‘It has good Wi-Fi,’ was all I could think to tell her. (This was not a lie: at our house we could go without a signal for days, forcing my husband to climb up on the roof to install the expensive satphone his employer had lent him). But what I really believed and didn’t say was something different, which was that lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Both my friend and I had been in Kenya long enough so that al-Shabaab’s attack on the mall in September 2013 was still a fresh memory. I had found myself in Nairobi nine months earlier, renting a house in the neighborhood of Westlands, a short drive away from the mall. It was not hard for an expat to fall in love with Nairobi – with its LA weather, its cheap childcare, the cosmopolitan mix of entrepreneurs and artists, many of them Kenyan-born and US- or UK-educated, returning to take advantage of the African markets while First World economies stagnated. That every dwelling, aside from those in slums, was nestled behind a concrete wall was a fact that I accommodated myself to in a matter of time. So much so that when my mother visited and remarked on all the unsightly barbed wire and cemented shards of glass, I realized that my eye had somehow learned to enjoy the greenery while airbrushing these details out.