“Why aren’t you asleep yet?” June is standing in the doorway. “Don’t hover by the window. You’ll catch cold.”

“You scared me,” Karen grumbles, climbing into bed.

June straightens the curtains, then pulls the covers up around Karen’s neck. Her voice is thick in the darkness. “Go to sleep.”

She smooths her daughter’s forehead, brushing her fingertips across it like she did when the girls were little. “Close your eyes. Go to sleep. But in the morning we need to discuss the boy.”

Earlier that night, June had startled the boy when she swung open the front door shouting, “Hey! What you doing there?”

After the boy had got a clear look at her—a diminutive, middle-aged Chinese woman—he’d straightened himself up and given a grim sort of laugh before walking away.

“Hey!” said June, opening the garden gate. “Come back here! Don’t run away!”

June hadn’t liked what she’d seen; the boy’s casual lack of concern at being caught, his smirk as he turned to run. But most of all, she didn’t like the fact that he’d been staring up at Karen’s bedroom window with the oddest expression on his face: solemn and expectant, as if waiting for something inevitable to happen.

HONG KONG, 1941

Jun-Jun is squatting in a ditch behind the fields. The idiot boy is shaking and moaning, “My wrist! You’re hurting meeeee…!” She puts her finger to her mouth to tell him Quiet! She mimes a salute to tell him Soldiers! (She knows the silence around them is a trick; she feels the soldiers’ movements thudding through the earth, in the waters. They are close—fifty feet, maybe less.)

Still the boy struggles to his feet, dragging her up, “I’m… soooo… hung… greeee!” She twists his arm behind his back and clamps her other hand over his mouth. He wriggles and squirms, warm, moist sounds forcing their way through her fingers. She hisses into his ear, “Quiet! Do you want to die?!” She jabs him in the back of the thigh; he falls to his knees.

“Will you be good now?”

He nods, tears and snot running down his face. “I’ll be good.”

“Promise?” She softens her grip.

“Promise.”

ENGLAND, 1983

After breakfast, June sits down opposite her daughter. Karen erupts into a tearful announcement. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t.”

“Okay, okay,” says June, patting her hand. “Just tell me what you know about the boy.”

“What are you going to do?”

“That depends on what you tell me.”

More than her mother’s anger or concern, Karen dreads the prospect of having to hear herself describe things that she’d rather push out of her mind. But there is a calm, muted quality to her mother’s questioning—“When was this?” “Then what happened?”—and a gentle, forward momentum that Karen finds reassuring, like being calmly pushed up a hill.