Now, in Ho Chi Minh City, Lin’s husband, Tran, is thin and wears a white shirt. His black hair is neat and combed back. He has a beautiful face, made more narrow by his soft dark eyes. He drives a motorbike. He always seems strong and confident even though he is narrow and slim in the way she is. No one would notice at first that he is missing an ear. Right now his eyes are worried. He has been left before. In so many ways: death and betrayal. He is thinking, What if she doesn’t come back?

“But you have decided,” he says, looking into her face. He knows her. He sees the determination in the way her face is set, the need, the decision, as if it is written in law. And it is. Blood law. Father-and-daughter law. Still, they are both full of unspoken words and fears.

“I will miss you until you come back.” He moves closer to her and runs his hand down her hair, the back of her head and pulls her face against him. He smells like lemon, she thinks. And she always smells of flowers, as if her life in the presence of them has become her flesh. In the green and yellow light of their place, with the one wall that looks lavender because of the evening light, she is sweetness. She is soft and kind. She is sensuous. He presses his body against hers, into hers, then they sleep in the last of daylight, sweating in the heat before the rainy season, not even bothering to close the shutters, almost forgetting the veil of mosquito netting. She reaches for his hand and entwines her thin fingers in his and sleeps. They don’t talk about fixing the rice. Besides, now they have electricity and a rice cooker.

They each have their own fears, lifetimes of them. He’d been forced into the same army that had once attacked her people. She discovered this information at her new job. He never wanted to tell her. He put his narrow hands over his face and cried when she asked him about it. “I was only eleven and hungry by then. When I tried to leave, they shot at me.”

“What have we here?” said a commander who was his cousin. And so they only cut off his ear and the blood ran. He got off lucky, he told her. He lived. His ear at times still aches. He used to cover it with longer hair. When they had gone through her village they’d taken the young men and boys away. The women had hidden in the trees and down in the water, breathing through reeds. He never said where the young men and boys were taken. He tells her he doesn’t know. Maybe they were killed. Others joined willingly, but war wasn’t part of his hopes for the future. He’d had other dreams, of being a doctor, a professor, dreams he could tell no one after the revolution because he came from the other class. He’d even been to school in France at one time.