“I have to tell you about her,” he finally said, toying with a beer and carefully watching Van’s face.

“No,” she pouted. “The war is over, Cong Ly. I don’t want to know.”

“Not about how she died. About why I loved her. And who she was. And what she wanted. It’s not right to forget that, in the same breath that we try to forget a war.”

“I think you’ve turned her death into your prison,” said Van, with a look that bordered on jealousy.

“The first time I saw her, she was leaving the grounds of Sai Gon University, dressed in a white ao dai, riding a bicycle. They had a little club there, run by the Vietnamese–American Society. I was twenty-three. I had just come to Sai Gon from Da Nang. I had never seen anyone so beautiful. I said hello. She was surprised that I spoke Vietnamese. And it stunned me that she liked me. For almost a year, whenever I was in Sai Gon I would wait for her every afternoon in a small café just outside the university. We would drink coffee and she would practice her English. After a year she gained the courage to bring me home to meet her parents. Her father’s family had moved from Ha Noi in 1954 after the country was divided. Her mother’s family had moved from Hue. She was studying to be a lawyer. They had already decided that she would marry a doctor from another Ha Noi family. But she didn’t. She went with me. And for three more years she loved me. And who was I? I don’t know why she fell in love with me.”

“Because you would take her to America,” teased Van, trying to again lighten his mood.

“That frightened her,” shrugged Condley.

“Her parents let you marry?”

“No,” said Condley. “They let her love me, as long as they didn’t have to recognize that we were in love. She finished school and they let her have an apartment. It was our apartment. I paid for it. When I was in Sai Gon we lived together. But when they spoke to their friends, it was only about her studies and her work, as if I were not a part of her life. They hoped that she would lose her fascination with the American. Or that the American would finally grow tired of Viet Nam and go home. And once either of those things happened they would have won, without losing face. Since they’d never recognized that we were together, they could reinvent those years in the eyes of the proper Vietnamese doctor or businessman who would be her husband. Save her face. Regrow her virginity. Allow her a proper life, with properly Vietnamese kids.”

“Did they blame you when she was killed?”