I don’t really know why I didn’t die that night in Nuremberg. I wanted to die, or at least I didn’t want to go on living in this terrible new world in which everybody I loved was dead. But something inside me would not die. I woke twelve hours later and realized I hadn’t thrown up those whiskey sours after all, and Velázquez’s letter still lay on my chest, right on top of my father’s necklace.

I am Perseverance, remember. I am Survival.

Eventually I rise, as I must, and dust off the sand. I turn my face down the beach, where Doris and Wesley are kicking salt water at each other, the little urchins. The small, unexpected offspring of my father and a woman against whom I have lived all my life in opposition, side against side, and now that contested ground has shimmered away like some kind of mirage.

Irene rises next to me and asks whether I can forgive her.

I lift my hands and stare at the palms, and I have the strangest feeling that they don’t belong to me anymore, that nothing belongs to me, the whole world is new and strange. I remember something Velázquez once told me about crashing his airplane, how he had survived crackup after crackup and how you never felt your injuries until later. God numbed your pain, he said, otherwise you might lose your head in the aftermath, you might be unable to save yourself, for example, from the burning wreckage.

Between my fingers, something moves. I lower my hands and perceive an object wobbling in the air, next to the faltering clouds. Then the noise reaches me, the uncertain putter of an airplane.

“What on earth?” mutters Irene. “Kaiko?”

I turn to face her. One hand shields her face from the glare; her eyes are narrow, trained on the airplane, as if calculating its odds of survival. She’s got no idea who’s aboard, of course. She took off for Ki’ilau before they arrived: the invading army of my fellow journalists, that necessary nuisance known as the world’s press, ruthless guardians of a democratic people’s right to know everybody else’s beeswax. Hapless Kaiko leading them smack bang into her paradise.

I turn back and loop my arm around her elbow, so we face the onslaught together. “Here’s a better question. Can you forgive me?”