I went back to Yemen again and again over the next several years, neglecting my Ph.D. dissertation to write a book about the country and cobbling together grants for visits. In late 2012, after the Arab Spring and the uprisings that forced Salih to step down, I scheduled another quick trip. I had lived through the revolution in Cairo, and had seen the expectations of change and a better life inflate and then burst leaving everyone more confused than ever. Yemen had changed as well. No one seemed to know the rules anymore. Salih was out and security was evaporating. There was a mad scramble for power that fall, and for the first time I felt physically unsafe. It was just a feeling, impossible to quantify, but I couldn’t shake it.

Yemeni friends on Twitter and Facebook disagreed with my assessment, claiming I had lost my feel for the country. And maybe I had. What did I know about predicting violence? But I wasn’t alone. Among the small group of Yemen watchers, the numbers had started to lose their meaning with repetition: 40% chance of bombing, 60% chance of being kidnapped. They were guesses without an anchor. No one knew anything for certain. Western embassies issued travel warnings, but they were as vague as everything else. Yemen was bad — maybe not Iraq bad — but the speculation kept getting worse.

Still, earlier this spring I decided to go back one more time. I pitched it to my editors as a three-story trip. But in my mind, it was a final farewell. I was getting married in a few months, and I wanted to move on and write about other things. I’d quit smoking years earlier and my twenties had slipped into my thirties. I was ready for a change. On March 6, I boarded the plane for my last trip to Yemen.

Sixteen days later I was done. I had my three stories, or at least the notes and interviews to write them. But I didn’t want to leave, not yet. Something was still missing. Instead of flying home early, I compromised: One more story.

I already knew the one I’d do. The ghost story every writer has, the one they obsess over and worry about; always researching, never writing. Mine was a tragedy that started with a Guantanamo interrogation.

Detainee: I am from Urday City in Yemen, not a city in al-Qaeda... My city is very far from the city of al-Qaeda... That is not my name and I am not from that city... Tribunal President: al-Qaeda is not a city. It is the name of an organization. Detainee: Whether it is a city or an organization, I am not from al-Qaeda. I am from Urday City. Tribunal President: Are you from Yemen? Detainee: Yes, I am from Urday. Tribunal President: Did you travel from Yemen to Afghanistan? Detainee: I went from Yemen to Afghanistan. Tribunal President: Did you do that in the year 2000? Detainee: I don’t know the time. Tribunal President: Was it the year 1421? Detainee: I am from a village, I cannot tell time.

The detainee, Adnan Abd al-Latif, was a mentally unstable man who had suffered severe brain damage as a result of a car crash in 1994. Twice he had been cleared for release, but each time something went wrong and he remained locked in his cell, counting the days until there was nothing left to count. On Sept. 10, 2012, he committed suicide. He had been in Guantanamo Bay for more than a decade.

Latif’s case seemed to get at all the horrors of that lost decade: a handicapped man who confused al-Qaeda with a Yemeni village of the same name, locked up as the worst of the worst. For 10 years, while Latif befriended the iguanas and banana rats that wandered into his cell, the U.S. and Yemen fought for custody. Neither side would give in. The U.S. had him but wouldn’t let him go; Yemen wanted him but couldn’t get him.

Then Latif killed himself with a fistful of pills and positions changed. Now neither country wanted him. The U.S. needed him gone, but Yemen wouldn’t take him. In death, just as in life, he was in legal limbo — neither here nor there. Instead of Guantanamo, Latif was sent to Germany, where his body was frozen and stored at Ramstein Air Base while the two countries argued over who had to take the corpse.

Latif’s story was sad, but mostly it was just human. He wasn’t nameless or faceless, an abstract stand-in for our fears. He was a man with a history and a family, and I wanted to write about them, to tell his story. In my mind it was less about Guantanamo Bay than it was about the withering of hope and how a single man had been ground down to nothing by a pair of bureaucracies. But no one else seemed to see it this way. Obama had already ordered the prison closed. He just hadn’t succeeded. Guantanamo was still open, and indefinite detention was still the law of the land. But the country had moved on; a collective forgetting that let us pretend everything had changed when nothing had.

Before I left the U.S. I had reached out to one of the Guantanamo lawyers and he gave me the name of Latif’s brother in Yemen. Muhammad lived in Taizz, four hours south of Sanaa. But Yemen was still coming apart, and the roads were too dangerous for a drive. I asked Muhammed if he would fly to Sanaa for an interview.

Since arriving in Sanaa I had been working with Shuaib, a young fixer and friend, who knew how to get things done in a country where nothing worked. That morning I met him at the ticket office to buy Muhammad’s plane ticket. The money I had just collected from Western Union went from me to Shuaib to the man behind the counter. I signed the receipt, the man behind the counter stamped it, and Shuaib called Taizz to confirm that Muhammad was on his way to the airport. It was just after 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 22. Muhammad’s flight landed in three hours, and Shuaib wanted breakfast.

When we arrived at the ticket office, Zubayri Street had been quiet. In another hour the shadows would be gone and the street would be noisy and hot with four jumbled lanes of traffic. But for the moment it was neither. Caught between the two, Zubayri Street came to life in fits and starts. Shuaib moved through it quickly, claiming he could smell something good. I smelled diesel and cigarettes. After a block whatever scent he was tracking had disappeared, and he gave up.

“Let’s just go in here,” he said. The restaurant looked like every other one on the street: an open front with a roll-up shutter, a counter in the front, kitchen in the back, and long metal tables in between. “Sure,” I said. But I didn’t really care. I’d already had breakfast; I just wanted another cup of coffee. “This is fine.”

Stepping up onto the sidewalk, Shuaib bumped into a soldier who was coming out of the restaurant, catching his windbreaker on the man’s rifle. “Sorry,” he mumbled, as he reached over to untangle his jacket. The man just looked at him, taking in Shuaib’s youth and his slight frame. And then he saw me. I was used to it, the attention and the double takes. Yemenis tend to stare at obvious foreigners, observing them as if they were under glass. But this time the lack of words was disconcerting. We were in the man’s space, inches from his face with Shuaib’s jacket hooked on his rifle. The whole thing was too intimate for silence. But the man in the olive green uniform didn’t say a word. Only his eyes moved, following Shuaib’s fingers as they slid up the barrel of his gun. Then we were free and moving again.