

Though they didn’t start dating till ages later, he said perhaps it was that first time they met, in a café, when he told her what he wanted to do and asked her to be his fixer. He said Goca paused after he’d described his batshit-crazy, terrible, likely lethal idea. She exhaled all the smoke from her lungs and said, “I don’t think I can not do this.”

“Maybe that was when I knew,” my uncle said.

It was the first thing my family ever taught me about love that felt as honest as blood. I can’t not do this.